Goosebumps / Fridge

As a Moments subpage, many spoilers are unmarked. Reader beware, indeed.

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The books — in general:

Fridge Brilliance:

Both the second and second-to-last book in the original series(Stay Out of the Basement, I Live in Your Basement) have basement-related titles. Odd coincidence, but both stories are also about a grotesque mutant pretending to be a human, trying to force himself into the protagonists' lives. In that sense, the latter might be a Spiritual Sequel to the former.
At some point, it was mentioned that when Mr. Wood died in the first Night of the Living Dummy book, Slappy became "twice as evil and a thousand times ruder." Take all the books with Slappy in order of publication, (even from different series), and he gradually becomes worse and worse.
- As an example, in the second book, one of his more horrible pranks was painting "AMY AMY AMY AMY" all over her sister's wall. In Slappy New Year, he goes after kids with gardening shears. This may not have been intended on R.L. Stine's part, but it's interesting how such a throwaway fact holds some consistency.

Fridge Horror:

As noted elsewhere, the Night of the Living Dummy books are about 10x creepier in retrospect. They're about dummies (typically Slappy) attempting to enslave preteen girls. When the girls resist him, he slaps and hits them, threatening to ruin their lives. To top it all off, in one book he demands a bride, a preteen girl, who he violently hits, calling these strikes "love taps".
- Bride of the Living Dummy mentions that the toymaker who built Slappy infused his evil to bring Slappy to life. The way it was written can be interpreted two ways: pure evil powers the doll, OR Slappy has the soul of an older man giving him life and personality. We probably don't need to explain how bad that latter one sounds.
- The fact that Slappy also has mind control does not help matters. It is quite disputable how that came about in "Ghost of Slappy" when Slappy possessed the food on the table in the lunchroom to humiliate Shep, falling all over him, in turn having 'everyone' in the lunchroom, including the teachers, to laugh at Shep, and of course, over the laughter, Slappy cackles. This makes you wonder if Slappy possessed everyone to laugh, or if it was merely a cruel coincidence, but though it was probably meaner than it was, does not remove how much you feel sorry for him, you would think the teachers would at least feel sorry for him, but they probably thought he did it to himself as a joke, or it was just a harmless funny prank, though as Shep pointed out, no one was laughing as hard as the girl he liked was who had tears coming out her eyes due to all her laughing, and she was just starting to like him.
- According to the films, Slappy is supposedly a personification of Stine's inner demons.
Being 12 years old in the Goosebumps verse is seemingly an automatic Weirdness Magnet, but let's look at some of the adult characters. Most are unnerving eccentrics at best(Dr. Deep, Dr. Brewer, the Swamp Hermit, Aunt Katheryn, Sheriff Freidus) and complete psychopaths at worst(Mr. Toggle, Ahmed, Dr. Grey, Emory Banyon, Vanessa). Given how supernatural forces and monsters are consistently drawn to children, it's quite possible all these messed up people started off as relatively normal kids before their own traumatic adventures.