You all know me, you know how I make a living. For decades, I’ve spooked young and old alike with my charmingly macabre tales of terror. People ask me all the time, “R.L. Stine, how do you come up with all this twisted-ass shit?” to which I usually say, “I’m just one sick fucking puppy.” Let’s face it — slime gerbils, living dummies, saying cheese or dying — you gotta be pretty loco in the fucking cerbesa to imagine all that shit. Cocaine helps, but I can’t give high-grade Colombian marching powder all the credit. If being a psycho motherfucker word-pervert is a crime, your boy is guilty as charged. One of my tales, however, is so dark, so deranged, so utterly batshit insane, even my depraved psyche couldn’t have come up with it.
Confession time — “The Horror at Camp Jellyjam” is a 100% for real fucking thing that, I shit you not, actually happened to me. God help me, I lived it.
Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why I’m such a fucked up basket case to begin with. “Monster Blood,” “The Haunted Mask,” “One Day at Horrorland,” hell, every sicko snuff-story I’ve ever written, they’ve all been my attempt to unpack and reconcile with the very real horror I very really experienced at the very real Camp Jellyjam when I was a boy. I guess it was only a matter of time before I got to getting that real-deal shit down on paper.
I don’t know what got into me at the time — I didn’t set out to do it. When I sat down at my computer that morning, I had no goal outside of cranking out another schlocky gore-porn to make the sicko Schoolastic kids fork over their milk money for another cheap thrill. Maybe someone slipped something in my breakfast Wild Turkey 101. Maybe I shouldn’t have bought my crank from that rando at Deny’s after my regular guy got shot. Or maybe, just maybe, part of me was tired of running.
I needed an inciting incident — kid moves to a new town, school gets a weird new principal, whatever the fuck, you’ve read Goosebumps — and this time the little voice inside me said “Why not use that time your parents moved you and your sister in a Uhaul trailer and the trailer got unhitched and you wound up marooned at that spooky Camp Jellyjam place? You know, with the weird culty competitions and the giant jelly-monster enslaving and eating people?” So I did.
I had every intention of pivoting back into one of my sick-fuck-make-em-ups — vampires, mummies, killer snowmen, whatever gets you off, Jack — but to my astonishment, the truth just kept pouring out. Next thing I knew, my fingers stopped hitting the keys, and it was all there. The sinister counselor Buddy. The King Coins. The giant purple blob monster I, for real, watched eat dozens of children. Before I knew it, the greatest trauma of my life was on bookshelves around the world, available to any 12-year-old pervert with $4.50 burning a hole in their pocket.
I didn’t change the names or anything. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone involved in the story besides me is either dead or in prison, I probably would have been sued to death.
What did I get for sharing my pain with the world? Closure? Catharsis? Absolution? Fuck. No. I was still the same sick fuck shell of a man I always was. The pills, the whores, the near-death brushes with auto-erotic asphyxiation, none of that shit went away, hell I doubled down. Worse of all, if you’ll notice, I kept writing Goosebumps.
Maybe that’s why I’m finally coming clean about what I experienced at Camp Jellyjam. Maybe I’m still just that scared little kid trying to put it all behind me, and maybe now the nightmares will finally stop. Yeah… and maybe priests make great babysitters. I’m at the point where any day without a needle in my arm is a good day. I gotta tell ya, I don’t think today is gonna be a good day.