I’m not sure if this was the first Fear Street book I read or not. I do know that it was the first book I ever got to pick out brand new. I remember sitting on the floor in the bookstore (Walden Books in the mall in my grandparent’s town), looking through all the Fear Street books and trying to pick the right one. I don’t know if I was already familiar with Fear Street or if that was the moment I discovered it. I […]
You Can’t Trust Anything in Shadyside
Full disclosure: this is the first of the Fear Street books so far that I know for sure I read as a kid. I clearly remembered the cover and one particularly gruesome scene, but I completely forgot the whole plot. This one opens with a prologue, but we’re with a victim fleeing for her life instead of with the killer stalking her. This particular trick–opening with a scene from the climax of the story–irritates the crap out of me. It may be possible to do […]
Murder By Ghost
This is, I think, exactly what I expect out of a Fear Street book. Or maybe a Goosebumps book, since they seem to have a lot in common in this case. Lea and her family have just moved to Shadyside. Her parents bought a house on Fear Street, despite the fact that the attic contains a boarded up room that’s been closed off for the last hundred years because there was a murder committed inside it. That right there? That’s the Fear Street I know […]
Also Not A Fear Street Book
Lights Out opens in familiar territory–we get a narration from a killer, this time in the form of a letter addressed to Chief. Then it immediately yanks us away from Shadyside to Camp Nightwing. Yup, like Ski Weekend, we’ve got another book that’s only related to Fear Street in that the main character lives there. There’s a practical joker who no one thinks is funny because of course there is, and he lampshades Friday the 13th pretty quickly. How many Shadyside High students have lived […]
Not Actually a Fear Street Book
This is only a Fear Street book by the very thinnest of margins–three of the main characters are from Shadyside and one lives on Fear Street. Mentioning it briefly is as close as the entire story gets to the titular street. Since RL Stine also published Point Thrillers and other books, I’m not sure why this was a Fear Street book. Since all the Fear Street books before this one were published in 1989 and 1990, maybe it was a deadline thing. In any case, […]
Wonder What the Adults Would Care About
There’s no killer to introduce us to this story, but we do get to learn about how much Emily hates her hair. And pretty much everything else about herself. She’s especially wound up at the moment because her new stepfather is bringing home her stepbrother and sister, who are going to be living with them. Emily’s older sister Nancy is keeping her own room to herself, their new step brother Rich is getting put into a closet, and Emily is going to share her room […]