Fear Street #42 – Killer’s Kiss

The Cover

I really like the original cover (taken from this Fear Street blog)? There’s something very classic about it, from the old photograph to lip stains on it, to the colors. It has very little to do with the plot, but that’s okay, because it’s sinister and sweet all at the same time.

The new one (taken from its Amazon page) is better than most of the updated covers. I appreciate a good skull though I don’t know why it’s wearing sunglasses? That color with that bridge crack definitely makes this skull look like a cool dude. The kiss on the forehead too is weird. I know why they did it there, but that doesn’t say “tender love turned deadly” as much as “bad Photoshop”.

Tagline

Her lips were sweet and deadly.

Also a pretty good tagline. It could use an ellipses in there to really sell the drama, but I like this.

Sweet, tender, and vicious.

Not as good, but they’re nearly identical. I think vicious isn’t as sellable as deadly I think it loses something from not being a complete sentence.

Summary

We open on Vincent Milano watching Delia apply a tube of purple lipstick to her lips after a makeout session. The first three chapters made me think Vincent would be our main character, and I thought this was going in a more Double Date direction, but he sort of disappears from his own story after this introduction? Unlike other Stine books where someone’s dating two people at once (which is an alarming number of them), Vincent is pretty much just there to lie and die.

The important thing is, Vincent and Delia have just been making out super good, and we see Delia do something she’ll do a hundred times in this book: she applies her lipstick and then presses a tissue to her lips, making a perfect lip mark. Vincent’s also a pretty bad womanizer. Delia asks him about his birthday party, and he realizes both she and Karina are invited and decides to do nothing about this. He’s also invited both girls over on the same night for making out. Too late he realizes the clock in his living room has stopped and Karina might be there at any second, so he kicks Delia out without much fanfare. Literally as she pulls out of the driveway, Karina turns down his street. If you’re going to two-time two girls who despise each other, at least plan it better.

Karina arrives and chats with Vincent on his porch before they walk in, and she realizes Delia left a huge purple lip mark on his cheek. Vincent quickly backtracks with some lame excuse about helping her with her homework and that she gave him a peck on the way out. Karina proceeds to give the same speech that Delia gave about her: the two are rivals, and the one is always stealing the other’s clothes and friends and now boyfriends. Karina flips out though and shouts that she won’t let her win before slamming the door and driving off. A totally normal Shadyside reaction.

We cut to Delia hanging out with her friends on the bleachers in the gym. Britty and Gabe are discussing the Conklin Award, which is never fully explained but appears to be an arts scholarship that allows Delia a free ride to the “most expensive fashion college in New York” (you couldn’t figure out a name, Stine?). Without it, Delia’s not even sure if she can afford community college in Waynesbridge. They say seven kids applied for it, which seems improbably low for a huge scholarship that could get you into art colleges in New York, but maybe it’s a local thing? There also seems to be a talent portion that is unrelated to the actual art that the student does? Delia paints and sketches fashion, but she plays guitar for her talent, and Karina sings, and Stewart, another contender, does a magic show? I don’t know much about art scholarships but I don’t think they work like a beauty pageant.

There’s a little more about Karina and Delia’s rivalry, and Britty mentions they all used to be friends. She still hangs out with Karina and offers to talk to Delia for her. Gabe mentions they had a truce for a whole year and were nearly on friendly terms, but Delia won’t stand for her boyfriend being stolen. Which is when the doors fly open and Karina comes shrieking in. She lunges at Delia and starts to choke her! She screams that Delia’s not going to win this time, and Delia manages to shove her off. For the first time ever in a Fear Street novel a teacher intervenes. The coach takes Karina to the principal’s office, and Delia is shaken. Her friends comfort her, and Britty promises to talk to Karina to see what’s going on.

Delia and Vincent are chatting, and I don’t know why Vincent is even with Delia. He clearly doesn’t want to talk to her and would choose Karina over her in a heartbeat. As he starts kissing her, Delia realizes they’re being watched, and she sees her younger sister Sarah. The two sisters fight, and Delia snaps at Sarah that she’s just jealous because no boy’s ever kissed her. Sarah flips out and screams that she hates her. She threatens her sister, steals one of her paintings, and runs upstairs.

At school, Delia is caught off guard by Stewart, who she says is the stiffest competition for the Conklin Award. She’s clearly into him and forgets for a second that she even has a boyfriend. Stewart asks her out, but she sees Vincent coming down the hall, and she tells him no. Stewart seems genuinely disappointed, which is a little sad. But later on she hears someone talking from within a storage closet, and she sees Stewart and Karina inside, talking quietly. She thinks maybe they’re plotting against her. She runs into Britty, who tells her that there’s no real reason for Stewart to help Karina, and it’s more likely that he asked Delia out because he likes her. They watch Stewart leave, but Karina doesn’t. Delia asks Britty to talk to Karina, to explain that she’s with Vincent, and she’s willing to be cool so long as Karina doesn’t come for him. Britty seems reluctant, but as they see Karina leave, she goes to greet her.

Britty gets Karina to stop walking so Delia can listen in. Britty asks her what happened the other day at the gym, and Karina blows it off. Britty is rightfully upset that she doesn’t see a strangulation as a big deal, and she tries to lightly bring up that she’s acting out of control. Karina gets real menacing and says Delia won’t win the Conklin and won’t win Vincent, and then she calls out to Delia in the hall before storming off.

Delia is all nerves as the competition starts for the Conklin Award. She dreams about Karina covering her in her Midnight Wine lipstick (less fun than it sounds). Delia chose to go last in the competition and regrets it, since she has all the time in the world to get nervous. Karina sings as someone plays piano, and Delia notices her sister sitting away from them, watching Delia. Delia runs backstage, her nerves getting to her, and she picks up her guitar case. The judges call her name, and she’s saved the embarrassment of playing an original song she wrote about Vincent when she realizes all her strings are cut, and a dead rat has been stuffed into its hollow center. Gabe helps her off stage, and she accuses Karina of messing with her. The judges again present themselves as reasonable authority figures and tell the girls that they’ll investigate what happened and decide from there.

Delia gets home to find a note taped to her door from Vincent, inviting her out to Red Heat. She decides to get some clothes that Britty borrowed from her back, and when she arrives at Britty’s house, she finds she and Gabe are making cookies for her. It’s genuinely sweet how these two support Delia, and they chat about Karina and eat cookies together and it’s great. As Delia drives back home, she sees Karina and Vincent kissing. She tries to slam on her brakes but hits the accelerator instead, and then a patch of ice, and then she’s spinning out of control. Karina helps her out of the car, and the two share an awkward moment. Delia admits she didn’t know Vincent was dating both of them, and Karina tells her he’s been lying. Karina apologizes for going berserk in the gym but swears she didn’t ruin her guitar, and she asks for a truce. Delia reluctantly agrees, and then Karina gets the fuck out of there so Vincent can arrive. I’m not 100% sure what happens next, but we cut to Vincent on the phone with Delia clearly the same night, telling her that he can’t go to the Red Heat after all, which is fucking crazy. He tells Delia that Karina was lying and kissed him against his wishes and, like, dude. If you’re going to keep playing this terrible game, at least go dancing with her tonight to reinforce it. Also she almost died getting an outfit to look good for you so you can at least show up. He doesn’t even wait for Delia to respond before hanging up on her. As he hangs up, he cuddles up to the next girl on his couch: Sarah.

The next stage of the Conklin Award appears to be presenting what you’re actually going to school for. Delia waits with her paintings. They’re all also artists and appear to be pretty good, so again, I don’t really know what the the requirements are for this scholarship. Stewart continues to be sweet to Delia and soft asks her out. But Delia’s called in, and she removes her paintings from their portfolio, only to discover they’ve been smeared with Midnight Wine lipstick. Delia flips out and immediately goes to find Karina, who is making out with Vincent.

Britty and Delia talk during an elaborate display of Britty pulling out salsa, jalapenos, and black beans and rice, which I guess is meant to tell us that Britty is Latinx, but it sort of comes out of nowhere? I’m not sure what Stine’s thought process was with this. Delia tells her she’s going to see Vincent, and Britty tells her to drop his ass. But Delia won’t let it lie, and she goes to Vincent’s house, only to find him making out with Sarah. Vincent tries to write it off, but Delia doesn’t even seem to care. She’s worried about Karina, and she makes him promise to talk to her before she gets too out of control.

And now it’s time for something completely different. Britty and Gabe appear to be helping Vincent set up his party in an abandoned house in Fear Street. I’m not 100% why either of them agreed to help or would show up with Delia, but narratively it needs to happen. Karina arrives instead, and Britty and Gabe vacate. Vincent doesn’t even seem to want Delila at his party, and when Britty comes up to him later saying she’s worried, he blows it off. He refuses to be worried about it at his own party, though he still seems kind of worried about it. Britty is getting snippy with him and says that they’re stopping by Delia’s on the way home, not that he cares. But as they start to leave, Delia arrives, making her grand entrance. Her heels are snapped, her dress is torn, her arms are scratched, and blood is on her face, and she collapses right there in front of everyone. They all gather around to see if she’s okay, and Delia points an accusing finger at Karina. She says Karina invited her over to talk, and then tied her up on her bed. She demands to know what Karina’s plan was after the party. Was she going to kill her? Karina screams that she didn’t do it, and when Delia says they can go to her house, she tells them no. Vincent tries to talk to Karina, but she screams at him and runs off.

The next day, Delia seems fine, which is probably the biggest red flag. She won’t go to the police, and she’s applying her makeup like normal. She and Britty and Gabe go over to the house to clean it, but they wait outside for Vincent first. When he doesn’t arrive, they check inside, only to find his body there, his body stabbed, and a purple lipstick mark on his cheek. The police take Delia in, and Gabe tells her not to accuse Karina, in case that makes her sound guilty, but the current story is that Karina ties up people to her bed so like mention that I guess. The detectives leave Delia with their murder board which doesn’t seem appropriate protocol. She watches as they start putting pictures of evidence on the murder board. They come out and tell her they took her lip print (????) and compared it to the print on Vincent’s body and found it a match. We don’t get the scene where a bunch of grown men in police uniforms force a teenage girl to kiss something to get her “lip print” and for that I’m thankful.

They do tell her not to talk until her attorney arrives, but she decides she can prove it wasn’t her. She does a full Mythbusters and says that if it was truly her lip print, the print would be reversed on Vincent’s cheek (?????). She does the thing where she presses a piece of paper to her lips and shows them the print, and then points out that this must’ve been pressed to Vincent’s cheek. I’m not a scientist, or a biologists, or an artist, but I’m pretty certain this is not how lipstick marks work. I don’t know if I could tell the difference between a direct kiss stain and a reproduction. Also, Delia, how much lipstick are you globbing on that your tissue paper blotting can reproduce a full lip mark after use. I feel like Stine maybe thought up this part first and then wrote us a story to get here. It’s written like a real Sherlock Holmes moment, but it doesn’t make any sense.

Anyway, the police go to search Karina’s house and find a saved sheet of lipstick marks. I’ve avoided talking about the homoerotic tension between Karina and Delia but man oh man could I get into some stuff. Karina flips out when Delia accuses her and tries to attack her again. Her mom promises to get her help, and Delia feels it might finally be over.

Cut to senior prom, sort of. Gabe and Delia are going together, but they stop by the psychiatric hospital to see Karina first, I guess to make her feel extra bad? Gabe mentions he’s been coming every week, though I don’t know why. He tells Delia he’s proud of her for winning the Conklin Award, and she says this isn’t how she wanted to win. She then proceeds, with no prompting, to tell Gabe exactly how she dug a dead rat out of the trash to wreck her own guitar, and ruined her own paintings, and she got so mad when she caught Vincent with Sarah, so she faked her own kidnapping, planted evidence in Karina’s house, and then killed him. She kisses Gabe and begs him not to tell anyone, and then comes the worst ending to a book I think I’ve ever read:

Gazing over Delia’s shoulder, he saw a white coated doctor standing grim-faced in the doorway.

“I heard the whole story,” he told Gabe. “I’ll phone the police.”

And then it’s over. What? It’s such a clumsy exit.

Favorite Line

“You’ve been out in the ozone somewhere since we got here.”

Fear Street Trends

So many! Thank goodness! Karina and Delia are clearly meant to be opposites, and they dress like it. Delia constantly mentions finding her clothes at thrift shops, and she wears loud colors and crazy designs. We see her wearing an orange shirt dress embroidered with yellow flowers. The outfit that almost kills her is a black suede miniskirt with a matching black suede fringed vest (ugh) with a purple lace bodysuit (what!) and platform red boots. Her “artsy” outfit for the second part of the competition is a braid with stone studded silver earrings. And her trademark purple lipstick. Karina is only described a handful of times, but Vincent says she looks like Michelle Pfeiffer (I’ve missed you celebrity descriptions!). She dresses more conservatively with pleated pants and a pink sweater.

Rating

This one is bad. It’s the only real word for it. The book is mostly bloodless and the unreliable narrator could’ve been cool if we were given more reason to distrust her. There’s a few red herrings but none of them are played up. The ending’s the worst part, and I think if she’d gotten away with it in the end, I would’ve forgiven this book some of it’s faults, but I guess Stine didn’t want to pull another Best Friend. I’m giving it one rat filled guitar out of five.

Fear Street # 37 – The Perfect Date

I did not mean to take January off, but my schedule got kind of crazy with things freezing over, taking trips, and working odd weekends, but I’m back! Since February is a month of love, I chose some books to really illustrate the dangers of dating.

The Cover

The original cover (pulled from this Fear Street blog) isn’t bad. There’s no background to it, which feels exceptionally lazy, but the posing is well done. It kind of reminds me of First Date, but the people in this are actually looking at each other and the knife to the back is subtle enough. The updated cover (taken from its Amazon page) is so, so sad. Why they do they do that negative exposure thing to all these books? Was that ever popular?

Tagline

Dream date… or nightmare?

Pretty good, pretty good. Plays into expectations, makes a play one words, but doesn’t reveal too much. I can appreciate this one.

Breaking up can be murder.

Um, what? I guess there’s a subplot about breaking up with someone in this book, but that’s not the central conflict. This seems very out of place.

