Blogger Beware

Blogger Beware was a blog run by Troy Steele that reviewed Goosebumps books. The blog contained reviews for all original Goosebumps books, the Tales to Give You Goosebumps books, and the Goosebumps Series 2000 books.

History
The first review posted on Blogger Beware was Troy Steele's review of the book Egg Monsters from Mars on January 19, 2006. Throughout the next two years, Steele would go on to review every book in the original Goosebumps series. (During this time, Steele released a line of pin-back buttons, and each button referenced a running gag from Blogger Beware.) Steele's final review for the original series was of Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes on June 30, 2008. After this review, Steele went on to start reviewing the Goosebumps Series 2000 books. At one point, Steele stated that he was planning on reviewing Goosebumps HorrorLand and Ghosts of Fear Street, a spin off of Fear Street for the Goosebumps audience.

Blogger Beware posts started to become more sporadic towards the end of the Goosebumps Series 2000 reviews, and the blog went on a long hiatus after More Tales to Give You Goosebumps was reviewed on May 9, 2011. Over the course of the next year, the only featured updates on the blog were not reviews. On June 5, 2012, Steele posted a review for Revenge of the Living Dummy, marking the first time that a Goosebumps HorrorLand book had been reviewed on Blogger Beware. The blog was updated once in 2015 with a post entitled, "Exciting New Poster For Everyone's Most Anticipated Movie Debuts!"; the title of the post is supposed to seem like it is alluding to the film Goosebumps, but — in actuality — the post is about an obscure film called Jenny's Wedding.

While the blog was never officially retired, it went dormant; Revenge of the Living Dummy (reviewed in 2012) is currently the last Goosebumps book to be reviewed by Steele, and "Exciting New Poster For Everyone's Most Anticipated Movie Debuts!" (posted in 2015) is the most recent post on the blog. In 2013, Steele said, "The blog is in indefinite hiatus, but hey, Futurama came back."

Troy continued commenting until roughly 2017, and made small revisions to posts up until 2018. However, sometime in early 2022, the domain for the site evidently lapsed, with the bloggerbeware.com link leading to a GoDaddy site, the service likely used to purchase the domain in the first place. Furthermore, the twistending.blogspot.com link still points to the bloggerbeware.com domain, making the original blog inaccessible.

Rankings
In a retrospective of the original Goosebumps series, Troy made up two lists ranking the best and worst Goosebumps books.

10 best books
As named by Steele, these are the ten best books in the original series, ranked in order:
 * 1) Be Careful What You Wish For...
 * 2) Ghost Camp
 * 3) Werewolf Skin
 * 4) You Can't Scare Me!
 * 5) The Haunted School
 * 6) The Headless Ghost
 * 7) The Ghost Next Door
 * 8) Welcome to Camp Nightmare
 * 9) Stay Out of the Basement
 * 10) How I Learned to Fly

10 worst books
As named by Steele, these are the worst books in the original series; though he stated that the list only features ten books, it actually has eleven, with Chicken Chicken being ranked #0.
 * 1) Chicken Chicken & Monster Blood IV
 * 2) Legend of the Lost Legend
 * 3) Attack of the Jack O'Lanterns
 * 4) A Shocker on Shock Street
 * 5) Egg Monsters from Mars
 * 6) The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena
 * 7) Deep Trouble II
 * 8) Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes
 * 9) Say Cheese and Die — Again!
 * 10) My Best Friend Is Invisible

Trivia

 * Many of the images and links on Blogger Beware broke due to link rot ⁠— prior to the domain expiring in 2022.
 * The site Blogger Beware Annotated has sought to restore as much of the blog as possible ⁠(in addition to notating things like pop-culture references).
 * The original Goosebumps series reviews were updated in a random order (but appear in order in the links), but Goosebumps Series 2000 was updated in chronological order.
 * Unlike with the original series, Steele did not reveal which of the Goosebumps Series 2000 books were the best and which were the worst. Steele simply described the books as "forgettable".
 * During his initial reviews, Steele called Jekyll and Heidi a "good" entry into the series, named I Am Your Evil Twin as "one of the best" books in the Goosebumps franchise, and described Are You Terrified Yet? in a positive light. In the comments for one review, he called The Haunted Car "the best book in the 2000 series by a mile".
 * When asked how he felt about Blogger Beware on Reddit, R. L. Stine had this to say, "They sure are critical aren't they? Cringe cringe."
 * After being presented with Stine's comment, Steele said, "Cringing at how critical I am of his life's work is hardly a diss. Considering the circumstances, it was about as classy a response as one could hope for".
 * According to Steele, a fan who worked at Scholastic personally sent him a set of Goosebumps HorrorLand books.