Give Yourself Goosebumps saw R. L. Stine's best-selling series collide with the solo gamebook format in a way remarkably similar to the other big proponent of US interactive fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure, for a total of exactly fifty different books (42 in the regular series, plus 8 'special editions') released between 1995 and 2000, when the franchise entered a hiatus that would last some eight years. With the nineties not being enormously kind to the gamebook genre on the whole, for many members of the generation who grew up with Goosebumps this was likely the first, and quite possibly only, series of interactive fiction books they followed.
If you were of that generation and revisited the original series of Goosebumps books more recently (and for whatever reason a hell of a lot of them have turned up in my local charity shops and second-hand bookshops lately), then they almost certainly read very differently as an adult. Whilst exactly how much of the main range Stine wrote himself still seems up for discussion, the various spin-off series -- this and the short story collections, amongst others -- are beyond debate, with multiple authors having openly stated they ghostwrote various entries. And time may well have been even less kind to the offshoots.
A note on UK and US cover art: up until the point when the first GYG book, Escape from the Carnival of Horrors, reached the UK in October 1996, it was standard procedure for the UK covers to have unique artwork (as did many other US mass-market paperback series of the time such as The Baby-Sitters' Club). However, the publication of EftCoH marked an end to all that: it was the first UK cover to use a cropped version of the US art, and the main line followed suit at exactly the same moment (#32 The Barking Ghost being the very last UK release to feature original art). Perhaps the addition of another spin-off series marked a tipping point where it was felt to be no longer worth the additional time and expense? That said, the switchover also marked the point where the UK covers started using the US logo (compare it with the logo used on earlier books, they're subtly but noticeably different), so maybe Scholastic took a firmer line on alterations made by overseas publishers around that time?
In terms of what's actually between the covers, well... look, I don't want to shatter the nostalgia filter any further than it already has been since the series' heyday, and I do still regard them with some fondness, but these books really aren't very good at all, either as gamebooks or just books. Very limited actual interactivity (there's generally two separate pathways right at the start of the book but not that much story branching beyond that), not even the most basic of inventory management, at times it's painfully obvious they've been ghosted, and as the series goes on the writing seems to get more and more rushed. Before he made it big with scaring children, Stine was actually, amongst other things, a gamebook writer (as well as penning, er, the novelisation for Spaceballs), contributing entries to the Find Your Fate series, a range which basically released simple gamebooks based on licensed properties such as Indiana Jones and James Bond, and Twistaplot, an early-eighties series not dissimilar to Choose Your Own Adventure but with slightly more depths and some notable gimmicks. If you compare the two, you can occasionally find similarities (such as an ending which sends you around in an infinite loop), but the older books are definitely a little more ambitious than Give Yourself Goosebumps, further indicating ghostwriters churning these things out. Escape is actually probably one of the stronger entries in the series, if only because the concept lends itself quite well to the Random Events Plot which the original series resorted to more and more as it went on (and, perhaps, it got more and more ghostwritten), but later GYG books seem to want to tell a coherent story as the plan, but in execution just have things happen without rhyme or reason.
Now, the original series would sometimes manage to have everything come together and produce a legitimately well-written, maybe even genuinely scary book that still holds up even in the cold light of adulthood. Stay Out of the Basement. The Ghost Next Door. Be Careful What You Wish For. The Haunted School. Werewolf Skin. And its gamebook spawn occasionally shows similar flashes of inspiration, mostly in some surprisingly nightmarish "bad" endings which the ghostwriter clearly had a lot more fun with than any other aspect of the writing. (I particularly like the aforementioned 'infinite loop' ending in Escape, where you get lost in a hall of mirrors that sends you in a loop around the same two sections, and some of the mazes and similar puzzles in other books.) The range also hits a notable high with the first Special Edition, Into the Jaws of Doom, which is dangerously close to being a "proper" gamebook, boasting twice as many sections as a 'regular' entry in the series, a proper inventory management system and use of dice; it still has signs of the same flaws most entries in this franchise have, but it's genuinely impressive for a gamebook released at a time when the genre had been thought to have all but died out. Seven more Special Editions followed, all usually employing some kind of gimmick such as choosing between playing as a warrior or a wizard, but none ever hit the highs of the Jaws of Doom.
Ultimately, though, unless you're that big on nineties nostalgia, this series cannot come recommended.
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