Give Yourself Goosebumps/YMMV


 * Author's Saving Throw: In books that require the reader to have a certain real life skill, for those who don't have it, the author handwaves your inability to do this skill, usually as a secret training session or magic.
 * Crowning Moment of Funny: If you're a Star Trek fan, it's impossible not to laugh at the part of Revenge of the Body Squeezers when you take a pick axe to chip away Leonard Nimoy's cemented star on Hollywood Boulevard.
 * Nightmare Fuel: A staple of the series. The deaths are often gruesome, though the bad endings that don't cause immediate death often involve slavery, being trapped in a horrific environment, or worse...paralysis.
 * This cover is really creepy for a children's horror series.
 * That One Book: Into the Jaws of Doom and A Night in Payne House are advertised as having only one good ending. The other ones involve lots and lots of death, and are next-to-impossible to figure out the first time reading through the novel (especially with Payne House). Checkout Time at the Dead End Hotel was also surprisingly difficult, and might also qualify.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: Not many readers were fond of Weekend at Poison Lake, because its luck based gameplay gimmick was extremely confusing and illogical.
 * Tough Act to Follow: Even though its gameplay was unforgiving at times, and even though there were other good books in the series, none of them could match the complexity of Into the Jaws of Doom. Its "gamebook" design was unparalleled to the rest of the series, and made the other ones feel simplistic in comparison.
 * Unfortunate Implications: Read enough of these books and a disturbing trend emerges. The descriptions of you, the protagonist, almost always seems to be of a light skinned individual (not counting the books that you turn into a vampire). The author doesn't always bring up your skin color, but every so often, descriptions of your pink skin emerges. Kind of bothersome for non-white readers, even more so when he approached racism quite deftly in one novel (see Fantastic Racism). It's even worse for The Knight in Screaming Armor, since the book assumes the reader's of Anglo-Saxon origin. Not a drastic leap for white readers, but for everyone else, it's irksome. At least gender managed to be homogeneous for the entire series.
 * R.L. Stine must have a grudge against the right-handed population (read: 90% of us), because if surviving a situation involves using one hand, people who are left-handed win a disproportionate number of these encounters (usually because the left hand isn't restricted).
 * Might be a cause of Author Appeal? RL Stine himself is left-handed...
 * In some novels, your gender is mentioned, obviously accidentally. You are always male.