Netflix’s The Midnight Club might convert a new generation into horror buffs
In the mid 1990s, America’s children were gripped by Goosebumps fever. These entry-level horror novels by R.L. Stine, never more than about 150 pages in length, were notorious for their textual jump-scares, their cliffhanger chapter endings that suggested the horrific only to be punctured by mundanity on the following page, and their overall promise of formulaic scares with just enough variation between books to allow for a feeling of discovery each time.
Two years after the publication of the first Goosebumps book (1992’s Welcome to Dead House) and roughly concurrently with such Stine titles as Phantom of the Auditorium, Attack of the Mutant, and A Night in Terror Tower, Christopher Pike published his own YA novel, The Midnight Club, which marks a sharp contrast to Stine’s intentionally cheap thrills. Pike’s book, which concerns the late-night storytelling rituals of a clique of adolescent hospice patients, is low on incident, high on rumination over the meaning of life and death, and crushingly sad. The book paints a vivid and emotionally ruthless portrait of the stages of grief spread across its small ensemble of terminally ill young people. And, crucially, it can be comfortably read in about half the time afforded to the new 10-hour Netflix adaptation helmed by house stylist Mike Flanagan and his Haunting of Bly Manor co-producer, Leah Fong. Perhaps surprisingly to fans of the book, however, despite frequent narrative fidelity, the tone of Flanagan and Fong’s Midnight Club is far closer to R.L. Stine than to its ostensible source.
The Midnight Club centers on Ilonka (Iman Benson), a cancer patient recently arrived at Brightcliffe, a youth hospice housed in a creaking seaside manor. Before long, Ilonka has been
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