In 1986, the world was introduced to an author by the name of R.L. Stine—or so they thought. His debut novel, Blind Date, was a hit with young adults and launched his career as a horror writer. A few years after that, he created the Fear Street series of horror novels, and a few years after Fear Street came Goosebumps. Both became massively successful franchises, with the Goosebumps books selling more than 400 million copies to date.

But Stine wasn’t a complete unknown when he wrote Blind Date. In fact, he’d been a writer for over two decades at that point. He worked on whatever projects he could in his early days, even writing coloring books when he had to. “Somebody’s got to write that stuff,” he told The Albany Herald in 1996. “When you start out as a freelancer, you don’t say no to an

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