Gamblers beware, you’re in for a scare. Especially if you’re scared of March-induced bracketing, the phenomenon that pits everything under the sun against everything above the sun in a single-elimination free for all. R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, the children’s-horror-serial-turned-nostalgia-gold-mine, are the latest item to get the treatment, with publisher Scholastic announcing a popularity poll to determine the greatest of Stine’s disposable masterworks.
While the prize deadline for accurately predicting the poll’s ultimate winner has passed (a prospect that was ruined the moment the number-crunching nerds got into the game, anyway, with their mummyball and scarebermetrics), you can still play along at home, betting whether perennial favorite Night Of The Living Dummy can overcome the challenge presented by late up-and-comer Monster Blood IV, long considered the artistic pinnacle of the Monster Blood franchise. You can get your blank brackets from Scholastic here, and get in on the voting at the official Goosebumps Tumblr.
Eagle-eyed readers and obsessive compulsives might note that the original Goosebumps series only ran for 62 books, two shy of the 64 necessary to fill out a traditional bracket. We’ll save you a sleepless night and note that Scholastic pulled two books, Cry Of The Cat and Bride Of The Living Dummy, from Stine’s later Goosebumps Series 2000 to fill out the list. (Tragically, Goosebumps Series 2000 #21, the terrifying-sounding The Haunted Car, failed to make the cut.) Those interested in other Goosebumps-spinoff-related gambling, like betting on whether a kid could make it to the end of a volume of the Choose Your Own Adventure rip-off Give Yourself Goosebumps without getting bloodily devoured by a cat, can arrange that in the comments below.