Summary

We open with a prologue! Brady Karlin and his beautiful girlfriend Sharon Noles are hiking up the tallest hill in Shadyside after a major blizzard burst through their town. Miller Hill slopes down in front of them, and Sharon’s nervous to sled down it. She keeps pointing over to the other hills, but Brady’s insistent they go down Miller Hill. He kind of pushes Sharon on her sled before she’s ready and follows after, and they’re sledding down, avoiding thornbushes and tall pine trees, flying so fast. Brady’s loving it, but Sharon starts screaming. She slams into a tree and goes flying. Brady chases after her, being casual about it at first, even though she’s not answering, and when he finds her body, there’s nothing left of her face.

Cut to a year later. Brady is hanging out with his friend Jon, possibly the most likeable guy in Shadyside, talking about cute girls. It seems like every girl has a crush on Brady, and Jon has to remind him he’s currently dating Allie Stoner. He seems a little upset when Brady mentions he’s been thinking about breaking up with her, and while it doesn’t come up, I’m 90% sure Jon has a little crush on her. Their conversation is interrupted when Brady sees a girl he describes as “perfect”, totally gorg, pouty lips and all. Jon again reminds Brady he has a girlfriend a she gets up to go talk to her. She introduces herself as Rosha Nelson, and her name normally wouldn’t make me bat an eye thanks to all the weird 90s names that get tossed around, but the characters bring it up themselves that it’s kind of weird. They chat, flirt, make plans for a date, and then she pours boiling hot coffee on his hand.

At school the next day, Brady runs into Allie, who reminds him they were going to the basketball game together on Saturday and invites him out for pizza that night. Brady plays her off and starts to break things off with her, but he gets cold feet on it. He lies instead, saying he has to babysit his cousin, and she seems to buy it. She asks if he’s still coming over Sunday to study with her and Jon, and he promises he’ll be there. But Brady’s distracted and only wants to think about Rosha. For the first time since the prologue he thinks about Sharon, and then quickly dismisses her for Rosha.

Brady meets Rosha at the mall on Saturday, nervous he’ll get caught by one of Allie’s friends. At first he thinks he might get stood up, but she shows, and they head off to Waynesbridge to see a movie. Rosha, up to this point, has refused to tell Brady where she lives, meeting at a second location instead, hasn’t given him her phone number, and has clearly lied about why she wanted to meet at the mall. She’s also incredibly cold, and Brady seems supernaturally attracted to her, to the point that he starts stalking her later. She also does that thing crazy girls in Shadyside do, where they ask for the keys to their boyfriend’s car, and then drive it at 90 miles an hour down dangerous streets. Going home from the movies, she plows through some ice, spinning them out, and getting Brady’s head smashed into the windshield. When he comes to, she quickly tells him to get in the driver’s seat since she doesn’t have her license, and when the police arrive, she’s already gone.

Brady goes to meet Jon and Allie for studying, and he and Jon talk about his crazy night. Brady got off surprisingly easy for crashing his dad’s classic car, but maybe the concussion is punishment enough. Allie is a good girlfriend and fusses over him, and Brady gets annoyed and disappears for a bit. He realizes he doesn’t have Rosha’s phone number. He opens up a phone book and looks for the Nelsons before realizing there’s a lot of them, and he doesn’t know her parents’ names. He decides to ditch his friends and blames his head injury before heading home. As he walks back, he sees a police cruiser in front of his house, and the officer hands him back Rosha’s purse she’d been carrying the night before. He opens it, hoping there’ll be a phone number or some way of contacting her, but finds it completely empty.

Brady ditches his girlfriend some more and starts calling Nelsons in the phone book, only for his phone call to be interrupted. He answers, and a voice on the other end tells him to stay away from Rosha before hanging up. This makes Brady only wilder for seeing this girl he has no way of contacting and remembers she mentioned going to the private school in Shadyside. He drives over to the school, but not before talking to Jon, who calls him out on his shitty behavior. Brady’s just pissed, and he races to the school as the students are leaving. He chases down a bunch of blond girls, none of which are Rosha, and goes to the office, demanding her phone number, until they remind him they can’t just give out student information. He sees a boy waiting for the bus and asks him if he knows Rosha, and when he says no, he flips out on him and knocks him to the ground. As he wanders the school, looking for her, he sees this girl on the football field. He saw her on their date at the movie, this blond girl with these horrible scars all over her face. She just stares at him, and Brady starts running, straight into Rosha.

Rosha listens to his story and realizes he was essentially stalking her. She flips out and asks if he’s checking up on her, calling him weird and a jerk. Brady apologizes, and she apologizes for crashing the car. He hands her the purse, and she gets nervous when he mentions the police, but he assures her he didn’t tell them anything. They get a coffee, and she gives him a phone number and an address. She also asks him to go dancing with her Saturday night, and, even though he knows he has a party to go to with Allie, he agrees.

Brady practices breaking up with Allie, but he gets a phone call from the mystery person, telling hm to stay away from Rosha. He figures out it’s the scarred girl. He and Jon talk while lifting weights, and Jon pushes on him to dump Allie before she finds out he’s two-timing her. Brady is lifting weights from the bench, and he sees through the window the scarred girl staring at him, surprising him so he drops his weights on his neck. Jon pulls them off, and he points out that the girl was right there. Jon thinks he’s freaking out because she reminds him of Sharon, and he admits that’s probably true.

Brady decides to ask Rosha if she knows anything about the scarred girl, but when he calls the number she gave him, it’s disconnected. He freaks out and drives over to 7142 Fear Street to talk to her face-to-face. He drives slow down the street, reading the street numbers, and he sees the graveyard where Sharon is buried. He gets up to 7136, and after that there’s no houses. Just the woods.

Brady’s at his house now, thinking about Allie and Rosha and what he’s going to do, especially since he can’t contact Rosha. Luckily, she shows up at his house, and he lets her in. He points out her address was bogus and her phone doesn’t work, and she quickly comes up with some excuses why and then gets mad that he would even question her. As they’re starting to calm down, Allie arrives, and Brady flips out. He tries to get Rosha to go out the back door, and on her way out she trips, plunging a letter opener into his side so badly he nearly passes out from the blood. Allie walks in and flips out, and the two girls get him to the hospital.

Brady wakes up in the Shadyside Hospital, not really awake and only seeing blurry shapes. He’s visited by the scarred girl, who tells him she’s trying to help, warning him that Rosha tried to kill him, and when she almost reveals Rosha’s true identity, she’s shuffled out by hospital staff. Luckily, Brady is taken back home quickly, and Allie’s his first visitor. She says that Rosha told her everything about their dates, and yells at him for lying, and tells him goodbye. Brady’s having a pretty bad day, and it gets worse when Jon calls him, saying he talked to the scarred girl, and she told him the truth about Rosha, and can he please come over, and he almost tells him who Rosha really is, and Brady interrupts him like a dumb potato because his call-waiting is ringing. When he gets back over to Jon’s line, it’s dead. Brady thinks Jon sounded really serious, and he goes to his house, only to find police there and Jon with his windpipe broken, which leads to a very strange timeline. Presumably, Jon wasn’t attacked until Brady interrupted their call, and then Brady got in his car immediately and drove six blocks to his friend’s house. Chocking someone isn’t that easy, even with the help of a marble candlestick. That’s definitely not enough time for anyone to call the police or even notice something is wrong, and not enough time to clean a scene of evidence. I doubt Rosha made it down the block by the time the police arrived.

Brady is still being a dumb potato and wonders if the scarred girl killed Jon, not that it really matters, because Rosha is literally the only thing he cares about. I assume some supernatural thing is going on to make him obsessed, but it’s never really addressed. Anyway, Rosha left him a message on his answering machine telling him to go to Miller Hill and meet her. Brady, having just seen his best friend’s body after being murdered, who was desperately trying to tell him Rosha was bad news, his parents not even home yet, is very excited to get this phone call. To be fair, he phrases it in that he’s going to ask her questions about the scarred girl, but he still races up the hill to see her.

He meets Rosha at the top of the hill, and she asks him if he remembers the last time they were here together. Brady’s confused, but she reminds him that he killed her. She’s not Rosha at all! Rosha Nelson is an anagram for Sharon Noles! She tells him she borrowed a body, because it was the only way her plan would work, and then she starts to choke him to death. But the scarred girl shouts at Sharon to stop and demands her body back. The two girls argue, and then the girl launches at Sharon. They fight in an almost comical way. At first it’s regular catfight pulling hair kicking and all that, Brady sunk into the ground, too close to death to do anything, and then the girl grabs Sharon’s arm and tears it clean off! And then Sharon tears off her leg! They’re throwing limbs in the air, and they both grab each other’s necks, and both their heads are ripped clean off, sending their bodies tumbling down the hill. And then they vanish? So that solves that problem.

In the epilogue, Brady trudges back to his house a full day later, the text tells me. He walks to Allie’s, ignoring people calling his name, or kids throwing snowballs, or any of the obstacles. He’s freezing. He needs to get warm. He finds her shoveling snow from the driveway, and he apologizes for being a jerk. He begs her to take him back, and she agrees, until he puts his hands to her face. He’s freezing, and he tells her the truth. He’s dead now, Allie. Rosha killed him. He’s so cold and so dead, and won’t she please take him back? And then it ends as Allie screams. So I don’t know if he stole her body, or if he plans to be her zombie boyfriend, or what actually happened. At no point is the bodyswapping or dead-to-life thing ever explained, it just is to make the plot work. The end!

Favorite Line

He staggered toward her. “Okay, Allie? Take me back even though I’m dead. Okay? Okay?”

Fear Street Trends

It’s winter time in this book, but these girls know how to look good! Rosha wears some skintight black leggings and tight jeans, and lots of pants disappearing into boots. Allie dresses a little more casual, and in the last scene she’s wearing blue snowboots and a fisherman’s jacket. The boys refer to Rosha as a “Major Babe”, and I’ve never seen that with the capitalization. Is it supposed to be a title, or is she a babe in the key of major? Linguists can inform me. Brady refers to the girls’ “bods”, which is everything we need to know about Brady. The movie they go see in Waynesbridge is a Brad Pitt movie, but it’s a horror film? I think he’s done some thrillers, but I can’t off the top of my head think of what that might be. And, of course, Brady uses a phone book to try to track down Rosha’s address, which paints such a clear divide between cell phone age and before.

Rating

The twist of this book I saw coming from a distance, and I think it could’ve been interesting, but there’s just no reason for it. It’s never explained how Sharon came back from the dead, or why Brady did as well, and the deaths are treated so lightly it can be jarring. It felt like ten other Fear Street books and doesn’t do anything special. I’ll give it two peeled off faces out of five.

Fear Street #28 – Truth or Dare

The Cover

This cover (pulled from this Fear Street blog) isn’t strictly speaking bad. Trapped on a ski lift isn’t a bad horror idea, and the girls look scared by… something. But thanks to the ski lift, they’re just sort of hanging around in the middle of nowhere, and their poses don’t look natural at all. The bright orange jacket and headband isn’t doing anything for me. Maybe a good pose was already taken up by The Overnight and Ski Weekend, which I think might be more sinister for a game of truth or dare.

Tagline

It started as a game… and ended in death.

Not bad. It’s not much, but it’s relevant without giving away the plot. I’m forgiving this week.

Summary

Four teens are being carried up a mountain by a white stretch limo, which seems like a bad choice for mountain driving, but I guess the lack of cars will be relevant later. Inside that car is Ken and Jenny, lovebirds and joined at the hip, April, our protagonist, and Josh, the boy nobody knows, very quiet, Definitely Not a Murderer. April and Josh have that sort of “he makes me uncomfortable and I don’t know why but I keep staring into his dark eyes” sort of vibe that previous Fear Street books would tell me means they get together, but there’s little romance in this book besides some background characters. They’re meeting their friend Dara at her cabin for some skiing, since she’s taking up her parents’ jeep. April lets us know that Jenny is the most beautiful girl at school in detail, and for some reason she clings to Ken. April’s jealous. Of her having a boyfriend. Sure, April, sure.

April tries to make polite conversation with Josh, who really isn’t having it. He wonders why Dara didn’t ride with them, and when they arrive at the cabin, which is really more of a private ski lodge, he talks about having been there before. Dara arrives behind them in the jeep and rushes out, talking fast and constantly. Josh tries to chat with her, but she blows him off pretty quickly. She leads them inside the house, and they quickly discover they’re not alone! They find Tony, who’s dad is a friend of Dara’s dad, making out with a girl name Carly Rae in the dark. It turns out their families share the lodge, and Tony starts telling her he was pretty certain he was supposed to have it this weekend, which is clearly a lie, and now that they’re all here they’ll just have to share. He says that last part after getting weirdly threatening. The Shadyside way.

They settle in as it starts snowing to the delight of everyone. A fire is started in the living room, and they gather around to discuss skiing tomorrow. Ken suggests to break the ice, they play a little bit of (dun dun dun) Truth or Dare. Josh reveals himself to being an alien by not knowing what that is, and the book for real gives an explanation, which Josh does not seem to get. The kids get to the good stuff right away, asking about embarrassing stuff and sexy stuff. After April goes, she asks Dara who the worst boy is she ever kissed. Dara looks at Josh and starts hmming and hawing in an attempt to tease him. He grabs a poker out of the fireplace and shouts at her to stop and then storms out of the room, but Dara convinces him to come back, apologizing. As they settle back in, Dara asks April another question: What’s a secret you wish you didn’t know about someone? April answers immediately: That girl on Sumner Island.

Jenny asks her what she means by that, and April looks to Ken to see if he knows it’s his secret she’s sharing. Before anymore details can be said, Tony sneaks up beside her to scare her. He tells them enough questions. He wants a dare. Dara tells everyone to grab their coats, and she forces them outside, pointing up at the roof of the lodge. Tony lost a Frisbee up there, and she demands he get it back. It’s starting to snow hard, the wind is rising, the roof is slick. It doesn’t take much for him to get up there, but when he grabs the Frisbee, he starts to fall. He manages to catch the gutter and, after hanging there for a moment, drops, totally fine.

