Tuesday 27 November 2012

Conquering Everest - Or Maybe Just Bullshit Mountain, Your Call


This autumn, I set myself the goal of reading all the Point Horrors.

Yes, all of them.

I started in late September, and I started slowly. I didn't have a goal then. I just read My Secret Admirer, because I liked the whole new-girl-in-town thing, especially with school starting. I always feel very teenage in autumn. Okay, so I feel like a teenager much of the time, but never more so when the leaves are falling and school's back on and Halloween is round the corner.

So I read My Secret Admirer. And then I read Prom Date, because I'd had fun with MSA, and I remembered PD as having plenty of shopping scenes. I do like clothes shopping, particularly when it's someone else doing it.

I had other autumn books on my list. Many of my books are seasonal. Not all, but many. Children's classics - L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series is my favourite, but I have plenty of others - are for early spring days. The spring of Easter and daffodils rather than cherry blossom. Teen romance belongs to December, and the coziness of Christmas. And teenage horror and suspense? That's for September and October.

Excuse me, my autism is showing again.

But whatever. Nobody cares if I indulge my controlling tendencies by reading books during the right seasons. (Yes, I said RIGHT. Right for me may not be right for you, but nothing is going to convince ME that Anne feels as good to read any other time as on a warm spring afternoon surrounded by lambs and narcissi.)

Anyway. I had other things on my list. Not just a mental list. I had - have - an actual list of teen suspense / horror stories involving teenagers starting in a new (American, inevitably) school at the beginning of their junior or senior year. What? I like to have a theme. Anyway, the list included the aforementioned My Secret Admirer by Carol Ellis, Richie Tankersley Cusick's Trick or Treat (also from the Point Horror imprint), Beverly Hastings' Home Before Dark (from the Nightmares imprint, which was similar to Point Horror, although a little darker and less extensive), Christopher Pike's Last Act and L.J. Smith's Dark Angel and maybe her Secret Circle trilogy.

Nearly sixty books later, I've read nearly all the Point Horrors, nothing else except a few Harlequin romances, and I am SO close to finishing...and I'm not feeling it anymore. I'm horrored out. I've read, at last count, 58 Point Horrors in two-and-a-bit months. I have 5 left that I own, all of them Caroline B. Cooney books that I've always loved and now don't know if I can summon up the energy or imagination for. I have 4 left to order out of the Britishly-published ones, not counting the Unleashed series (which I didn't like), the Mutant Point Horror (which I didn't know existed) and the Nightmare Hall series (which is a task for next year).

(There are also a handful that were only published in the US, but I need to wait till I have more money to buy those, since shipping is gonna be costly. I figure it'll be my back-to-school present to myself next fall.)

Ugh. 9 books left - Cooney's Vampire Trilogy, Freeze Tag and The Stranger - some of my favourites - still in the box. R.L. Stine's The Boyfriend and The Witness / I Saw You That Night, Barbara Steiner's The Phantom and Peter Lerangis' The Yearbook left to order from eBay. Oh, and Janice Harrell's Vampire's Love duo. I forgot about those, since I didn't like them and didn't think they belonged under the PH imprint. (I also don't think L.J. Smith's Forbidden Game Trilogy belongs under the PH imprint, and indeed I totally forgot it was published as such in the UK, since I have it in a different form, until someone pointed it out to me recently.)

Nine books left. Eleven if you count the Harrell ones.

I'm not sure I can do it.

Nine is such a silly number to bow out on when you've already read 58. Of course, the whole thing was a silly bet ANYWAY, but still. I cannot be beaten by nine slim YA books.

When I thought I was going to be finished by Halloween, I was happy. That was when I thought I had twenty books instead of forty-odd. It was before I started buying the remaining ones, two-at-a-time, from eBay. But here we are on November 27th. Halloween is a dim memory, even Thanksgiving is over. The leaves are no longer falling but have been crushed underfoot. The weather went from hot to freezing in the space of a week, ensuring that I had no time to revel in my cute autumn dresses, heels, cardigans and cropped jackets - I'm having to wear turtlenecks and leggings and ski boots to class because it's so freaking cold. There was virtually no real fall weather, just Indian summer and then straight to shivering throughout the day if you're not dressed warmly enough.

