Confessions of my Past, Present and Future
by
Patrick Lacey
The Past
I,
like many horror writers my age, was weaned on Goosebumps. I devoured those things as I would a freshly baked
batch of chocolate chip cookies, and that’s saying something. What got me
initially were the covers. We’re talking illustrations of evil dogs, skeletons,
possessed Halloween masks—everything a future horror buff could ever want. The
plots were often cheesy (especially Say
Cheese and Die…sorry, I’ll leave now if you’d like) and straight forward
but they were aimed at kids after all. R. L. Stine should take great pride—and
I’m sure he does—in knowing that he inspired an entire generation of boys and
girls to take up reading.
Goosebumps were cool. If you weren’t reading
them, you were, dare I say, a loser. In third grade, I made the obvious and
lucrative decision to try my hand at the series. I wrote a manuscript of thirty
or so pages entitled The Curse of the
Scorpion. I still have it somewhere. It’s horrible, even for my age, but I
remember how writing that thing consumed me. The entire outside world, any
childhood fears or anxiety, vanished while I was putting pen to paper. I’d
always had a vivid imagination but now I had a way to harness it, to sculpt it
like Play-Doh and make it do my evil bidding.
