One of my favorite hobbies is going to used book sales and finding rare gems for low prices. It’s not just about paying less; it is more fun and fulfilling to find books in the wild rather than simply ordering a copy on Amazon. It’s akin to treasure-hunting—you never know what you might find. At one such sale, I acquired a collection of Goosebumps books for $0.25 each.

Written by R.L. Stine in the 1990s, Goosebumps was a series of horror books aimed at kids in the “middle grade” level. Goosebumps books were massively popular bestsellers in the 90s and were adapted into a television show, and the franchise remains popular today, with Stine still writing more books, Hollywood movie adaptations, and a rebooted TV series.

Despite being in the target age range at the time, I never read Goosebumps as a kid—though I was always curious about the books because of their evocative covers. Last year, while working on my re-write of Trick or Zombie Treat (a horror book about kids in the 1990s, very much in the vein of Goosebumps), I was feeling nostalgic for the 90s, the formative decade of my childhood, so I decided to see if the Goosebumps books were worth the hype (or at least worth a quarter).