I want sweet teenage romances. I want my Jane Claypool Miners and Mary Francis Shura's Summer Dreams, Winter Love (sometimes published as Winter Dreams, Christmas Love) which is one of my favourite books ever. I am so done with the scaries.

Pike and L.J. Smith will wait until next year, as will the Nightmare Hall series and the US-only books, but the thought of those nine UK-published Point Horrors is grating at me.

I. Do. Not. Like. Quitting.

I will certainly never set myself a book-a-day target for more than a week's period again, so if I don't complete this challenge now, I won't do it at all. And there is the distinct possibility that I'm disillusioned with reading because I'm disillusioned with EVERYTHING; because I've had a badly infected eye abscess and a badly infected tooth socket which have required two courses of antibiotics in the last month; because my serotonin levels - lacking at the best of times - are at a very low ebb, and nothing pleases me right now: not food, not books, not resting, not exercise, not computer games, not baths. I feel dirty right after bathing; I'm too sick to work out; food doesn't taste right or satisfy my hunger (except for pizza and McDonalds, both things that have no place in my normal diet); books and video games and the few TV shows I watch seem dull and make me feel emotionally itchy; I crave company when I'm alone and aloneness when I have company. It's just my low hormone levels after the infections, and I should feel better within the month (fingers crossed!) but I can't discount the possibility - probability, even - that my boredom with the books I'm reading would be there regardless of my reading material.

Nine books. Nine books, not because I want to say that I read them all, but because it's important to me to finish what I set out to do. For once.

Even if what I set out to do was something as stupid as read sixty-odd teenage horror novels.

Sunday 18 November 2012

A Book Review - Beach House by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


Strange book here. Hard to rate. It gets four stars from me for a weird and cool plot idea, and three stars for characters that I didn't hate but couldn't really empathise with, and two stars for a confusing narrative - so averaging out at three, I guess.

I can't really say much about it without giving everything away. It tells the story of two sets of four teenagers, plus a fifth wheel with each set, that lived forty-ish years apart. In the past, the teenagers are being murdered one by one. In the present, two of them disappear. But who is killing them, and why? And how are they connected?

I liked the idea of this. I'm not sure it quite worked, but big points for trying something different. Jumping back and forth between the fifties and the nineties gave me a bit of a headache, and with some of the characters - Ross and Stuart, for example - being quite alike, it was hard to remember what had happened to whom. None of the characters were particularly loathsome, but none were great enough to really root for either. The fifties esprit du temps that I was hoping for, wasn't really tangible, at least to me.

But it wasn't an awful read. It was disturbing and gory, but it kept me wondering what would happen next, and the explanation gave it that bit of uniqueness from other Point Horrors.

So yeah, not bad at all.

Verdict: A decent enough addition to the Point Horror series.

A Book Review - Amnesia by Sinclair Smith (Point Horror)


I should mention before I start that, six years ago, I did in fact suffer from what the doctors called "absolute personal retrograde amnesia" which is what Alicia in this book suffers from. Personal as opposed to global, meaning that personal memories are gone but not things like eating or speaking or the knowledge of who the presidents were or the equation for photosynthesis. Absolute meaning that ALL the personal stuff was gone, not just bits and pieces. Retrograde meaning it was everything before the accident, rather than anterograde, which would be short-term stuff since the accident.

(There, you learned something today.)

If I'd remembered this book, I'd have been freaked out. Luckily, my memory wasn't working.

Heh, some brain-damage-humor for you there.

Anyway, onward.

Sinclair Smith is probably the only Point Horror writer who could have pulled this off. Christopher Pike (who doesn't have any books in the British PH series) could have made a good book out of it, but he'd have ended it up with Alicia being a cyborg or something. The other authors would have flopped it. But Smith is inventive enough with her / his (still haven't managed to find an author bio online) plots that s/he made it work beautifully.

Spoilers don't really matter, as the suspense doesn't concern the who but the what, when and how.

