I don't have much to say about this book. It was average. I didn't read it for the first time until I was in my late teens, so I don't have all the warm fuzzy feelings surrounding it that I have with some of the older Point Horrors, which probably makes me a bit more critical.
The basic premise of the book is that Janna, a dancer in a (presumably) small theatre group, is being "stalked" by someone who leaves her flowers and notes, and who plays nasty tricks on her, like making threatening phone calls and dropping a set piece on her while she's onstage alone. In a turnaround from Ellis' early novel My Secret Admirer, Janna assumes that the nice things (the flowers) and the nasty things are coming from the same person, which is the first plot point that I find difficult to swallow. (I've had secret admirers before, and I've had stalkers, and I've never confused the two.)
Anyway, Janna runs around a lot, screeching about the things that are happening and letting the stress affect her performances, but doesn't actually tell anyone aside from her roommates until two thirds of the way through the book. Herein lies hard-to-believe point #2. Her reasons for not calling the police or reporting it to someone in charge of the play include 'What can anyone do? I don't know who it is!' and '[the choreographer, who seems to fill the role of producer here] doesn't like to hear excuses about bad performing'. Um, okay. If I were getting threatening notes and being followed around by some weirdo, I'd tell the people in charge of the production, the security in charge of each theatre I performed at, and the police. But maybe that's just me.
She does eventually tell the police, but not until she's been attacked twice and nearly killed. Turns out she was right, they were fairly useless. This seems to be a common theme in Point Horror.
What was good about this book? Well, it was readable. Aside from the two things I've mentioned there wasn't anything majorly wrong with it, and those alone do not make a bad book; I'm used to books that require some suspension of disbelief. Also, I didn't predict the bad guy. They were on my list, as most characters are when I read books like these, but there were at least three or four suspects that I thought were more likely.
The flip side of this is that, although I've read the book three or four times in the last decade, I didn't REMEMBER who the bad guy was. In fact, I only had a vague memory of reading it at all. Ask me again in a year, and I'll probably have forgotten again.
Carol Ellis is kind of hit-and-miss for me. Camp Fear was reasonable, and had a certain creepy factor to it, and My Secret Admirer is a shining star from the early days of Point Horror that I adored in childhood and can still read over and over again, but The Stalker is definitely not her best effort.
Verdict: Enjoyable. Just.
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