The group heads back inside, but April’s worried that she’s played her hand about Sumner Island. She was working as a nanny that summer when she saw Ken on the beach with a girl that wasn’t Jenny. Every time she saw him, he was with that girl, and again, the thing April remembers most about her is the tiny blue bikini she wore. When they get in, April immediately absconds to bed, getting up only when she hears some noises. Going downstairs, she sees Dara stepping outside. Dara tells her that she’s grabbing firewood, and on the stairs back to her bedroom, April runs into Tony. Everyone heads off to bed for the night.

In the morning, it’s a full on blizzard, and the ski lifts have stopped because of high winds. Jenny makes everyone breakfast while they listen to the radio, and April notices neither Dara nor Josh come downstairs with them, despite Dara being an early riser. When she still hasn’t come down after everyone eats, Jenny and April go upstairs to check on her, only to find her room untouched. Her things are still unpacked, her bed still made. She never slept here at all. Josh’s bed is likewise untouched, and his bag left there. April goes downstairs and sees no firewood was brought in last night. They tell the others, and when they look outside, they see the Jeep is missing too.

Tony is thoroughly unconcerned and mentions Dara and Josh used to go together, so they probably snuck out together. The others seem to agree, but April suggests calling the police, and Tony tells her no. He and Carly Rae would get in a lot of trouble for spending the weekend up here. He’s convinced Dara’s fine, and if she did go for a drive, she knows every road around here. They’ll wait another hour or two to see if she calls, then start to worry. April’s tense in the house and jumps at every noise. In the afternoon, they hear a weird knocking at the door, and every time they check, there’s no one there. Ken and April go outside to investigate and find a locker door that’s swinging in the wind, and when they try to close it, something falls out. Dara’s frozen body. An axe buried in her parka. In her back.

Now is the time to call the police, but when Tony tries, the line is dead. They’re a couple of miles to town, and with the blizzard outside, they’re sure to get lost or frozen or die before they get there. April, at first, is convinced whoever murdered Dara also murdered Josh, ignoring the obvious clue that he is also missing and so is the car, but it doesn’t take much for people to start accusing him. They go to investigate his things, and April looks at Dara’s room again, finding a note from Josh, telling her to meet him outside at midnight. Tony declares there might be a gun in the house, and they start wondering how helpful that is, but he points out that if Josh realizes he left evidence behind, he might return. And they may need to defend themselves.

At night, April tries to sleep, and she hears something outside. She walks out and is grabbed, only for it to be Tony, who says he thought he heard something too. April asks if he and Dara used to go out, and he gets a little uncomfortable and says yeah, but it didn’t really mean anything. They walk back in and talk a little longer, when they hear something at the door. They see Josh, half-frozen, slowly pounding against the glass. April’s scream gets everyone downstairs, and they let him in. Carly immediately makes him something hot to drink while the others shout at him to explain. Josh can barely put together a sentence and doesn’t know what they’re asking him, and they tell him Dara’s dead. He protests when they accuse him, but April shows him the letter. He insists he didn’t write it, and Jenny screams at him to stop lying, while Tony takes the letter back, telling him it’s evidence.

Josh tells them after Truth or Dare he really did lose it, and he really did want to kill Dara, but he definitely didn’t. He stole the keys and took the Jeep in an attempt to strand her at the lodge, but he got caught in the blizzard and went into a snowdrift. He nearly froze to death in the car waiting for someone to rescue him, so he got out and walked back. He didn’t know Dara was dead. And if he’s telling the truth, that means there’s still a murderer here.

In the morning, April doesn’t want to face anyone. On her way down, she runs into Ken, who tries to talk to her about the girl on Sumner Island, but she runs away. She goes back to her room and finds Josh going through her things. He tells her he’s looking for the pen that wrote the letter. It was written in red ink, and if he can find the pen in someone else’s things, it means he didn’t write it. This is the last straw for April, who just wants out. She runs downstairs to grab her coat but finds it missing. Everyone had thrown their things in a pile, and she remembered they were all wearing each other’s coats. And with horror she remembers the last time she saw it. She goes outside, finds Dara’s body, and that confirms it. Dara was wearing her parka, meaning the killer was after her.

April fucking books it. She’d rather take her chances in the snowstorm. As she descends the slope, she realizes she stole Ken’s coat, and when she puts her hands in the pocket, she finds a red pen. Ken tried to kill her to keep his secret. As she makes it to the bottom of the hill, she sees someone chasing her, and realizes it’s Ken. He tackles her into the snow and tells her they have to go back. It’s too cold. They’ll freeze. He asks her again about the game, and she blurts out that she saw him with another girl. He asks if she ever told Jenny, and she promises that she didn’t. As soon as they get inside, she runs from him and finds Jenny and Carly in the kitchen. I haven’t devoted much time to Carly, but she’s the best character in this whole book. She only exists as a voice in the background, and she gets this amazing exchange as April tries to warn Jenny about the murderer:

“We can’t stay here,” I told her, pulling her hand away. “We’re not asfe here. We’ve got to get away from here. I have to tell you about Ken, Jenny. He–“

Carly poked her head into the kitchen. “Secrets?” she asked.

“Yes. Secrets,” Jenny replied quickly. “Deep, dark secrets.”

“Hope you’re not talking about me,” Carly replied dryly. She took a can of Coke from the refrigerator, then returned to the living room.

She’s amazing. But she’s about to be ditched. April convinces Jenny to ski down the slope with her to get to the police. They put on more layers of warm clothes, take their skis, and start down. They see the ski lift has started again, and they find another human person, who tells them to take the ski lift to the ski patrol station. They get on, and about a third of the way up, Jenny turns to April, and tells her sorry right before she pushes her off. April struggles against her and asks why, and Jenny screams that she knows about the girl on Sumner Island, the girl she killed! Jenny stops killing her to ask how she knew, and then monologues everything. That Ken was seeing some girl on Sumner Island, that he swore he stopped after the summer, but she knew he kept going back. Jenny tracked her down, and when confronted with her, went crazy. They fought. The girl died. Jenny ran. She thought no one ever knew. When April revealed that she knew in the Truth or Dare game, she went to murder her, not realizing it was Dara. She asks April how she knew, and April says she didn’t.

Jenny gives her one more shove that throws her from the ski lift, but thankfully they’re at the top of the mountain. She jumps out to murder April with her ski pole, but then Ken shows up! He grabs Jenny and holds her until the ski patrolmen come. He tells April, next time, choose Dare, and she says, next time, we’ll play Trivial Pursuit. Freeze frame, laugh track, cut to black.

Favorite Line

…I tried reading. But I had brought only a scary thriller to read. And I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a thriller!

Fear Street Trends

The kids mostly wear coats and parkas, so there’s not a ton of fashion, but there’s a ton of beautiful young ladies described. Jenny (and the girl on Sumner Island) are described as dark haired and perfect. April notices Josh has a lightning bolt earring in one ear, so you know he’s dangerous. Dara’s hair is crimped, and mention is made of her having a nose job to show off how rich she is. Jenny also uses the car phone in the limo to call Corky Corcoran and brag, and you think poor Corky has enough friends that are murderers. On top of the weird definition for Truth or Dare, a game so simple the title describes the rules, Ken gives a definition of a snowglobe, in case the viewer is also unfamiliar with those. I suppose if Stine is used to writing for a younger audience, he feels the need to include those, but it’s like, yeah, Ken, everyone ever has seen one of those.

Rating

I’m not sure about this one. It isn’t my favorite, but it’s actually fairly solid. There’s a ton of red herrings that actually work fairly well, and I was rooting for Tony as the murderer for most of it. The plot twist of what the actual “truth” is turns pretty well. Still, the writing’s much weaker for this one, and feels like he may have written this right after finishing a middle grade book or something. I’ll give it three hatchets in the back out of five.

I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be putting up in two weeks, since it will be Christmas Eve. I have a present I’ve been working on for y’all, but I don’t think it’ll finish in time. I’d like to finish another book, but we’ll see how much time I have in the ensuing weeks. If you’ve got some free time this holiday season, I recommend checking out my writing blog, which’ll finish up part two of my 1950s monster mash soon. In the meanwhile, I’ll be planning out the next few books to read. Always feel free to drop recommendations to me. And, if you’re in the Houston area, you should check out my LGBT pop up library, which will pop up for the first time in January.

Fear Street #50 – Best Friend 2

The Cover

The cover (pulled from Amazon) is nothing. The only thing I like about it is that Fear Street has a logo on top, but that logo leaves no room for anything else.

Tagline

There isn’t a tagline, just a reminder that this book was written after they held a contest. Fans submitted what they thought should happen to Honey. I wonder how much of this book came from Sarah Bikman, or if she had the initial idea. The initial idea’s fantastic and I wish it’d carried through more of the book, but what’s a Fear Street book without at least three plot twists.

Summary

This book is separated into parts as well, though these parts actually seem helpful to the overall narrative. It’s all done in first person. I cannot remember if the original book was in first person or not, but it’s the only way this book would work. Becka’s now going to Waynesbridge, the town over from Shadyside. She’s nervous about her past following her, and nervous about not fitting in. She calls herself “full-figured” and not cute, but she’s starting to feel good about herself again.

Becka has to check in with a counselor first. It’s not the only counselor she’s seen in the past year since Honey ruined her life, but hopefully it’ll be the last. Miss Englund pulls no punches and immediately asks her about Honey. Becka proceeds to recap the previous book, feeling extreme guilt over Bill’s murder. She sees him everywhere, and makes a fool of herself throwing her arms around some rando. He’s nice about it at least and walks her to her next class. Here she’s thrown into a class with a teacher who lectures and never stops. A pretty redhead girl takes pity on Becka and tells her to write down everything he says, introducing herself under the unfortunate name Glynis. They don’t really get to talk during class, since their teacher drones on, and Becka distractedly writes down whatever she can, only to realize she’d written BILL BILL BILL across the page. This’ll happen a lot, so I’m only going to make this joke once.

The good news is, Glynis seems to want to be her friend. They chat a while about Becka’s old school until Frankie rolls up. He’s clearly Glynis’ boyfriend, but Becka can’t keep her eyes off him, and he can’t seem to do the same. He’s the one who invites her out to pizza with the two of them. As they eat, Becka sees someone she recognizes and runs to embrace Eric. You remember Eric, right? He was in the first chapter of the Best Friend only to be dumped? No? I didn’t either. He’s a little standoffish with Becka, clearly trying to get out of the conversation, but she follows him to his car anyway, grabbing him as they get in and making out with him hardcore, though she’s really thinking about Frankie. When Becka gets home, she’s excited, relieved, and bubbling with hope. She looks at herself in the mirror. Her hairs only a few shades darker than Glynis, and about the same length. If she straightened it, stopped chewing her fingernails, bought a matching nail color, she’d look just like her…

Becka gets a phone call and hears Frankie’s voice on the other end. He wishes that Glynis would go away so they could be together, and Becka realizes she’s imagining this. She’s acting like Honey. She remembers the party, when Honey showed up in a matching outfit after cutting her hair, right before she pushed Trish down the stairs. The moment of revelation goes away as she paints on the same nail polish that Glynis wears, only to realize the words BILL BILL BILL have been scrawled over her face in that very nail polish.

Becka spends more time with Glynis. She ends up trying on all her clothes and then tucks a handful of them away to borrow. Glynis takes her shopping and asks about the clothes, but Becka plays it off, saying she had a date and wanted to try them. They go to the Shadyside mall (a bad idea, Becka), and go into one of the shops where Eric happens to be working. Glynis and Frankie talk to him too before absconding to the food court, and Eric asks the question we’ve all been thinking: Why are they calling you Becka? Because it’s not Becka at all. Surprising no one, it’s been Honey the whole time. Honey loses her absolute shit, made worse when Eric points out the real Becka is standing the same store next to her. She grabs a necklace of glass beads and starts choking Eric. No one seems to do anything about this. It’s not a quick and easy process to choke someone to death, especially with a department store necklace, but Eric goes down, and Becka screams that Honey killed him. Honey pulls the usual “no you!” on Becka, but it’s clear it’s not working.

Smash cut to part two, now narrated by the actual Becka, who has remained in Shadyside, is still best friends with Trish and Lilah. They’re attending poor Eric’s funeral, whose only crime was to make out with a girl he had to know attempted murder in the last year. They discuss how Honey forged her way into Waynesbridge with fake documents, and now she’s disappeared. No one knows where she was living or where she would go. As they walk home, Becka’s two friends try to console her, and they both point out she’s been distant and refuses to talk about anything. They’re interrupted by BILL running up the street! He’s not dead at all! He survived his stabbing last year, though he and Becka are donesville. It seems like he’s gotten very close with Trish, which will be a plot point later. He tries to talk to her, clearly wanting to get back together, even though she has a boyfriend now, and Becka brushes him off. She tells him she can’t.

The girls keep walking, and Trish speaks up. She tells them that Bill visited her in the hospital every day, that he was a good friend to her, and that Becka didn’t do any of those things. Becka tells her she was so messed up after everything that she couldn’t look at the people that were hurt because of her. She feels so much guilt over everything that happened. It’s why she can’t look at Bill anymore. But she promises to be a better friend.

Becka works at the Hacker’s Cafe (delightful) and her boyfriend Larry comes by to chat. She’s too busy to sit with him, and she has to do her job, but she tells him she’ll call later. As she leaves work, someone comes up behind her at her car, and she flips out, only to see Bill. He tells her he stills cares about her and bla bla bla. Knife victim, guilty conscious, boy that won’t take no for an answer. Becka’s rescued when Larry runs up. Larry seems to be one of those rare good boyfriends you can occasionally find in Shadyside. As he helps Becka into her car, she starts screaming, because someone’s taking a knife to the interior and tossed in a dead rat for good measure.

In a rare turn of events, Becka’s seeing a therapist and taking her meds. They aren’t doing their job of calming her down though, and she decides to investigate the house next door. Honey’s dad still lives there, and she wonders if there’s a chance he’s hiding her. But she’s interrupted by Lilah, who wants to show her something. They have a loud conversation outside the window, and that ends exactly as you’d expect it, with Honey’s dad looking outside. As soon as he recognizes Becka, he starts shouting at her, asking her where Honey is. The two girls run away.

