R. L. Stine reaches out to his former audience with “Red Rain.”

Stine is mostly remembered for his bestselling series “Goosebumps.”  The series later became a TV show and it was recently revived in the book series, “Goosebumps Horrorland,” in 2008. The novel, “Red Rain,” is about a travel blogger who happens to stay at an island that is hit by a terrible hurricane.  After the storm, she meets two twin boys that have lost everything in the storm, and decides to bring them home with her.  After they come home, terrible things begin to happen to her family.

“Red Rain” is essentially the grown up “Goosebumps” for his grown up audience from the nineties.  In this book, however, Stine knows he’s not writing for kids anymore.  There is real death, real fear, and at the end of the book it doesn’t go back to normal.  All the detail he’s added helps to make the story more real and the situations put on the family even scarier.

The book does have its flaws at times however, in dialogues and blog entries, but overall the story is really good.  Just like his “Goosebumps” books, the protagonist makes bad, but well meaning choices that lead the situation to get progressively worse. It doesn’t matter if you were a “Goosebumps” fan as a kid or not, the book is definitely worth the read, and if you were a fan then the added nostalgia of reading a Stine book makes it even better.