thumb|Cover art for Give Yourself Goosebumps #17: Little Comic Shop of Horrors, illustrated by Mark Nagata.

Give Yourself Goosebumps is a children's horror fiction gamebook series by R. L. Stine. After the success of the original Goosebumps books, Scholastic Press decided to create this spin-off series in 1995.

50 books in the series, including the "special editions" were published between 1995 and 2000. All of the books in the series, with the exception of Please Don't Feed the Vampire, are now out of print.

General plotline

For the most part, play is rather simple, as the books are merely novels with branching plots. The books are written in the second person and enlivened by puzzles or choices. Rather than reading simply from beginning to end, the reader is told to turn to a certain page at the bottom of the current page. At certain pages the reader will be given at least two choices of which page to turn to, depending on what they want the main character (one's self) to do. If the reader makes poor choices, the book may come to a "bad" ending that will feature a horrid fate for the main character, but the reader is always able to go back and choose a new choice.

There is also at least one page in each book that uses an alternative method to selecting each choice, and is done more by chance rather than the reader's decision. These include; "Tossing a Coin" (where "Heads" represents one page and "Tails" another) "Rolling a Die" ("Odd" and "Even" sides having their own pages), or the reader trying a challenge in real life (and turning to a different page depending on whether they were successful or not). This whole structure came from the then-popular Choose Your Own Adventure book series.

There are normally two "main stories" and one "side story" which have their own set of choices, and a certain decision - usually at the first two choices - that will determine which of the two "stories" the reader will be a part of. The side story will usually feature inside one of the two main stories, would consist of a small group of choices, and is usually more lighthearted than the rest of the book. There is sometimes a group of choices which contain one choice which is blatantly wrong (such as eating the blue eggs in Escape from Camp Run-For-Your-Life or failing to acknowledge the situation in Welcome to the Wicked Wax Museum as an emergency). If the reader makes one of these choices the book will break the fourth wall and demand that the reader turn back and choose a better option, or sometimes simply conclude. This literary trope is characteristic of many late 20th century Western works of metafiction.

The main character is never named and is usually of ambiguous gender to allow the reader to imagine themself as the main character regardless of gender. However, the occasional "he" slips through. There is typically a "friend character" who is named and gendered, and this character is normally present throughout the storyline. The only thing linking the main character in each story is that they are self-proclaimed "Goosebumps Experts".

Mark Nagata illustrated the next book, Tick Tock, You're Dead!, throughout number 24, Lost in Stinkeye Swamp.

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References

  • Give Yourself Goosebumps at Gamebooks.org
  • Give Yourself Goosebumps at Scary For Kids
  • How to Write Your Own Give Yourself Goosebumps Books by R.L. Stine at Scholastic