Lilah tells Becka what she wanted to show her was a news article she found. It tells the story of Hannah Paulsen watching her father murder her mother and her brother before turning the gun on himself. Becka’s horrified, but Lila tells her they knew Hannah Paulsen. She was a total loser who followed them around in the fourth grade. They tricked her into embarrassing herself in front of the whole school, and soon after that she disappeared completely. And now she’s back. Hannah is Honey. Her “dad” isn’t her father at all, but her uncle.

Becka gets a few more threatening phone calls, because why not, and Trish tells her she’s hurting Bill more than getting stabbed ever did. She goes to her counselor and tells him about some of the stuff she’s learned. He asks if she’s gone to the police with any of this, and she admits no. He does the first responsible thing I’ve seen an adult do in these books, and tells her she has to tell the police about the phone calls, since they can probably track them. No stalling. Go there right away. She leaves, only to be attacked by Honey five feet from the door. As she wails on her, Becka tries to reason, calling her Hannah and saying she knows the whole story now, but Honey screams that she’s not Hannah and she’s not Honey because she’s Becka now! She continues to beat down on her, until all Becka sees is black.

But Becka wakes up again and realizes Honey must’ve stopped because she thought she was dead. She drives herself home instead of going inside the building full of adults, but her parents make her go to the hospital, and the police are called. Someone really should involve them at some point. Despite being beaten in the street, she still goes on her date with Larry, who’s pretty standoffish. Becka screams when someone accidentally pokes her with their umbrella, and at dinner flips out when she sees a waitress carrying a steak knife. Larry, to his credit, doesn’t want to leave her alone and offers to stay at home with her until her parents get in, but she tells him to leave. Listen, kids, neither of you are prepared for this kind of relationship. Don’t blame yourself if it doesn’t work out.

Becka refuses to turn on any lights when she gets home, which is stupid. She makes her way up to her room only to find her bed is full of blood and guts and someone’s etched THIS IS U into the wall. No one has Becka leave the house, or be put into protective custody, or her parents don’t consider moving for a while. Her friends offer to let her stay, but Becka says no. As she hangs around the house, she gets another a phone call, this one telling her that her best friend is coming tonight. Becka flips out when she hears someone at her door, but it’s only Bill. She screams at him what’s happening, and he tells her to get in his car, that he’ll take her to his uncle’s murder cabin in Fear Street Woods. The phone rings again, and Becka answers it in case it’s her parents. It’s Lilah, who tries to tell her something, but she hangs up on her.

They get to the murder cabin, and Bill goes to get some firewood. Becka takes advantage of the phone. She calls Lilah, who tells her that Honey’s been arrested. They caught her two days ago. It was upstate, and Honey was giving different names, so local police only just figured it out. Becka realizes this means that Honey couldn’t have messed up her room and couldn’t have called her. As she realizes this, Bill comes in, telling her to put the phone down. He lunges at her when she tries to call 911 and rips it off the wall. She asks him why he did it, sneaking into her room and calling her, and he says it wasn’t him. Then Trish walks in. Yup! You guessed it! Trish was the best friend the whole time! Trish tells her that when she was in the hospital, Becka never visited her, only Bill was so sweet, and she’d hurt him too, and she was being so selfish getting over the trauma of being gaslit and hunted and thought to have murdered her own boyfriend. She then pulls out a knife, and Bill says they were only going to scare her, not actually hurt her. Trish brings the knife down, and Bill tries to stop her, only to get stabbed once more in the abdomen. As Trish screams this is all Becka’s fault, Becka goes for the knife. The two girls wrestle, but Becka manages to cut her neck as sirens wail in the distance. Becka drops down beside Bill, holding him, and tells him she’ll be at true friend this time.

Favorite Line

I am my own best friend! I told myself. I have to be strong. I have to be my own best friend now.

Fear Street Trends

At least two girls are described as “like a model”, and Glynis is described as resembling Claire Danes (which is actually a pretty good pull). Larry is described as looking like Bugs Bunny (less good). Glynis paints her nails a chocolate brown and calls it “the flavor of the week”, sparking a conversation where Honey as Becka talks about licorice nail polish. Her “very slim and trim” look is a yellow vest over a white t-shirt and a short green skirt over brown tights. That’s so many layers! Were we doing that many layers back then! No wonder we wore basically nothing in the 2000s. I may also have to give you the full description for the Hackers Cafe:

It’s actually just a coffeehouse. But Mr. Arnold, the owner, put computers at the counter so that customers could surf the internet and send e-mail while they drink their coffee and eat their muffins and pastries. The cafe became really popular, especially with kids from Shadyside High and young adults who work in the neighborhood.

Love it, love it, love it.

Rating

I don’t know how to feel about this one. The twists were obvious from a mile away, but they were interesting at least, and the eponymous best friend switching from Honey to Trish isn’t bad. Still, no one’s motives make much sense, and Honey’s barely in it. I’ll give it three murder cabins out of five.

Fear Street #43 – All-Night Party

I’m still playing a bit of catch up right now, but hopefully I’ll be back on track after this week. If you’re looking for something to read between books, my writing blog is updating with short stories about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and monsters. The first is already up, and the second will go up tomorrow! I’m trying to get back on a regular schedule with this, so bear with me while I finish sorting everything out.

The Cover

So I found three covers for this book. The first (found at this Goosebumps fan site) is pretty good. There’s a danger element to boys and the girl looks suitably nervous. The girl peeking over the shoulder of her date to watch also adds a creepy element. I think the colors are pretty passive, though I do actually like her blue dress, and maybe something bolder could’ve been added, but this is nice.

The two revamp ones (found through Random Blogger and Amazon) are not good. There’s no danger to them. The silhouettes look bad. The colors are bad. They don’t have any danger element to them at all, and it feels very generic.

Tagline

Party till you drop… dead.

Not bad, not bad. Very generic but it gets across a danger that I appreciate.

Everyone is dying to be invited.

Also not bad. Kind of nothing, but it works for what it needs to do.

An exclusive invitation… to die.

Bad. Bad bad bad. It’s the worst of the three.

Summary

We’re introduced to Gretchen as she and her friends are on their way to Cindy’s house to surprise her for her birthday. More specifically, they’ve decided to Jawbreaker style kidnap her, take her to Fear Island, and have an all night party. Gretchen is new to Shadyside, having only lived  here six months, but she fits right in with this bad plan. Hannah says it’s “just what Cindy deserves”, which probably hints at the larger problems in the group. Cindy is blond, beautiful, and always gets what she wants. She’s also described as a huge tease a large number of times, which isn’t completely inaccurate.

They march into Cindy’s house and storm into her bedroom. Gretchen and Hannah blindfold her, and then Patrick pulls out a fucking gun and puts it to her head. Everyone reasonably flips out, and Gretchen asks why he even brought it. Patrick tells them that his dad, a police officer, told him a convict escaped and is hiding on Fear Island. He was put away for killing three girls, and his dad gave him the gun for protection. It’s not loaded at the moment (at least he practices gun safety?? kind of????). They agree to go out anyway, assuming anyone escaping probably wouldn’t stay in one place too long.

They row out to the island, and the teen drama starts coming to the surface. Hannah comes with her boyfriend Gil, who is also the ex-boyfriend of Cindy, who still flirts with him a lot. They broke up because her parents told her too, and it’s obvious the two are still into each other. Hannah’s very annoyed by this. Also with them is Jackson, who stares at Gretchen a lot and is kind of a creepy dude. He says a lot of weird stuff and otherwise does not talk at all. Cindy asks Gretchen where her boyfriend Marco is, and Gretchen admits she’s been looking for a way to break up with him. He’s a dangerous dude with one earring and a motorcycle. Typical Shadyside guy. Gretchen didn’t invite him, but he shows up anyway, letting her know he found out through her mom. At least these kids were responsible and told their parents where they would be.

The party is kind of lame with only eight people in attendance. There’s some cattiness between Hannah and Cindy as they argue over who knows Gil better. Gretchen tries to get as far from Marco as possible, but it’s not really a good scenario with nowhere else to go. Hannah storms into the kitchen, and Gretchen follows. Hannah tells her that Cindy got a scholarship she’d applied for, even though Cindy’s parents could pay for her college and Hannah needs it. Hannah says loudly that she wishes Gretchen was dead. They go back into the room and open presents, which Cindy kind of tosses aside. She tells everyone thanks but seems really unenthusiastic and doesn’t really care. They put on some music and dance, but Gretchen really wants to get away from Marco, and she makes an excuse to go outside.

Hannah and Gil go with her to find a private spot to neck, and they disappear. Patrick stays inside, as does Cindy, and so does Marco presumably. Jackson continues to watch Gretchen, who heads to the shed beside the cabin. Inside the shed, she can hear voices in the kitchen. Voices that sound like Cindy and Jackson. She hears a sharp slap and then silence, but decides it’s none of her business. As she walks around outside, she hears someone behind her, and it’s Marco again. Gretchen tells him point blank she didn’t invite him because she didn’t want to go out with him anymore. He takes this well by pulling out a switchblade and hacking up the tree beside her. They walk back to the cabin together in probably the most awkward silence there ever was, and it’s empty. Gretchen goes into the kitchen where she sees the mess from their cake making earlier, flour all over the floor, and something red spilling everywhere. It’s Cindy. Dead.

Gretchen staggers out of the kitchen feeling sick. Marco runs over to her, and she tells him what she saw. She tries to run outside and runs straight into Patrick, whose shirt is covered in blood. He tells her he cut his hand on the upstairs window. Everyone else is coming in to as Patrick surmises that it’s he escaped prisoner that must’ve killed Cindy. Gretchen says they have to go to the police, and he insists no. There aren’t any phones in the cabin. There aren’t any phones on the whole island. They’re trapped. Until dawn. (dun dun dun)

It doesn’t take long for the panicking to set in. They decide to stay in the cabin and wait until their parents notice they’re missing, but someone points out the murderer could still be in the cabin. They decide to search the cabin. Gretchen thinks she sees someone outside only to run into Jackson, who tells her he’s worried. She thinks about the argument she heard and considers asking him, but he walks away. As they come back together, they consider the possibility that their friend Patrick is covered in blood and insists they shouldn’t go to the police and also has a gun with him. Gretchen looks at Hannah, who’s sobbing, and remembers her saying she wants Cindy dead. And then Gretchen tells everyone about the argument.

This is a good set up, and should devolve into them screaming and stabbing each other. Gil screams at Hannah that he was going to break up with her anyway to get back with Cindy, Hannah is a mess convinced the killer is going to come back for them, and Jackson tries to keep them together and insists they look at the body one more time. Now Gretchen has time to actually look at it, and they all notice something. A red baseball cap in her hands. It’s Patrick’s. They argue over whether he was wearing it or not, if Cindy put it on herself, if anyone else did, and Patrick says if he did kill Cindy he wouldn’t shot her instead of using a bread knife, which causes everyone to point a finger at him, because how did he know? Patrick points out that it’s missing from the knife holder. But there are footsteps in the flour, and Gretchen goes to get everyone’s boots and see which have flour on them. Guess who does?

They tie up Patrick, and then they go through his things. And they find everything! A note from Cindy saying she isn’t going to keep his secret, a bread knife wrapped up and stuffed into his sleeping bag, along with all of the other evidence. They bring it all to him and ask him to explain, and he tells them he’s being set up. He tells them if he did kill Cindy, he would’ve hidden the evidence instead of leaving it lying around. They discover that the note is forged. As they decide maybe Patrick isn’t the murderer, they notice that Hannah is missing. She ran off, leaving a note, which makes Gretchen suspicious that she may have done a murder. She goes outside to look for her, and Jackson follows, telling her he needs to confess something. It turns out the reason he’s a big creep is because he has a big ol’ crush on her. His choosing this moment to tell her reinforces that he’s kind of a big creep. But Gretchen seems sort of into it? She admits to him that she and Marco broke up, and after the conversation decides she feels safe with him. Sure. That’s how that works.

They hear Hannah screaming and find the other boys pulling her back inside the cabin. Gil tells them that he and Hannah separated for a bit while they were walking in the woods, meaning she could’ve gone back to kill Cindy, meaning Gil also doesn’t have an alibi. Gretchen finds a note in her pocket, and she realizes immediately who the killer is. The handwriting of the note matches the handwriting of the forged letter. It’s Patrick. He’s still the killer! Patrick framed himself, which is kind of silly because he’s also the one who had to convince his friends he was being framed. He tells everyone Cindy was a tease and loved to flirt with him and then push him away. He tried to give her a kiss for her birthday, and she laughed at him, and it set him off. Patrick pulls his gun on them, just as two police officers make their way into the cabin. They immediately tackle him and take his gun.

The officers explain Patrick stole the gun from his dad, and he sent them to get it back. There’s no escaped prisoner at all, Patrick had just planned to pin the murder on a fake story, but also he framed himself? This guy had too many plans. Just stab someone Patrick, and worry about it later. The officers wonder if the secret Cindy found out was the fires he set back in Waynesbridge, and Hannah realizes she didn’t know about that. She just liked to tease. She also thinks she may have liked Patrick, which was why she teased in the first place. This is the lesson, kids. Don’t be a tease.

Favorite Line

“I wish I hadn’t taken the gun out when we were kidnapping Cindy!”

Fear Street Trends

So much denim! Gretchen wears denim, Patrick wears denim, Marco is described like a 1950s greaser with a white T and blue jeans, though he also has a silver hoop in his ear. No one is really described that much, and the fashions are pretty nil. They do pull out a portable CD player, and they listen to some “heavy rock-and-roll”.

Rating

This book felt like #2 in the series, not #43. It’s kind of phoned in. It does share a lot of similarities with the Overnight, and Party Games seems to borrow a lot from it. On one hand, I appreciated how short it felt, but I really feel like the ball was dropped here. This could’ve turned into a Battle Royale style suspicion and murder, with kids turning on each other and splitting up and trying not to get murdered while taking out the suspects, but it really feels like the whole events took place over like two hours. One suspicious baseball cap out of five.

Fear Street #20 – The New Boy

The Cover

The cover (pulled from its GoodReads page) is okay. It’s not sinister enough for me. There have been other covers that have done more with the interplay of sex and death, and this one just feels a little flat.

Tagline

He was a hunk of trouble…

God, I love this. This is what every Fear Street tagline should be. It’s punny, it’s indicative of the book without being spoilery, it’s so good.