Alicia wakes up in hospital, not knowing anything about herself and unable to recognise her face. She only knows her name because of the bracelet she's wearing. After a few days, the doctor tells her that her sister has come to take her home. When she sees her sister Marta for the first time, Alicia is terrified, but she manages to shrug off this visceral reaction and embrace Marta as her kin and kith.

When Marta gets Alicia home, she seems a bit bossy and controlling, but nothing too awful. But as time goes on, she becomes angrier and more controlling of Alicia, forcing her to dress, eat and act in ways that Alicia supposedly always did, but that feel totally unnatural to the new her. Marta manages to convince Alicia that Alicia was unbalanced before her head injury; that she destroyed all the family photos and stole things and generally acted like a psycho - even though it's Marta who now goes around smashing plates and killing canaries. But Alicia doesn't have the memories or the friends to say otherwise. Until one day she realises that Marta isn't her sister at all...

Hoo boy. I'm glad I didn't have to go through anything as bad as poor Alicia, because that was some creepy stuff right there.

Alicia's a fun character, and easy to empathise with, not just because of her predicament but also because you get a nice feel for her while she's learning about herself. And Marta is quite terrifying. If you've ever lived with a mentally unbalanced person of this type, you'll know that Smith got it spot on.

Amnesia was a delightfully chilling read. Straightforward enough for younger readers (a nice change after reading Richie Tankersley Cusick's The Mall!) but suspenseful enough to entertain older teens (or adults). Very well played, Sinclair Smith.

Verdict: Frighteningly realistic.

A Book Review - The Mall by Richie Tankersley Cusick (Point Horror)


Gosh, this was a weird book. My love for Cusick is well-documented (in these reviews) but this is such a bizarre book, quite different from her usual, I don't know how I feel about it. I got it in the mail on Halloween, having only read it once as a teenager (and not really remembering it; it was the same week I first read Caroline B. Cooney's The Stranger, which kind of eclipsed everything for a few weeks) and I lay on my bed upstairs for several hours, forgetting about trick-or-treaters or pumpkin carving, and getting seriously creeped out.

I was planning to say something about how the setting is unusual for RTC, since she usually likes to set her books around decaying gothic mansions - and then I realised, that's not really true. Of the RTC books that I've either just read or am just about to read, only Trick or Treat and Help Wanted are set in big old houses. The Lifeguard is set in a beach cottage on an island - atmospheric yes, gothic no. Teacher's Pet (currently reading) is based around a woodland retreat with log cabins; Fatal Secrets and April Fools are, as far as I remember, set in basically normal suburban neighborhoods, albeit rich ones. Huh. Funny how I think of Cusick books as gothic horror.

Anyway. Having a book set in a mall makes for an interesting experience. Of course, this isn't a normal mall. This is a Richie Tankersley Cusick mall, a mall of dark passages and intrigue and silent stalkers. This is the mall from my nightmares, and maybe from yours.

The plot is a little hard to follow for a first-time reader, or at least it was for me. I'm giving you a longer recap than usual because of the twists in the plot.

Trish is working at the muffin shop in the mall, and one day a very strange customer comes in and makes suggestive comments about her hands. Weird, but not worrying - YET. Later she's called out to her car, after receiving a message that someone hit it - yet the car is fine. However, when she's in the parking lot, a pay phone starts to ring, and when she answers it (don't answer a ringing payphone! This happens all the time in movies, and nothing good ever comes of it!) it's Muffin Man. "I'm eating the muffin," he says. "It tastes just like you."

Okay, it's only page 22 and I'm officially creeped out.

So Trish seems to have acquired a stalker. And I have to say, this stalker is considerably more spooky than others I've read about lately.

Trish has also captured the attention of handsome, mysterious, flirtatious Storm Reynolds, who works at the pizza counter and has all the girls swooning and yearning for his pepperoni. Ahem. Storm runs into her right after she gets the phone call and reports it to a cynical security guard who doesn't believe a word she says, so she's understandably freaked out. He walks her back to work and lets slip that he's been watching her closely, and knows her schedule. Hmm, suspicious.

