Twitter is about to get real #spooky. 
 
 R.L. Stine, often endearingly referred to as the Stephen King of children's literature, announced that he will be writing a new scary story on Tuesday — entirely on Twitter. 
 
 See also: 36 Elaborate Halloween Costumes to Make Everyone Jealous 
 
 For Halloween, I'll be writing a story live on Twitter this evening. Hope you'll join me. — R.L. Stine (@RL_Stine) October 28, 2014 
 
 Stine didn't reveal any further details, like timing or topic. Cliffhanger. 
 
 The author began writing scary stories for children in the late ‘90s with the Fear Street series. In 1992, he started Goosebumps, and at age 71 still continues to publish stories under that label. His next book, A Nightmare on Clown Street, is set for release this February. 
 
 But his age and propensity for physical books doesn't set Stine back in the social media world. He boasts more than 133,000 followers on Twitter. 
 
 This isn't the first time that R.L. has released a scary story on Twitter. Two Halloweens ago Stine used 13 tweets to tell the short story of a farmer being haunted by a ghost named Yost. A few months before that he tweeted a spooky tale about a family dealing with a haunted kitchen over a series of 9 tweets. 
 
 If you can't tune in tonight, you can check back with Stine on Thursday, when he takes over Scholastic’s Twitter feed for a Halloween-themed Q&A. (Scholastic publishes the Goosebumps series.) ||||| The real target of ‘The Hunger Games’ Why Americans young and old are so hungry for this story 
 
 I’m one of those annoying people who knew about “The Hunger Games” way before you did, who read all of Suzanne Collins’ mega-popular trilogy of books long before I knew they’d be a huge movie. (This is because I’m a weirdo who reads a lot of young adult novels, not because I’m a cool trendsetter.) Back then, when I would describe the plot of the books to everyone I met, I’d often get the same response: “This is a bestseller?” And always, inevitably: “This is a book for kids? ” 
 
 Yes and no. “The Hunger Games” trilogy is about a dystopian future in which a capitalist dictatorship forces children to kill each other on a nationally televised reality show, and it’s only hard to believe such a book is for kids if you’re not a regular reader of young adult novels. 
 
 Authors of books for kids have been disemboweling and beheading their young heroes for years; all the way from the original, much bloodier Brothers Grimm fairy tales to the creepy cliffhangers and cartoonish violence in the R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike novels that were all the rage when I was in middle school. 
 
 But there’s more to their appeal to tweens than their unstinting descriptions of battles and wounds and war. 
 
 Whenever you begin to investigate the sources of literary megapopularity, it’s tempting to either condescend to the benighted masses — those sheep who will happily graze on anything with “Girl” or “Tiger” in the title — or to hatch complicated theories about the underlying societal neuroses the book in question taps into. 
 
 In a New Yorker roundup of dystopian teen fiction published in June of 2010, Laura Miller posited that the “Hunger Games” books appealed to teens because the daily struggle for survival in the arena that heroine Katniss Everdeen confronts in the books functions as an allegory for what happens in the halls of the average high school. Maybe this argument resonated because of our current cultural focus on the social minefield that school can be for kids who don’t fit in, which has been magnified by the addition of online bullying to alpha teens’ arsenals. 
 
 Dystopias for adults are didactic, the theory goes, but the ones written for teens aren’t meant to warn or scold: “It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening — it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader.” 
 
 High school as dystopia seemed like a plausible explanation of the series’ popularity to me at the time I read Miller’s piece, but now I’m convinced that doesn’t come close to capturing the phenomenon — especially because of its cross-over appeal among adults. ||||| Bradbury died Tuesday night in Los Angeles, his agent Michael Congdon confirmed. His family said in a statement that he had suffered from a long illness.Author of more than 27 novels and story collections—most famously "The Martian Chronicles," "Fahrenheit 451," "Dandelion Wine" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes"—and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often-maligned reputation of science fiction . Some say he singlehandedly helped to move the genre into the realm of literature."The only figure comparable to mention would be [Robert A.] Heinlein and then later [ Arthur C.] Clarke ," said Gregory Benford , a UC Irvine physics professor who is also a Nebula award-winning science fiction writer. "But Bradbury, in the '40s and '50s, became the name brand."Much of Bradbury's accessibility and ultimate popularity had to do with his gift as a stylist—his ability to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.The late Sam Moskowitz, the preeminent historian of science fiction, once offered this assessment: "In style, few match him. And the uniqueness of a story of Mars or Venus told in the contrasting literary rhythms of Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe is enough to fascinate any critic."As influenced by George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare as he was by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs , Bradbury was an expert of the taut tale, the last-sentence twist. And he was more celebrated for short fiction than his longer works."It's telling that we read Bradbury for his short stories," said Benford. "They are glimpses. The most important thing about writers is how they exist in our memories. Having read Bradbury is like having seen a striking glimpse out of a car window and then being whisked away."An example is from 1957's "Dandelion Wine":"The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchman and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning."Bradbury's poetically drawn and atmospheric fictions—horror, fantasy, shadowy American gothics—explored life's secret corners: what was hidden in the margins of the official family narrative, or the white noise whirring uncomfortably just below the placid surface. He offered a set of metaphors and life puzzles to ponder for the rocket age and beyond, and has influenced a wide swath of popular culture--from children's writer R.L. Stine and singer Elton John (who penned his hit "Rocket Man" as an homage), to architect Jon Jerde who enlisted Bradbury to consider and offer suggestions about reimagining public spaces.Bradbury frequently attempted to shrug out of the narrow "sci-fi" designation, not because he was put off by it, but rather because he believed it was imprecise."I'm not a science fiction writer," he was frequently quoted as saying. "I've written only one book of science fiction ["Fahrenheit 451"]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen."It wasn't merely semantics.His stories were multilayered and ambitious. Bradbury was far less concerned with mechanics—how many tanks of fuel it took to get to Mars and with what rocket—than what happened once the crew landed there, or what they would impose on their environment. "He had this flair for getting to really major issues," said Paul Alkon, emeritus professor of English and American literature at USC."He wasn't interested in current doctrines of political correctness or particular forms of society. Not what was wrong in '58 or 2001 but the kinds of issues that are with us every year."
– Fans of Goosebumps author RL Stine—and the Bustle thinks this includes "every teen, twentysomething, and thirtysomething"—will want to tune in to his Twitter feed. Stine today promised this: "For Halloween, I'll be writing a story live on Twitter this evening. Hope you'll join me." He offered no other details, including what time the story-tweeting begins. For those unfamiliar with Stine, Mashable explains that the prolific 71-year-old is referred to as the "Stephen King of children's literature."