Summary

Janie is hanging out in the hallway when she first gets a glimpse of the new boy. She sees him from a distance, and he’s brooding and dreamy. Her thoughts are interrupted by her two BFFs Faith and Eve. Faith is a rich girl, while Eve’s family struggles to make ends meet, much like her boyfriend Ian who’s working about five jobs to pay for his college. They all worked to plan the school dance and now have to count the money from it. Of course, her friends are more interested in gossiping than doing their job. Eve does a mean prank on Janie, making Janie think they lost the money, and Faith brushes her off for it. They all three see the new boy walking towards them, his arm bleeding, and when they rush forward he tells them he was helping someone with their bike and accidentally sliced his arm on the fence. He introduces himself as Ross Gabriel, and Faith and Eve help him go to the nurse’s office, leaving Janie behind, who pouts that she saw him first.

The girls return to help Janie, who lets them know she’s interested in Ross. The others tease her and discuss their own boyfriends. The boys themselves, Paul and Ian, show up and start goofing around with the girls, joking they’d steal the money and tossing stacks of bills at each other. Their interrupted by Mr. Hernandez, their principal, who at first threatens to suspend them, then lightens up and let’s them know he’s joking. They finish counting it to a little over twelve hundred dollars, and Janie goes to tell Mr. Hernandez the final count while the other two leave. She forgets the amount, returns to the drawer where the money is, and finds that it’s missing for real!

Janie goes over to Faith’s a few days later, still stressed out over the missing money, but relieve the girls aren’t suspects. She sees Paul at her house, and they all have kind of a tense conversation. After he leaves, Faith asks Janie if she’s going to ask Ross out, or if Faith herself will do it, dismissing Paul when Janie brings him up. They make a bet: ten dollars to the first girl who asks out Ross. They even call Eve, and she agrees to play the game.

Ross is Janie’s chemistry partner at school, and he plays it cool and funny when he’s with her. He lets her know his old school was way a head and he’s done this experiment before, and then he drops in some wrong ingredients, creating a stink bomb. He plays dumb in front of the teacher, saying he made a mistake, and the teacher takes the test tube out of the room. The other kids are grateful for his disrupting class and removing the teacher in one move. Ross says, “I like to mess people up.” It’s so strange, and even Janie’s like, what, but the bell rings. As they leave, she starts to ask him out, but he sees someone in the hallway and quickly bolts. It’s okay though, because Eve runs up to Janie and proclaims herself the winner of the bet.

On Friday night, Janie and Faith are talking about how jealous they are over the phone. Faith says she could call Ian right now and let him know Eve is on a date, but Janie tells her not to. Faith worries a little her parents might be divorcing, since they’re no longer in the same room at the same time anymore, and she’s extra annoyed that Paul asked her for three hundred dollars to fix his car, and she’s pretty sure he only goes out with her because she’s rich. Janie invites her over to watch a movie, but Faith tells her she just wants to stay in.

We cut to Eve in the car with Ross, and they’re making out. This is paints Eve in a pretty poor light, especially because later we learn Ross agreed to go out with her because she promised him half of the bet money, which makes it sound like she pretty much only did this to win ten dollars. We don’t really see her and Ian together at all, and so it’s unclear if she’s interested in fooling around, or if she’s lonely because Ian works so much. It doesn’t matter much, because she and Ross walk into the Fear Street woods, and she does not walk out again. Janie gets a call Saturday morning from Ian, who tells her Eve never got home last night.

Janie calls Eve’s mom, who lets her know Ross is missing too. Ian comes over to Janie’s, and he asks if they can drive around, since he’s too nervous to sit still. Ian kind of accuses Janie of knowing Eve went on a date last night, and Eve deflects. Ian slams on his breaks as they near Fear Street, claiming he saw a dog, and they both see something in the woods. Getting out, they find Eve’s body. The police arrive, and Ian’s clearly a wreck. Janie tells him they can go now, that the police are handling it, and he tells her he’s certain someone killed her over the money. At first she thinks he’s talking about the bet, but then he clarifies: Eve stole the dance money. He then demands to know who Eve went on a date with, and she tells him the truth, that it was all a stupid bet. He flips out and tells her to get out of the car, and she’s afraid he’s going to do something stupid, so she steals his keys and tosses them into the grass. The paramedics take Eve’s body away, and Janie worries that Ross is lying dead in these woods too.

Janie and Ian are called into the police station to answer more questions, and they see Ross being brought in by two officers. Janie’s excited to see him alive at first, and he told her Saturday morning he went with his parents back to his old town bright and early, meaning he didn’t even know what happened until they got back and the police were waiting for him. He lets her know he dropped Eve off at home and watched her go up to her door. She was safe, as far as he knew. He asks if she believes him, and she hesitates. Ian makes it clear he doesn’t.

Janie meets up with Faith, and they’re both miserable. They agree not to tell anyone that Eve stole the money, a bad idea, and they’re interrupted by Ross. He sits beside Janie, and Faith gets openly hostile, something he picks up on. He wants to know if she’s thinking he’ll kill her too, which sounds like a threat, and he starts screaming at her, again, not a good look. Faith runs away as she sees Paul and Ian, but Janie hangs behind. She tells Ross she does believe him, and this is where he admits he only went out with Eve because of the bet money. He mentions something that went down in his old town, and Janie asks about it, but he brushes her off.

Her friends are still suspicious of Ross, but Janie isn’t so sure on them. Paul mentions he found the money to pay for his car, and she starts to wonder if Faith gave it to him, or if he got it on his own. Ross comes over to her house to work on French homework, driving her to a restaurant, where his car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, which gives Janie a lot of anxiety. He lives on Fear Street too, and he runs inside his house to grab his wallet. This is all set up for after he drops her off back home, and she has to return his text book. She arrives at his house, and an old woman answers the door, telling her no one named Ross lives there. She’s worried she’s falling for a murderer, and her friends are disdainful of the relationship. Faith mentions she overheard some rumors about Ross from his old school but refuses to elaborate. The rumors at their school circulate that Ross was arrested for the murder, but they see him in the cafeteria, where he kind of flips out that everyone is accusing him. Janie asks him about the old woman, he tells her his grandmother is senile. She forgets things, including her grandchildren, and sometimes her own son. He also says Ian told the police about the stolen money, surprising Janie, but the money wasn’t found at Eve’s. He then starts to hand her a scarf, which Janie thinks is Eve’s, and she flips out and runs away.

Janie runs to the parking lot only to see Faith and Paul having a huge fight. She decides not to tell them that Ross has Eve’s scarf, since they’re in the middle of something. After school, she goes to the mall to see Ian, and he talks about his many, many jobs. When she gets home, Faith is calling her, and she tells her she has something really important to tell her about Ross. Suddenly she gets another call, and she goes quiet for about a minute, then returns, asking Janie to come to her house. Janie asks why she can’t just tell her over the phone, but Faith insists. When Janie gets to Faith’s house, the door is ajar, and she smells something burning. She runs into the den to find Faith on the ground, struck by a poker. She calls 911 and thinks she hears someone in the house. The operator tells her to leave calmly, but Janie’s so disoriented that she locks herself in the den. Then someone comes up behind her, and it’s Ian! He tells her that Faith was going to tell him something about Ross, and when he sees the body, he starts to freak out and blame him again.

A funeral is held. Ross is missing. Everyone is sad. Janie runs into the girl who scared Ross off before, and she spills everything. That at his old school, his name was Robert Kingston. He went out with a girl for a few months, and after they broke up, her body was found in the woods. He was questioned but not arrested. Robby hung around with some bad boys too, and his alibi was that he was in a stolen car. Now knowing this, she runs into Ross that night and is terrified to be near him. He’s getting unhinged, it seems, and demands she get in his car and talk to him. He then tries to give her scarf back to her, and Janie realizes it is hers, not Eve’s, and she flipped out over a misunderstanding. She refuses to go with him, but she says she’ll meet him at the pizza place at eight tonight, promising. That seems to satisfy him, and he drives off. Janie gets home and tries to call the police so they’ll know where Ross is, but a storm has knocked out the phone lines. Her parents are out late, and she’s getting anxious alone in her house, and around eight-thirty, Ross comes a-knocking.

Ross is clearly angry, but he tells her the truth. He didn’t kill that girl. He found her body, and the police took him in for that, but the rumor mill wouldn’t stop. He wasn’t even in town when Faith was killed, but the police are still picking him up to ask questions. He gets aggressive with her, and then a pair of headlights come up the driveway, chasing him off.

The kids at school get more aggressive, and Paul and his friend start to beat up Ross when they see him talking to Janie. Janie herself is skipping class and hiding out to avoid him. Ian finds her and tells her he has proof that Ross killed Faith. As usual, he says he can’t tell her here, and he drives her out to the woods. They park across the street from Ross’ house and go into the trees. He has with him a baseball bat, and once they’re far enough, he starts to threaten Janie. He tells her he knows Faith told her everything, that she’s a loose end, and Janie has no idea what he’s talking about. It turns out Eve stole the money for him, but when he heard about her date with Ross, he got jealous and angry. He killed her there with the bat in a fit of rage, and then drove her body to the woods, where he led Janie the next morning. Janie screams that Ross is right behind him now, and he tells her he’s not stupid, only for Ross to grab him and be rewarded with a hit of the bat. Janie flips out and attacks Ian, pinning him to the ground and pressing the bat to his throat to choke him. Ross gets up, holding Ian down, and tells Janie to run to his house and call the police. She agrees with a smile, happy that she’s no longer in love with a murderer.

Favorite Line

“I usually don’t put a move on a girl the first date.” He shrugged. His eyes locked on hers. “I usually wait until the second date!”

Fear Street Trends

We get to see Corky and Kimmy out of a Cheerleaders book, which is a delight! Deena Martinson breaks up with Gary Brandt, and Ricky is still the class clown. There aren’t a ton of fashions, but my favorite is Eve’s sexy red denim jeans she saves for hot dates, worn with a blue blazer borrowed from Janie. Blazers are such good date wear.

Rating

More than usual, this Fear Street book felt especially cookie cutter. Cute boy, dangerous love interest, murder, murder, plot twist, two characters who should no longer trust or like each other get together at the end. I’ll give it two stolen money bags out of five.

Fear Street #14 – The Knife

This one I’ve been putting off for a while for a few reasons, but my low bank account and a pile of Fear Street books donated to me by a friend meant this time around I went old school and read a real physical book (and ran out of sticky tabs doing it). Get ready for some hospital horror…

The Cover

The cover (taken from a Buzzfeed article, bleh) is alright. There are things I like about it. I like the element of “something hidden going on at the hospital”, or the sweet innocent girl chatting with what should be a normal man, but the colors are just too bright and pastel. I think there’s a more dynamic way of having this image without it just being a man with a knife behind his back. Definitely could be better.

Tagline

In this hospital people are dying–to get out!

It’s an obvious choice and I don’t hate it. I think a “what goes on under the knife” might be better, though there’s no actual surgery element to the book. It’s just kind of meh.

Summary

There’s an unnecessary prologue where Laurie is running through an unconstructed area of the hospital with a man chasing her. She’s grabbed, and her thought is “where is the knife”, which is a bonkers thought, especially when we get context later, but it’s a title drop.

We cut to one week earlier where Laurie and her friend Skye are playing candy striper in the kids wing on the ninth floor of Shadyside Hospital. They note the new wing under construction thanks to a big donation by Franklin Fear, descendant of the Fear family,and the wing will be named Fear Wing, which seems like a bad idea for a hospital, but whatever. Skye tells her she’s bringing more toys for a sick kid in one of the rooms, and there’s a running joke that he’s constantly getting new presents. As Laurie goes to run her errands, she hears crying in room 903 and finds a sick little boy named Toby. His room is bare, no balloons or toys or anything, and he doesn’t talk at all. She comforts him a little after reading that he has pneumonia, when one of the nurses walks in and tells her to get out. The nurses are all portrayed as mean and snappy, but there’s also a lot of mention going into how overworked they are. It’s a little weird, and I think Stine just didn’t want us to think he hated nurses or something when he made them all so mean.

Anyway, Nurse Wilton says the boy doesn’t talk at all, but Laurie is pretty certain he’s pleading with her, and not just because he’s sick. When she sees Skye again, she asks her if she could steal some balloons out of the other kid’s room so she can bring them to Toby, and Skye says the kid probably won’t even miss them. They also talk about a raffle for a red Mercedes-Benz that Franklin Fear is putting on to help pay for the wing, which is used as a plot point later on. We get some more girl talk. Skye makes plans with multiple boys and then decides who to drop last minute, while Laurie has been dating the same boy, Andy Price, son of the hospital director, who she’s trying to figure out how to dump. There’s a weird jab about Dr. Price being his step-father, which I think is meant to exonerate Andy later in the book, but we never really see the two of them interact, so whatever.

They’re interrupted by a handsome man entering the cafeteria. Rick is constantly described wearing loud t-shirts, and today his shirt says WRONG WAY GO BACK. He’s also a student volunteer, but he’s also in his second year at college, which will make his later flirtation with Laurie kind of creepy. He says he’s going to medical school, but a code blue gets called and he’s confused by it, and the girls explain it to the readers him. Laurie thinks the code is for room 903, and she runs off, hoping that Toby is okay.

She runs to the room, and Toby is flailing under the care of Nurse Wilton, but it’s only because she’s trying to get blood from him for a test. The code was for room 503. Laurie offers to help, saying she can calm Toby down, but the nurse tells her to get out. Laurie walks back to the nurses station and overhears the nurse there talking to Toby’s mom, Mrs. Deane, who wants her son out of the hospital. Nurse Girard lets her know Toby will likely be going home the next day, but they have to be sure he’s out of danger. Laurie sees Nurse Wilton leave the room, and she sneaks back in. She tells Toby what the nurse said, and she holds his hand until he’s asleep. As she leaves the room, she sees someone enter the restricted construction zone and realizes it’s Rick.