Trish and her flirty friend Nita leave work only to find Wyatt - general odd-job guy at the mall - trying to break into Trish's car. Except he says he's not, he thought it was his car, which seems to have disappeared. Although this sounds highly suspicious to me, kind-hearted Trish and flirty Nita decide to drive Wyatt home, and stop to get food. Nita flirts. Wyatt does not. After dinner, Wyatt tells Trish she can drop him at the mall and he'll walk to a friend's house, since she has to drop Nita there at her car anyway. Trish drops Wyatt and Nita off and they go on their merry ways - and then Trish's car breaks down. So she goes and bangs on the mall door in the hopes that a security guard will let her in to use the phone, or something. It gets a bit unclear here, but I think Trish gets chased by someone, or maybe she's just jumping at shadows. Anyway, she falls and cuts her leg, and a young security guard lets her in. He bandages her up and they have a nice little chat about how Trish loves her job but hates her bitchy boss. Unfortunately, she knocks over a crate of bottles and breaks them, and when she goes to put them in the dumpster - well, there's a body who's been stabbed with an ice pick.

The guard is horrified, and radios for help. Then he tells Trish that she needs to get out of there, so she doesn't get involved and he doesn't lose his job for letting her into the mall at night. She gives him her address, and he calls her a cab.

Next day, there's nothing in the paper about the murder. Trish is surprised, but figures that the police are keeping it quiet. She decides to look for the guard to thank him for his help, and after giving a description of him to one of the guards on duty, she gets directed to a security guard named Roger.

Unfortunately, Roger's not the right guy. The general description fits, but his eyes and voice are wrong, and he doesn't have a scar. More sinisterly, Roger tells Trish that the mall doesn't have any night guards.

Trish is freaked out by this, and slowly realises that the guy who patched up her knee was only pretending to be a guard, and probably murdered the girl Trish found. And worse, since he called her a cab, he has her address.

Whoops.

Things get a bit disjointed from here on, perhaps reflecting Trish's panicked state. Muffin Man reappears at work, although he does nothing but look sinister, and Trish gets reamed by her supervisor for some imagined infraction of the rules. She and her friend Imogene - Nita's sister - walk down to the loading docks to pick up some stock, and Trish thinks she sees the security guard again - except this time he has a mustache and different hair, and he's dressed like a delivery man. On the way back upstairs, they find a long grey wig and beard - identical to Muffin Man's - in a bin.

Creepy.

Trish spends much of the rest of the book panicking in horror. She gets spooked by a workman and flees down an out-of-order escalator, which starts up while she's on it, throwing her to the bottom and injuring her quite badly. While she's in hospital that night, a shadowy sinister figure named Athan visits her, claiming that he is the one who's been stalking her, as he loves her and has decided that she belongs to him. He tells her that he knows where she lives, and that while he wouldn't hurt her, he'd hurt Nita and Imogene if Trish quits her job, which she's been planning to do.

Trish moves in with Nita and Imogene and their family for the foreseeable future, as her mother's in Europe. When Nita and Imogene are at work, and their parents have gone out to dinner, Athan calls and scares Trish so she leaves the house (even with her injuries) and goes to the library, where she runs into Storm. He convinces her to come and see something interesting, which turns out to be a deserted, falling-down house in a meadow that looks pretty when bathed in moonlight. She gets scared and runs from him, he wrestles her to the ground, she cries and asks him not to hurt her, he's horrified that he's scared her and begs her to tell him what's wrong. Then things seem to be going well, but he scares her again with some stupid ghost story. This guy takes social awkwardness to the max - first he basically kidnaps her, then wrestles with her even though she just got out of hospital, then the story thing. THEN he kisses her, and she seems to like it at first, until she slaps him and tells him to take her home. Which he does. A bit little and late, but oh well.

