John Sara on “Field of Screams”
Since January, I've been working on a larger project I like to call The Poet Who Cried Monster, which has been to write 62 poems based on R.L. Stine’s original 62 series of Goosebumps books. “Field of Screams” draws inspiration from The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, the twentieth book in the series.
I carry a lot of nostalgia for Goosebumps and part of the fun of this project has been trying to interpret these books through poetry using them as a springboard for exploring love, identity, and monstrosity.
Looking back at Goosebumps as an adult, it strikes me how these books can capture the fears of adolescence. Stine always aimed to show that kids were capable of handling difficult situations on their own, but with this, there always came that sense of alienation many of us feel as children, misunderstood by the world and by our parents. Like a lot of Goosebumps books, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight highlights a specific dread: What happens when we can’t trust the adults around us? What if we’re not just imagining things? What if the scarecrows really are moving through the cornfields at night?
In this poem, I’ve tried to capture that specific gaslight-y horror of Stine’s book—where our grandparents may know a little more about those scarecrows than they’re letting on.