Laurie goes home, to her aunt’s house. Her parents are dead, and she lives with Aunt Hillary, who’s a big name accountant and often works late. While she’s feeding herself, alone in the house, she gets a phone call, and like many phone calls in these books and other horror media, it’s just breathing on the other end. She starts to hang up until she notices the wail of an emergency vehicle in the background. The phone rings again, and this time it’s Rick Spencer, who asks why she left the cafeteria so quickly. She tells him a little bit about Toby, and then asks him why he was wandering around on the ninth floor. He tells her he wasn’t. He then asks her out on a date, but she tells him she’s already taken.  In the background, she hears the siren again. When she asks how he got her number, he says Skye gave it to her, and she quickly gets him off the line. Out of curiosity, she calls Skye next, asking her directly if she gave out her number to Rick. She says no, and in true friend fashion asks if she should. All this proves is that Rick is a big fat liar.

The next day, Laurie talks to Andy a little bit, and despite her saying she’s looking for a way to break up with him, they seem to get along fine. She sneaks off to work early and buys a teddy bear for Toby, but when she gets up to his room, it’s empty. At first she flips out and assumes he’s dead (I don’t know why), but the second she walks to the nurses’ station, she sees him with Mrs. Deane. She notices Rick is the one talking to Mrs. Deane, and Toby runs over to her while his mom is distracted. She gives him the bear, he thanks her, and says his first words when she tells him to head back to his mom, those words being, “She’s not my mommy.” Laurie is stricken by this, especially when Toby says she’ll be mad if he tells her who she really is, but Mrs. Deane calls Toby back over before Laurie can ask more questions. They walk out, and Laurie asks Rick why he’s on the children’s floor and what he was saying to Mrs. Deane. He makes up a bunch of excuses and asks her out again, and she starts to tell him no when the phone rings. As she reaches for it, she sees a box of surgical knives open on the desk, and it freaks her out a little. Rick answers the phone, writes a note, and then picks up the knives, pocketing them. Laurie is shaken.

Laurie wants to know why Rick is lying to her, but she more importantly wants to figure out who the woman who took Toby away is. She sneaks into the patient record room and finds Toby’s file, copying down his address which is, you guessed it, on Fear Street. She tries to think of an excuse for going over there and remembers that she’s selling raffle tickets for that car in the lobby. It’s the perfect reason to knock on the front door. She starts to leave but sees Nurse Wilton right outside the door. Unsure how to escape without being seen, she thinks to wait her out, and when that proves it isn’t going to happen, she just makes a run for it. Nurse Wilton sees her, and she escapes to the elevator on the far side, letting the doors close in Nurse Wilton’s face. She’s shocked to see a person lying on a gurney beside her, monitoring equipment jutting out of the sickly woman, and the orderly demands she get out. She ducks out on the next floor, which says restricted personnel only.

She looks back at the elevator, but it’s moving up again, and she’s worried Nurse Wilton might’ve seen what floor she got off on. She runs through the unfamiliar halls and ducks into the first room she finds. It’s freezing cold, filled with metal tables, and when she puts her hand down on one she realizes she’s touching a corpse. It’s the anatomy lab, where medical students dissect corpses, and they are everywhere. Outside she hears a jangle of keys and realizes she’s been locked in. She starts to slam on the locked door and accidentally knocks over a skeleton, gains her balance by grabbing onto the first thing she finds, a hand that ends at the wrist, whirls around to see a severed head with its skin peeled back, and as she slams her fists again on the door, she thinks she sees something moving behind her. When nothing does, she makes herself breathe, realizing hysteria is getting to her. Calmly she re-examines the door and finds the deadbolt, manages to unlock it, and runs back into the hallway. She runs back to the elevator and stops again, this time seeing Nurse Wilton talking with Dr. Price. At first she thinks Nurse Wilton is complaining about her, but she realizes even she couldn’t be crazy enough to take a minor problem to the head of the hospital. Too traumatized to think about it, she finds another set of elevators and gets the fuck out.

When she meets up with her friends later, Laurie tells them what happened, and they joke about it with her. She asks if they’ll come with her to Fear Street, since she’s too scared to go alone. Skye makes them agree to go with her, though Andy is unexcited, and while they joke about it, when they actually get there, they’re all quiet. Since the houses don’t boast numbers, they split up the raffle tickets, and Skye and Laurie go up to the house they think is the Deanes. Mrs. Deane answers the door and seems annoyed by them, but to get them out of her hair she goes to grab her purse and make them leave. Laurie hears someone crying from inside, and when Mrs. Deane doesn’t return, she barges in. She sees Toby on the stairs and starts to talk to him, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her, and then Mrs. Deane shows up, yelling at him to go back to his room. She throws the dollar at Laurie who runs off, and the others demand to know what happened.

Laurie tries to figure out what to do about this development, and while she should call child services and be done with it, she gets called into the head nurse’s office instead and is told she’s being transferred out of the Children’s Floor. She sort of tries to explain the situation, but she’s told she’s been getting a lot of complaints, and if it’s true that she broke in to look at patient records, she could be fired. Laurie’s sent to the X-Ray Department to file for the rest of her life. She decides to go talk to Nurse Wilton to explain the situation, but when she finds her, the nurse is walking into the construction zone, and Rick follows her. At first, Laurie waits for them to come out, but after a long time passes, she follows them in. The construction area is barely done, and there’s all kind of strange shadowy shapes lying around. She almost walks through a hole in the floor and stops herself. When she turns around, she realizes one of the shapes is Nurse Wilton, a surgical knife sticking out of her neck.

Laurie flips out and runs back to the nurses station, grabbing Nurse Girard and Skye. Neither of them really believe her or do anything about it for a full minute, but they agree to go with her to collect the body and call security to the ninth floor. Laurie points security to where she found the body, but then she realizes there isn’t one anymore. Skye is enraged because she thinks it’s a big joke Laurie is playing, and then a doctor arrives, asking if another doctor put the girls up to this. He tells them he’s been playing a game of gotcha with one of the other physicians, and Skye says yes, of course, this is all a big joke. Laurie is convinced Rick killed the nurse, and she’s also convinced it’s connected to Toby somehow, though I don’t really know how she made that leap in logic. She goes to the patient records office again, but this time she can’t find Toby Deane’s file. Someone has taken it.

Nurse Wilton doesn’t show up to work again, but no one believes Laurie when she tells them the truth. Laurie’s convinced something is happening on Fear Street, and she drives to Toby’s house again. She watches for a while. She sees Toby in the kitchen with another woman who sees to be trying to comfort him, and he has a suitcase with him. Mrs. Deane and a few men arrive, picking up Toby and his suitcase and putting him in a car despite his every protest. She hears another child crying inside. Laurie tries to figure out what to do next and decides to talk to Dr. Price, since it’s his hospital. At no point does ‘call the police’ enter into her thoughts. She sprints back to her car and sees a Honda drive past slowly. As soon as it sees her, it backs up quickly, and a man gets out, Rick. He starts to call her name, and she drives away.

Laurie gets home to find it empty. Andy calls her, asking if she wants to watch a movie with him, and she asks if she can talk to his dad tomorrow. He starts to initiate something, asking if her aunt is home, and if not, can he come over, and she quickly hangs up on him. Alone, freaked out, and feeling like she was followed, she calls Skye and asks if she can sleep over, but changes her mind when she hears the door open, assuming her aunt is home. She calls Aunt Hillary’s name, and with no response, she realizes the person isn’t her aunt. In a desperate attempt to pick up the phone again, she knocks everything over, but is saved when the front door open and Aunt Hillary walks in for reals this time. Laurie runs to her, tells her there was someone in the house. Aunt Hillary says she saw a car leave just now, a Volvo, which is what Andy drives, but when Laurie tells her someone broke in, she starts to call the police. Laurie stops her for some reason and starts to tell her everything, but like everyone else, Aunt Hillary refuses to even entertain the notion that she actually saw any of this.

Laurie tries to go to sleep and is woken by a phone call from Rick. He tries to explain things to her, and she tells him she saw him steal the knives. He says he did take them, that he was bringing them to a doctor on the surgery floor, and then makes a joke asking if she thinks he stabbed anyone with them. She demands to know why he followed Nurse Wilton and why he was on Fear Street tonight, and he tells her to stay away from Fear Street.

The next morning, Laurie goes over to Andy’s house bright and early and pretends she’s interviewing his dad for a project. She goes into Dr. Price’s office and quickly tells him what she saw. He’s the first person to react like a person. When she tells him she suspects Nurse Wilton has been killed, he calls the office and asks about her schedule, and is told she’s gone on vacation for three weeks, explaining her absence. She then tells him about Toby and how his records disappeared. He then tells her she must be overworked or misunderstanding things. He offers to talk to the head nurse and put her back on the Children’s Floor, as well as have someone follow up with Toby, but it’s clearly a pacifying technique. As she walks out, she and Andy get into a fight, and she tells him to leave her alone forever. This goes nowhere.

Laurie goes to the mall to meet Skye and doesn’t have too much fun shopping. She’s surprised, though, because she sees Mrs. Deane there with Toby, who cries and struggles as she pulls him into her car. She does not mention this to anyone. When she gets home, she calls the Deanes, unsure of what to do, and tries to talk to Mrs. Deane about the raffle. Over the phone she hears Toby calling her name, and then hears Mrs. Deane strike him. She hangs up and runs straight over there.

She breaks into the house and is hit over the head for it, waking up tied to a chair. Mrs. Deane is there, talking on the phone to someone, saying they need to deal with her and her aunt before it gets out of hand. Toby finds her, and she asks him to get her some scissors so she can cut the rope. She asks him about the boy who got into the car, and he tells her it’s his twin brother Terry. As she cuts herself free, she hugs Toby and tells him to be quiet, and she can get him out of here. She picks him up and runs back to her car, driving off as Mrs. Deane calls after them. She pulls over briefly to call her aunt and warn her and is told she’s at the hospital, waiting for Laurie to come pick her up.

As Laurie drives to the hospital, the radio sputters on to say a car was found in the Fear Street woods, with Nurse Wilton inside of it. Laurie thinks to call Dr. Price, certain an autopsy will reveal the true cause of death, and they pull into the parking lot. She realizes Rick’s Honda is right behind them, and she picks up Toby, racing inside. Leaving Toby with a nurse, she gets on an elevator for the ninth floor. Rick is running in after her, and she isn’t sure if he saw her as the doors close.

She runs to the nurses station where she’s supposed to meet her aunt, but she isn’t to be found. Rick then enters the floor, momentarily distracted by Nurse Girard. Laurie looks for a place to hide and runs into the construction area. Rick follows. We get a chapter that is the prologue, once more with clarity, and when he grabs her he pulls her away from the hole she was about to step into. She screams for help, and then Rick is hit from behind. Dr. Price tells her it’s safe to come out. For a moment, she thinks she sees a knife sticking out of Rick’s back and screams that Dr. Price killed him, but on further inspection it’s another of Rick’s loud t-shirts. Rick starts to wake up, and he tells Laurie not to trust Dr. Price, that he was the one who killed Nurse Wilton, and that he’s been kidnapping children and selling them. Laurie’s frozen as she doesn’t know who to believe, and then Dr. Price lunges for her, removing a gun and pressing it to her temple, and he starts backing up towards the open hole in the ground. He takes one step too many, and they both fall through, but Laurie is caught by Rick. He drags her up, and they’re both safe.

As they wait for the police, Rick explains everything. His sister was kidnapped from a hospital, and he’d been searching for her, which led him to Dr. Price. He guesses that Dr. Price killed the nurse and hid her body under a sheet, pretending to be an orderly to get her out of the hospital. Aunt Hillary says she’d been at the hospital doing some auditing of the books and found a strange extra fund that no one seemed to know about, undoubtedly related to the selling of children. Laurie and Rick kiss for some reason, he makes a bad joke, and the day is saved.

Favorite Line

A descendant of the Fear family, Franklin shared a family trait with his ancestor Simon Fear–he liked to have things named for him.

Fear Street Trends

Skye and Laurie are both a fashionable bunch who take care in their clothing. When Laurie gets down to business, she puts on a pair of distressed jeans, and she likes cable knit sweaters for comfort. Skye says Rick looks like Tom Cruise, and his graphic tees are tight enough that they can see his muscles. Besides his knife and wrong way shirt, he’s said to wear a Batman shirt (that looks like a mouth?) and a Harley Davidson tee. He’s a pretty fashionable guy. Toby is described as wearing Oshkosh overalls at one point too, which I think was supposed to add to his innocent look. Skye has that “skinny girl looks good in everything” look going on, and is mentioned to make even their volunteer uniforms look good.

Rating

I’m wobbling on this one a little. I ended up liking it a lot. It’s less repetitive than the other Fear Street books, and there weren’t as many “gotcha” scares. Just about every scene moves the plot forward, and the hospital setting was probably helped by my just finishing a replay of Silent Hill 2, so I was in the mood to be creeped out. Despite it’s strange plot, I think it is one of the better and creepier Fear Street books, so I’ll give it a four dissected corpses out of five.

Fear Street #22 – Bad Dreams

The Cover

The cover (pulled from its Amazon page) is pretty good. The girls look good, especially the hair on the one in front, and they seem genuinely afraid. I do love how they’re grabbing onto each other. The canopy post does good for implying a shadow or shape in the scene. All in all, I really like this cover.

Tagline

Don’t go to sleep!

I also really like this tagline! It’s a little generic, maybe, but it plays into the title, and there’s an urgency I appreciate.

Summary

We start with an unneccessary prologue. An unnamed girl sleeps in her bed, and is woken by a human figure in her room. She screams, “But you’re my sister!” and dies.

Smash cut to Maggie in the car with her family as they search for their new house on Fear Street. It’s just her mom and her sister Andrea and their dog Gus. I absolutely expected Gus to be horribly murdered in this book, and he is not. No animal violence at all. It’s a breath of fresh air.

The opening scene is just to establish that Maggie is the better sister. She’s a year older, a little prettier, she has a steady boyfriend, she’s doing well on the swim team, and Andrea is petty, mean, and has a complex. They’re moving out of North Hills, the swanky side of Shadyside, into Fear Street because their dad recently died. It seems like he had an anuerysm or heart attack, but they never really talk about it.