Next morning, she finds a tape from Athan in her car, spewing more of the same BS - she's a bad girl for going off and kissing Storm and talking to him about her problems, she belongs only to Athan, etc. Ah yes, the women-as-property trope that is so popular with stalkers. I bet most of them support the Tea Party. Trish immediately drives to the block of apartments where Storm said he lives - since she's now feeling bad for not trusting him, but surprise! His name ain't on any of the apartments. She doesn't feel safe at home or at the girls' house, and can't face school, so she goes to the mall. Which is probably the most unsafe place of all, but oh well. After a short chat with Wyatt, and her discovery that Bethany the Bitchy Boss didn't show up for her shift, she puts on her apron and starts working.

A message is left for Trish that implies that Imogene has been taken by Athan. Trish sets off for the delivery docks (located in the deepest basement of the building - is the mall built on a really steep hill?) to find her, and instead finds a shadow holding an ice pick and then the body of Bethany. She gets stuck in an elevator that the killer keeps playing with, moving it up and down without letting her out, and eventually - somehow - making it fall crashing to the bottom of the shaft, which knocks Trish unconscious. I have no idea how he does this; I didn't think elevators were built in such a way that it's possible to slow them or speed them up, but then I'm so untechnical that I have to call my ex-boyfriend for help every time I want to run a new program on my computer or take a photo using the flash on my camera. When she wakes up, Trish makes her way upstairs and finds that the mall is closed - except for one door. Nita's sweater is in the open doorway, so Trish infers that Nita is in trouble and runs up to Nita's store instead of out the open door to call for help.

The rest goes quite fast and frantically - in the store Trish is surprised by one of our suspects, and bashes him over the head. Bad choice, Trish - this is a Cusick book, and the first person you think is the bad guy never actually is. A piece of the mirror is missing, so she runs behind the mirror and down a long cobwebby passage that eventually takes her into a creepy underground - my autocorrect changed that to "unsettling" and that works too - room where lots of mannequins are stored, as well as a shrine to Trish with a four-poster bed and a wedding dress. Athan is unmasked, Trish is terrorised some more, and the suspects who didn't turn out to be freaky killers show up - late, but better than never - to save the day. One of them's been stabbed with Athan's ice pick, but he'll be okay. Probably. And Nita and Imogene are assumed to be safe at home, and the phone call and sweater were just misdirection.

The book ends with Athan's body being not quite visible anymore, and Trish thinking one of the mannequins moved, so we're left with some ambiguity about whether Athan was really dead or not. Uck. I usually like RTC's little unknowns (like who the heroine is going to end up with) - but having the murderer dead or alive isn't a little unknown, it's a honking great one and I felt the book would have had a much nicer ending without it.

Jeebus, that was a long recap. Usually I stick to a paragraph or two, but this was such a damn twisty book, with just about everything that happened being integral to the plot.

Did I like it? Yes. No. Maybe. I haven't a clue.

It was very unsettling, and totally unrelenting, pace-wise. One thing I enjoy about Point Horrors in general and Cusick in particular is that they're not just horror, they're horror against a backdrop of American teenage life. Our characters get some scares, alternated with some peaceful periods where they talk or eat or make out. Even in books like Trick or Treat or Teacher's Pet, where the gothic atmosphere is pervasive and oppressive and casts a dark shadow on everything, there are still those periods of safety where our heroines get to sit down and take a breather. The Mall didn't allow that; even during the times when Trish was away from the mall there was still the feeling that she could be attacked at any moment, and I didn't like that. I need periods of peace in my books, not only because they give the characters - and by extension, the reader - a chance to recharge their batteries for the fight ahead, but because I think it's nice to see characters in more normal situations - it allows them to seem more like people and less like featureless blobs of fear and panic. So I missed that about this book.

The guys...I was hoping for someone to rival Conor from Trick or Treat or Neale from The Lifeguard. I didn't get that. The guys in this were - well, they acted pretty dickish at times. Storm, and to a lesser extent Wyatt, had the whole sexy douchebag thing going on. I can't decide if I liked them or found them really distasteful. I'm leaning towards like, but several of the scenes, and the whole scene with Storm and the car and the abandoned house, made me quite uncomfortable.

So, character-wise, I don't think this is Ms Cusick's best book. And plot-wise, the pace was too unrelenting for me personally, and I can also see how it would have too many twists and turns for a lot of people to keep up. I actually had to re-skim a lot of the book to write this review, and I only read it on Halloween five or six days ago.

