They are chill-and-thrill children’s tales by America’s answer to J K Rowling which have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide, closing in on Harry Potter’s record. Now, 16 years since R L Stine, a master scary story-teller, wrote the first of his 87 creepy-crawly page-turners, Hollywood is to adapt the Goosebumps series for the big screen in an ambitious blockbuster franchise.

Columbia Pictures has snapped up the rights to the world’s most popular series of children’s books after Rowling’s adventure stories, whose sales are 400 million.

Both Stine and Rowling are published in America by Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher of children’s books, and both are publishing phenomena that continue to inspire even the most reluctant children to pick up a book. His cliff-hangers virtually dare them to try to stop reading.

Such is Stine’s popularity that he is among the most-borrowed authors in British libraries and has outsold John Grisham and Stephen King. A television adaptation of Goosebumps was screened in more than 100 countries, regularly topping viewing charts, and his publisher’s website attracts 1.5 million page views a month from his pre-teen fans. Like Potter, Goosebumps is primarily aimed at children aged from eight to 14.

Stine, a 64-year-old New Yorker who writes with a skeleton at his side, has been dubbed “the Stephen King of children’s literature” and “the Enid Blyton of his day” - except that his characters eat strained eyeballs and haunt Fear Street.

While Potter has got progressively darker with every book, the Goosebumps series has been sending shivers down young spines from the series’ first book. With titles such as Brain Juice, You Can't Scare Me and It Came From Beneath the Sink!, Stine has mixed gory horror with good humour to avoid giving his readers nightmares. Brain Juice tells the story of a group of children who drink a liquid which makes them so intelligent no-one can stand them.

A common theme in his books is children triumphing over evil, normal kids facing horrid or frightening situations and using their own wit and imagination to escape them.

Deborah Forte, one of the film’s producers, said: “The wonderful thing about Goosebump scares is that they’re not ‘real-world’ scares. Kids don’t have nightmares. It’s just fun to be scared. It’s not some perpetrator breaking into your home. It’s more like a librarian who eats bugs, or a father who’s doing something strange in a basement and turning into a plant...

“It’s such an interesting combination of scares and humour. It also tends to address some psychological issues for an adolescent that somehow rings true all over the world. Their parents seem strange, they are moved to a new town and don’t have friends, or some popular child in their school is mean. It puts them in some kind of psychological dilemma. They get picked on or create a certain level of anxiety to introduce the scare.”

“The difference between Goosebumps and Harry Potter," she added, “is that Potter was read by young people and adults. Goosebumps belongs to the kids. It’s theirs.”

Stine was a school-teacher for a year before working for 16 years on children’s magazines. He went on to write more than 40 humorous children’s books. His first scary novel, Blind Date, 1986, became a bestseller that launched his career as a horror writer. The Goosebumps series began with Welcome to Dead House in 1992.

Ms Forte, whose previous films include The Golden Compass, the Philip Pullman epic adaptation, said: “The film’s going to be a huge global franchise. People sometimes forget how vibrant and popular Goosebumps is around the globe. It was the first mega publishing franchise that worked in every country of the world.”

Casting is yet to begin, but Columbia is expected to seek out unknown child actors with well-known names in supporting roles, much as Warner did with the “Potter” franchise.

She is co-producing it with Neal Moritz, whose 40 films include box-office hits such as the teen horror film, I Know What You Did Last Summer. He described Goosebumps as “good, scarey fun”. In a story about a child who thinks ghosts live next door, for example, the reader ultimately realises that they are not ghosts but that we are all dead. “There’s always a reversal twist at the end”, he said.

Stephen King suggested that Stine’s success helped to persuade Scholastic to pursue Rowling’s boy wizard. “He’s largely unknown and uncredited,” King said. “But of course, John the Baptist never got the same press as Jesus, either.”

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