They make it to the house, and it’s a creepy old Fear Street house. They go up to find their rooms, and in Maggie’s room, the previous owners had left behind a canopy bed. It’s set up like the girls didn’t know what furniture they’d get, but later a neighbor tells them the house has been empty a long time, which means when they viewed the house, they would’ve known, but whatever, it’s an excuse for Andrea to complain. They fight, Andrea screams at her, their mother tries to settle them down.

They settle into the house. We’re introduced to Justin, Maggie’s boyfriend, and Dawn, who’s on the swim team with them. At night, Maggie’s exhausted, and she falls into her canopy bed. She has a dream where she’s walking through the mist and sees a girl with ash blond hair. She wakes up screaming, and her family rushes in. Andrea asks her to describe the dream and suggests she might’ve been thinking of Dawn, since she has blond hair. Her family comforts her, and she goes back to sleep.

There’s a nice moment with Justin, where he brings the family a bouquet of kitchen sponges, which delights Maggie’s mom, and she offers him something to drink with only two cans of Sprite in the fridge. They make out for a while, and when Maggie looks up, she sees the girl from her dream watching her from the shadows. Justin turns around and says hi to Andrea, and Maggie thinks she was spying on them. He’s friendly but curt to Andrea, who’s clearly hurt by it. He then scares Maggie by pretending to choke to death in front of her. That good ol’ Shadyside humor.

It’s swim tryouts day, and Maggie and Andrea are competing for a spot in the 200m swim. Andrea has a minor freakout where she accuses Maggie of stealing her swim cap before she finds it on the floor next to her backpack. There’s a long scene of them swimming, but the final result is Dawn, Maggie, Tiffany, and then Andrea. Dawn flips out at Maggie accusing her of interference, but the coach puts it down. They change, get ready to leave, and Maggie sees Dawn floating face down in the pool. She panicks and jumps in after her, only for Dawn to tell her she was practicing her breathing. They laugh about it.

Maggie goes to sleep again and dreams. She sees the blond girl thrashing in her covers, and a knife in the darkness, and she wakes suddenly to see the girl standing over her bed. She starts yelling, and then Andrea reaches down and tells her to stop. Andrea says she heard Maggie having a bad dream, and she came in to make sure she was okay. Maggie makes a crack that the house is haunted. Andrea worries it’s stress that’s making her dream this, and tells her to take it easy on the swim team, and Maggie flips out on her, telling her of course she would say that, so Andrea could finally beat her. Andrea says dreams are all wishes which is the wildest thing anyone’s ever said and accuses Maggie of wanting to stab someone. Maggie realizes she’s identifying with the person who was stabbed.

Maggie’s exhausted at school to the point where she doesn’t remember her locker combo. She’s trying to get to her next class when she sees her sister up ahead and runs into Dawn on the stairwell. She starts talking to Dawn right as she starts to fall. For a moment, she doesn’t move, and then she starts wailing that she was pushed. Her arm is broken. Maggie sees her sister, and it looks like she’s happy about this. Dawn accuses Maggie of pushing her.

Maggie talks to her friends, who tell her Dawn was probably angry and concussed, which was why she accused her. Tiffany assures her she had no reason to push Dawn. Maggie gets home and naps, and her mom wakes her up by making spaghetti and vegetarian meatballs. She goes outside and takes a nap as well, and is woken by a strange man who is reaching down for her. She panicks, but he tells her he’s her neighbor, and he was worried she was baking too long in the sun. He introduces himself as Milton Avery and invites her over to meet the missus. He tells her a terrible thing happened in the house, and it’d been empty so long it might as well felt haunted. Mr. and Mrs. Avery keep calling Maggie a “pretty young girl” and I half expected a shocking swerve where they were the murderers or something, but they’re just old. They tell her the Heifers lived there before, and their daughter Miranda was stabbed in her own bed.

Maggie meets up with her friends again. Dawn apologizes for accusing her, but Maggie isn’t sure if she means it. Justin tries to make out with her, but Maggie is still thinking about Miranda. He gets mildly weirded out with her ghost talk. When Maggie sleeps that night, she wakes up with Andrea standing over her, and the gleam of a knife in her hand, but Andrea tells her she’s borrowing her curling iron, and Maggie breathes a sigh of relief. Her dreams aren’t getting any better. She goes downstairs and reads Moby Dick at the suggestion of her late father, who called it the most boring book, a sentiment I heartily agree with. She goes back upstairs and finds her bed messed with and a knife sticking out of her pillow. She runs to her mom’s room and accuses Andrea of doing this, and when they return to the bed, the knife is gone, and the blankets are back to where they were. Maggie wakes up Andrea and screams at her.

Maggie’s too tired to race properly, and her coach tells her to get plenty of sleep. Her coach tries to talk to her, and when they come back out, Tiffany is laying down on the floor with blood pouring out around her. Maggie reaches down to help her when her coach walks in, and she immediately starts yelling that she didn’t do it. It’s not at all suspicious. At home, Maggie’s mom tells her no one suspected her, and it’s such a tragedy, and Andrea gets off the phone with Tiffany, letting them know she’s fine. Andrea’s clearly happy despite everything and says she won’t pretend to be excited now that she’s swimming the 200 IM. Maggie shouts at her for it and storms off.

At night, Maggie dreams again, and this time she starts in a dark tunnel. She watches Miranda run away from someone wielding a knife, and then falls into the canopy bed. Miranda wakes up and sees someone standing over her, with ash blond hair, and she asks if she’s a ghost. The figure nods and raises a knife. Maggie starts screaming, and her mom runs in, but now the ghost has disappeared. Maggie’s mom tells her they’ll get her all the hep she needs.

Maggie goes on a school trip to some caves. She’s distracted, thinking about the ghost, but she’s put in a group with our two faves, Deena and Jade. They walk through the tunnels, and Miranda gets dizzy. She sits for a moment. When she looks up, her group is gone. She runs to catch up, and she’s reliving her dream, feeling like someone is chasing her, footsteps behind her, and she slams into a dead end. She panics as the person gets closer and closer, but it’s only Justin. The group had noticed she’d gotten lost, and he tells her everyone is waiting back at the bus. They walk out together.

Maggie starts seeing a therapist. She talks to Justin about it, but while they’re hanging out, she sees the ghost. She runs after it, leaving Justin behind, but Miranda is gone. When she gets home, she sees her mom with Mr. and Mrs. Avery, and they have dinner together. Maggie’s quiet, but Andrea’s ecstatic. Maggie’s too tired to continue, and she tells her mom she’s going to lie down. When she gets to her room, she finds the canopy bed is gone. Moved. Maggie’s mom had some movers come over and they put it in the attic. I don’t know why she didn’t take it to a resale place or smash it into firewood, but the rest of the plot needs to happen. Andrea convinces Maggie to come back down for dinner, and at night, when everyone is gone to bed, Maggie sneaks up to the attic.

Maggie’s certain she just needs to see the rest of the dream, and she climbs the creaking staircase to open the door, only to find someone already sleeping in the bed. She wakes Miranda, who jumps out of bed, knife raised, and starts singing that someone stabbed Miranda. She’s not a ghost after all, and she’s not Miranda either. Gena was Miranda’s sister, and she starts singing that she has to kill the mean sister, and Maggie’s mean like Miranda was. She’s been sleeping in the attic this whole time. Andrea hears them and runs upstairs as well, and Gena tells her she’s going to kill Maggie for her. Maggie struggles against Gena, and Andrea manages to tangle her up in the bed, and they wrap her up as their mom comes up to see what the noise is.

The police take Gena away. The women sit around and discuss what just happened. Maggie thanks Andrea for saving her life, and offers her the canopy bed. Andrea politely refuses. Finally, they head back up to bed.

Favorite Line

“Dreams are all wishes, right?”

Fear Street Trends

Our faves Deena Martinson and Jade Smith are back, of course. They don’t do much. Not too many outfits are described, but my favorite is Andrea’s “short-short khakis, and orange tank top, and gold hoop earrings.” To which she says, “I was feeling like dressing up a little.” Justin wears some generic white boy clothes, and Maggie wears some faded jeans and “a green-checked vest” which is definitely something I wore in the 90s.

Rating

This one was kind of meh. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, but this went by pretty quick, and I was surprised at how quickly I got to the end. All in all, I’m going to give it two stabbed pillows out of five.

Fear Street #23 – Double Date

The Cover

The cover (pulled from Goodreads) is kind of meh. Bobby looks like a mannequin, and the girls are just kind of doing nothing. It should be sinister, but it’s far too bright, and the people don’t look real at all. There’s few salvageable things about it.

Tagline

Two’s company. But three can be murder.

I do actually kind of like this. It’s a decent play on an old saying and sets a tone. It’s only extremely out of place on this boring cover.

Summary

We’re introduced to Bobby forcing a girl named Ronnie into a locker and then kissing her. Our hero. He talks about how he dated Ronnie pretty much only so he could say he went out with all six cheerleaders. For the first time, I think, we get to see Kimmy outside of the cheerleaders books. She yells at Bobby for standing her up last night and going out with another girl. He brushes her off and goes to band practice with his two main dudes, Arnie and Paul. Thus begins the running gag of bands changing their names, which is a thing in just about every teen fiction I’ve ever seen. They changed their name from “The Cool Guys” to “Bad to the Bone”. They’re going to need a lot more help.

Bobby is all about music. He has a white Fender Strat “like Jimmy Hendrix”. Arnie is Bobby’s best friend and clear supporter, but Paul kind of thinks Bobby is a narcissistic skeeve. They start to practice, and two girls enter the room. Bree and Samantha Wade moved to Shadyside a year ago, and they’re looking for one of their teachers. Bobby takes the moment to chat with them, but they leave to get done what they need to do. Arnie and Bobby joke about going out with twins, while Paul is clearly agianst the idea. As practice finishes up, they’re visited by Melanie, who Bobby used to go out with, and who is now dating Arnie. She’s antagonistic towards Bobby, and when she hears Bobby might ask out both twins, she tells him to stay away from them.

He promptly ignores her and runs straight into Bree. He invites her to see their band play that Friday, and after they can go out. He goes home and tells Arnie, doing a weird victory lap in his room. My favorite moment from this scene is a line that paints Bobby as an absolute narcissist:

Arnie is my biggest fan, Bobby realized. That’s why we’re such good friends.

It’s honestly so enjoyable to read what a terrible person Bobby is (unlike say Paul from Haunted) because the piss is clearly being taken out of him at every turn. He calls himself Bobby the Man and struts around singing “I’m cool” while Paul and Melanie are in the background lamenting any association. Lines like that paint him as such a loser.

He calls the Wade household and gets Samantha on the phone. He asks her to a movie Saturday night, and she gets instantly nervous. She tells him Bree’s really looking forward to their date on Friday, and asks if this is a bet or a dare. In the end she agrees to go out with him and promises not to tell her sister.

Friday comes, and Bobby and his band play on stage. He does a “Chuck Berry strut” and the crowd cheers. As they get off the stage, the club lights up. Paul tells Bobby he ruined the set with his showboating, which ends with him pulling his amp out accidentally, but Bobby won’t hear it. He and Bree dance for a bit, but she gets tired, and they walk out together. As they drive around Shadyside, and here’s where we get the craziest aspect of this story, which adds almost nothing to it. The kids in Shadyside are doing science projects, and Bobby has two monkeys he got from his uncle who is an animal importer for zoos. This already sounds highly illegal, but his his experiment is he only feeds one bananas and water, while the other has a mixed diet. Is his experiment the fastest way to murder a monkey? Part of me assumes Bobby only did this to show off at school, which wouldn’t be out of character for him.

They make out, Bree asks him out tomorrow, and he says no. The next day he meets Samantha, and they head to the movies. Samantha thinks they’re all really boring and instead they walk around the mall. They try on earrings at a kind of expensive store, and she gets yelled at for actually putting them on. She starts to leave the store, and they’re yelled at for shoplifting. They race through the mall as security chases them. They get out and run across the parking lot, where they run straight into a security guard, who chastises them for running. They walk away laughing.

They go back to his car, and Samantha demands to drive, a thing I highlight only because recently I’ve realized how strange it is that in straight couples the man will always insist on driving even if it’s not his car. They go to River Ridge to make out, and she warns him that Bree can get a little crazy when she’s hurt. She refuses to say anymore.

It seems like Bobby’s been dating the twins for a few weeks. Everyone at school knows about it, and the fact that the girls don’t seem to makes it all the more suspicious. After Melanie rags on him some more, he goes home and gets a weird phone call, where a whispered voice tells him three’s a crowd. He figures out pretty quick it’s his friend Arnie, who laughs at him. They talk a bit, and then he’s interrupted by someone knocking on the door. It’s Bree, syaing they have to talk. She says she’s worried about Samantha, who is seeing someone and refuses to tell her. Bobby plays it cool, and when it’s clear Bree doesn’t know what’s going on, he tells her he’ll try to find out for her. She leaves, and Samantha calls, warning him that Bree’s on her way. When he tells her it’s cool, she was here and left, Samantha says she’s sick of sharing and asks him to break up with Bree. The longer they drag it out, the more she’s worried she’ll get hurt, and the easier it’ll be for her to fly off the handle.

Bobby goes out with Samantha again, does some more shoplifting, and they run into Bree. Bobby briefly considers taking them both on a date at the same time, but they skedaddle together. He walks outside and finds both his tires slashed, and Melanie driving up. He’s convinced momentarily that it was her doing, and she’s probably still obsessed with him, but he decides girls don’t know how to handle knives, and thus she’s off the hook. At school, Bobby and Samantha sneak off. He shows her his monkey (hur hur), and she shows him the way to tell the twins apart. Samantha has a small butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. As they make out, she tells him again to dump Bree, and then she shows him her science project: a colony of cannibal ants eating a dead mouse. Shadyside really values its education system, huh.

The band, who have changed their name again to the Desperadoes, are playing at school, but the second Bobby hits his Fender, he’s electrocuted and jolted to the ground. There’s a brief interlude where he’s in a grey fog with ghostly faces all around him, but the second someone says the amp was cut, he sits straight up. They realize someone had deliberately cut it. He goes off with Samantha and asks if Bree was capable of this. She says her sister could do anything as Bree walks into the room.

Bobby and Arnie sit together in the cafeteria. Melanie comes in again and tells him she’s known the Wade twins since elementary school. She warns him again, and he tells her she’s clearly still in love with him. She calls him a pig and leaves.

Bobby goes out with Samantha, but while they’re making out, he realizes her butterfly tattoo is missing, which means he must be with Bree. He asks her about it, and she gets confused, claiming she doesn’t have a tattoo. She acts hurt and gets him to drive her home. At school the next day, he’s confused, and when he opens his locker he finds it coated in blood with a monkey’s head laying on top of his books. A note reads “THIS IS YOU INSIDE”. For once, someone in Shadyside has a normal reaction to this kind of treatment, and he tosses his breakfast. Arnie comes along, confused, and picks up the fake monkey’s head. It’s a prank. Another disgusting Shadyside prank.

Bobby and Samantha go out, and she’s driving again. She takes him to a place out in the trees where there’s a small cabin. She demands to know why he hasn’t broken up with Bree yet, and then tells him they have to kill her. Bobby agrees, but it’s pretty clear he’s just going along, trying to get out of this situation. He sees the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder again. He asks her again, and she says of course she has a tattoo, she told him about it. They go inside the murder cabin and make out some more.

Bobby calls Bree immediately and tries to tell her what’s up. He picks her up to go dancing, and he explains to her that Samantha took him out and threatened to kill her, still kind of lying his way around the whole “cheating on you with your sister” thing. Bree tells him they aren’t twins, but triplets. They have a third sister named Jennilynn, the fakest, worst name I’ve heard in any of these books, which earn the prize in made up terrible names. She tells him Jennilynn is crazy, and attacked their parents, so they sent her away to live with their family on the West Coast. She says the real way to tell her apart from Bree or Samantha is that she has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder.

He drives to Arnie’s after dropping her off and immediately spills the beans after promising not to. Melanie is there, and he asks her directly, since she admitted to knowing them since they were kids. Even though one threatened to kill her sister, and the other told him a story about their murderous triplet, he’s still not quite ready to give up dating the Wade twins. He meets up with Samantha the next day and tells her what Bree said about Jennilynn. Samantha is horrified, because there isn’t a Jennilynn. She’s Bree’s alter ego, which whom she acts out terrible fantasies. He checks her shoulder again. No tattoo.

Bobby has no idea which sister is telling the truth, and instead of maybe going to their parents and asking or forcing the sisters to talk to each other, he continues to date them. Samantha picks him up in the car and takes him to the cabin. He sees the tattoo on her shoulder again, and she says of course she has a tattoo, she told him. He realizes she’s still planning on killing Bree, but the second they’re at the cabin, she brains him with a bottle, ties him up in only a t-shirt and his boxers, pours honey all over him, and drops her cannibal ants on him.

Samantha/Jennilynn leaves, and Bobby manages to  break free. He runs free of the cabin, straight into Melanie, who says the twins had their car stolen, and they were pretty sure it was Jennilynn. She came to find him, and he says they have to go back to the house to warn the sisters. They run inside the house, Bobby shouting about Jennilynn, and is surprised to see both sisters and a lot of girls from school. The Wade parents are there, and they have no idea who Jennilynn is or what Bobby is talking about. They don’t even own a cabin. Also, cannibal ants are not a real thing. He points at the girls and demands to see which one has a tattoo, and they dutifully show their parents their bare shoulders. Melanie, Kimmy, and Ronnie each make fun of him for his appearance and for dating every girl in school. Samantha and Bree laugh about all the acting they had to do, with Samantha pretending to be a wild girl. This also means that either Samantha and Bree or every girl involved are the ones who slashed his tires, filled his locker with blood, and maybe tried to electrocute and then kill him? Troubling, of course. But in Shadyside, it’s not out of place.

At school, things seem to fall apart for Bobby. The band breaks up. He’s dejected. Bree and Samantha see him and bring him an envelope with a letter inside. It says they both knew from the very beginning what was going on, and on the inside is small temporary butterfly tattoo.

Favorite Line

Girls aren’t strong enough to cut tires that deeply, Bobby thought to himself. Girls don’t know how to handle knives.

Fear Street Trends

So many! I feel like it’s been so long since the kids have been described like this! No one looks like a celebrity, but Bree and Samantha are described in every scene. A lot of faded jeans, cut off shorts, and midriff-bearing blouses. Samantha is almost always described as wearing something low cut or that shows off.

David Metcalf makes an appearance, and Suki Thomas gets a special mention. The teen club in this is the Mill, when I think it’s usually the Red Heat. What surprises me the most is the mention of real stores. McDonalds, Waldenbooks, and the Gap all get a mention.

Rating

I think I loved this one. Bobby is a straight up narcissist and psychopath, and the twist at the end was probably one of the best in Fear Street history. I’m giving it five fake butterfly tattoos out of five.

Fear Street #8 – The Halloween Party

The Cover

The first cover (borrowed from this Fear Street blog) is fantastic. It is 100% why I wanted to read this. The girl running through the graveyard, the jackolantern skull, the gravestone, the mansion in the background. The only thing I don’t like is the white cape, but I guess it contrasts better with the red dress. The second cover (taken from the Simon & Schuster page) is pretty dull in comparison. The scarecrow motif doesn’t add anything, the background is nothing, and it’s a pretty ugly cover.

Tagline

There is going to be an uninvited guest at this Halloween Party on Fear Street…

It’s way too long, and isn’t true. I guess there is an uninvited guest or two, but the implication that they’re the murderer isn’t true at all. It’s really bad.

It’s an invitation to terror…

Much better. There’s a dramatic ellipses, the word terror is used. If only we could swap these two taglines.

Summary

Chapter 1 is really more of an unnecessary prologue, so feel free to mark that in your bingo cards. Terry and Niki are on their way to a Halloween party, walking through the Fear Street cemetery. Niki is deaf, though she reads lips, and at no point does she implement sign language, even when it seems useful. They hear a scream in the cemetery and see a dark, shambling figure move towards them, but it turns out to be their frienemy Murphy just trying to give them a scare.

Smash cut to two weeks earlier, where Terry is going through his messy locker. He and his friend Trisha discuss the Halloween party Justine Cameron is throwing, which is super elite and only nine people have been invited.It’s taking place at the Cameron mansion, just behind the Fear Street cemetery. Justine is beautiful, mysterious, and she transferred recently when she and her uncle moved into the old mansion. She’s known for traveling the world and for keeping a distance from most people. Terry recognizes how beautiful she is, but not as beautiful as his girlfriend Niki, who his devotion towards is genuinely sweet. I’ve had to read a lot of books full of garbage boys recently, and Terry was a breath of fresh air.

Lisa Blume is doing her job in the hallway of being extremely nosy and talking loudly about the party. Ricky Schorr is also invited to the party, and he’s still a dweeb. Alex Beale got an invitation as well, who Terry used to be friends with until high school, and there’s a lot of baggage there. Justine comes along and tells everyone how rad and excellent this party is going to be with the nine people she wants to be friends with. Two boys, Marty and Bobby, are upset they don’t get invited. They pester Justine some, and she brushes them off.

The group of kids invited to the party are divided, essentially one half of them being the jocks and the other half being the geeks. The jocks, which includes Alex, starts calling the geeks wimps and telling them they couldn’t survive the night on Fear Street. You could make a drinking game out of this book how many times the word ‘wimps’ is said. They decide to have a contest where the two prank each other and see who is less of a wimp.

At first the pranks are pretty basic. Rubber snakes, shaving cream in lockers, prank calls. Then Terry reaches into his locker without looking and finds a plucked chicken head staring at him. He goes to yell at Alex and sees Niki already talking to him. Terry gets weirdly jealous, but she lets him know she was just telling them to knock off the prank war. Someone leaves a threatening letter to Niki, Niki reads Justine’s lips as she’s talking on the phone and she says “They’ll all pay.” Everyone’s suspicious but no one more than Justine.

It’s Halloween night! Murphy is dressed as a zombie, Terry is dressed as a 1950s greaser (and is mentioned wearing a mask????), Niki is dressed as a “carnival reveler” which I think just means she’s wearing red velvet, Justine is dressed as a sexy vampire, her uncle Phillip is dressed as a sad clown, David is dressed as a scary basketball player, Angela like a biker girl, Ricky is dressed like a frog, Trisha is dressed like a 50s cheerleader, and Alex is dressed in a skin tight silver body suit and calling himself “the Silver Prince”. None of these costumes will play into anything later, they’re just exceptionally ridiculous.

Justine serves a lot of food from a lot of different countries, mentioning she learned to cook them while living there and also talks about being at the Carnival of Venice. She also flirts with everyone, including Terry, who very cutely keeps mentioning Niki his girlfriend. Justine sets off a few pranks of her own, surprising everyone. The lights go out, and when they come up again there’s a dead body in front of the fireplace. Everyone starts flipping out, and Les Whittle pops up, revealing it all to be a prank. The jocks versus nerds thing goes on a little long before Niki snaps at the boys. Terry and Alex have a moment where they remember being friends, and then they ruin it. Justine flirts a little more. She gets real close to Terry right as some motorcycle boys come through the door.

It’s Bobby and Marty here to crash the party. Justine gets real mad that they ruined her party. They throw her uncle on the ground. They’re both clearly drunk and are getting too rowdy, throwing things on the ground, drinking a bottle of wine they find, pushing people over. They also have like chains and stuff, because one throws it at Terry, who catches it with a candlestick, which is way rad. The boys fight the bikes enough that they get scared and run off. People start saying to call the police, but Justine tells them not to. She doesn’t want to ruin the party. It’s time for the treasure hunt!

They all run off in different directions. One girl finds a mummy’s hand, a boy finds a botle of blood, another a stuffed cobra. Niki is nervous though, remembering what she saw Justine say. She wanders into Justine’s room and finds it strangely empty. There are barely any clothes in her closet, no posters on her wall, no desk at all. In the closet, she finds a secret door and goes through, finding a wardrobe full of designer clothes, brand new, long gowns, high heels, cocktail dresses, all sorts of fancy things. She also finds a lot of fancy underwear and a picture of Justine kissing an older man, as well as pill bottles made out to Enid Cameron. Niki is convinced Justine is leading a double life and runs off to tell Terry.

Terry is in the middle of the scavenger hunt himself and finds Alex hanged, blood dripping from his silver costume. He goes to get the others, and when they return they find a dummy with red cellophane being used for blood. Alex jumps out at them. They go back downstairs, where the stair railing falls out from under Justine, and she lands on the couch below. She’s fine though, and she and Alex get chummy while Terry and Niki talk. She tells him what she found, and she’s worried about what Justine is planning. As the party continues, the lights go out, and Justine gathers them all around to play a game of Truth. The rules are you say the worst thing you’ve ever done, and everyone decides if you’re lying or not. If you don’t tell the truth, you have to pay the penalty. Surprisingly, Ricky goes first, and he hints at the events of the Overnight, though he refuses to tell because of the other people involved. In the middle of the game, Terry notices Niki is missing and goes to look for her, on the way finding Les’ body.

He runs into David going to tell the others, and they aren’t sure if they’re being pranked again. The body is gone when they return, but it’s been dragged outside onto the ledge. They decide not to say anything to the others until the police arrive, since someone at the party is a murderer, but when they go to the phones, they find the lines are cut. David’s convinced it’s Bobby and Marty, but Terry isn’t sure. They find Phillip’s blood covered jacket as well and decide to go back.

David runs out to get to a payphone, promising the others he’ll be back. He has to go through the cemetery, but I happened to be staring at the Fear Street map which has the Cameron Mansion on it, including to the second road right behind that does not require access through a cemetery. Maybe they can’t pull their cars through, but it seems easier to run to the next street. Anyway, all the cars have been wrecked by Bobby and Marty with the tires slashed. They’re still riding their motorcycles through the graveyard, and they chase after David. One of them takes a swing at him, and he cracks his head on a gravestone, and we leave him blacking out, with the two dragging him away.

Terry finds Niki stuffed in a closet after being knocked out. She grabbed an article from Justine’s shoebox, which talks about a couple that died in a fiery crash. The article lists every single teenager who was in the car that caused the crash, which I think is illegal, but otherwise we wouldn’t have this plot. The crash took place twenty-eight years ago, and they realize every single person at the party is a child of someone in that car, and Justine is actually Enid, making her 30 years old. They run downstairs to tell everyone. Justine plays it off, tells them Les is really alive, and drags them into the dining room, where she locks the door on them.

Justine shows them all a picture of her parents who died in that car accident. Les’ parents were driving the car, so he died first, but the others are just as complicit. She plays the sound of a car wreck, tearing metal, screams, tires squealing. Smoke starts filling the room, and they’re all screaming. Niki is immune to the horror since she’s deaf, and she manages to force her way into the dumbwaiter. She finds Phillip trapped and bleeding and helps him. They manage to get the windows open and pull the others out. They all run out to the yard, where David comes out of the Fear Street Woods.

As the police arrive, Philip explains. He was angry about his brother’s death in the car accident. He raised Justine and instilled that anger in her, but he didn’t imagine she’d actually kill over it. She left her adult woman life to fake being a high schooler and trap the kids in the house. Justine runs up to them, angry and screaming. She runs into the burning house, and both Alex and Terry run after her. She pulls Terry into the flames, but Alex helps him out, tackling Justine in the process. They have a moment. The sun comes up as the police arrive, and only one person is dead. The end!

Favorite Line

I have a really rad sound system, and I bought a lot of excellent CDs.

Fear Street Trends

They spend most of the book in costume so there’s no great fashion. Jade and Deena get a shoutout, as does Lisa Blume. There’s definitely a lot of weird old people stuff in this book, including a hot dog vending machine, and a lot of 50s references. Angela has a “fast” reputation, and half the party is dressed like they’re from the 50s, as well as the motorcycle bad boys feel very much like a 50s movie. At the same time there’s a lot of modern slang. Rad and excellent is thrown around, “dissed” is used including quotation marks, and some things are just really now.

Rating

I don’t know how I feel about this one. I liked a lot of bits of it, and the scene where David hits his head on the gravestone and blacks out is genuinely good, and I like the concept a lot. Justine’s a pretty obvious villain and she never really gets hammy enough for that to be wonderful, but she’s fine. I’ll give it two mummy’s hands out of five.