So why the four-star rating?

Well, because it really, really scared me.

And that's exactly why I bought it to start with.

Verdict: Great book? Eh, passable. Great horror? Absolutely.

Sunday 4 November 2012

A Book Review - The Body by Carol Ellis (Point Horror)


Having just reviewed Carol Ellis' Silent Witness, I feel funny about giving this a lower score, because it's got a much more interesting plotline. Melanie is new in town, and gets a job reading to Lisa, a teenage girl who was paralysed after a fall a few weeks (or months?) back. Nobody knows quite why Lisa fell, but she's scared of something or someone. Through a series of incomprehensible (to me) events, Mel realises that Lisa is trying to tell her something, and they work out a system where Mel reads to Lisa - Jane Eyre - and Lisa makes subtle (so the cameras  - she lives in a mansion with security cameras everywhere - don't catch them) hand signals when there's a place in the book that pertains to her accident.

Lost? Yeah, so am I.

I like the idea. I do. I just think it's too ambitious for a short teenage book. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, but I'm fairly sure that if I were reading to a paralysed, mute girl - Jane Eyre or any other book - I wouldn't interpret her lifting her hand on certain sentences to mean anything other than that she was trying to move. And I'm almost certain that I wouldn't be conspiracy-minded enough to make a list of all the places she signalled - sentence fragments like "somebody has plotted something" or "and dangerous he looked: his black eyes darted sparks" or "the stranger who might be dying" - and put them all together and work out that Lisa's "accident" was a result of her fleeing from someone who'd already murdered someone else.

I actually do like this plot. I just don't like it for a 195-page teenage book. I think it would work really well if it were a) 200-400 pages longer; b) aimed at a slightly older audience; and c) the characters either had some sort of pre-existing relationship, or the protagonist was a codebreaker or a linguistics specialist or something that would give them an edge on solving puzzles.

But I can't buy that an eighteen-year-old girl, with no experience at this sort of thing, who had never met the paralysed victim, could firstly figure out that Lisa was trying to communicate, secondly place the fragments together to work out that a crime had taken place, and thirdly work towards figuring out who the criminal was, just because Lisa lifted her hand a bunch of times.

Mel does do all this, though, and discovers that Lisa fell while running to get home because she herself had discovered a terrible secret - that someone had committed a murder and buried the body on her property. Worse, Lisa knows who the murderer is - and s/he's close to home...

So yeah. Readable, even intriguing, but not believable.

Verdict: Too ambitious, although points for trying. The bare bones would be a good start for a longer adult novel.

A Book Review - Silent Witness by Carol Ellis (Point Horror)


I liked this, and I'm not sure why.

Lucy's friend Allen died recently, in what's believed to be an accident, and Lucy's been asked to give out his personal items to friends. With the items is a video tape - Allen was an avid video photographer (is that the right term?) - that Lucy plans to have edited and voiced over, as a sort of memorial.

But before she can watch the tape, strange things start happening - someone locks her in a cupboard at school, steals the original recording (but misses a copy) and attacks and mugs a friend who's wearing Lucy's jacket - and it becomes clear that someone doesn't want that tape to be seen. 

It's hard to explain why I liked Silent Witness, because it's such a simple book. Usually the books I like the best have intriguing plots or heartbreakingly wonderful leads, and this book didn't. It was just a basic, slightly formulaic but well crafted suspense novel. But it worked for me. I liked Lucy - she's a straightforward, undramatic heroine who's undeveloped but surprisingly likeable. Jon, her romantic interest, is reserved and moody enough to be intriguing, but friendly and light enough to not really be threatening. Most of the characters' actions were believable, which is always a plus for me - I hate when characters seem to have no common sense and go off making the most random, illogical choices.

Arrgh. It's hard to write this review, because even though it's only been a week or so I don't really remember the book that well. It's not one that will stick in your head and haunt you. But I know that at the time, I enjoyed it enough to give it four stars (although the lower end of four). I shall refrain from making comparisons to a certain other Carol Ellis book that is on my favourites list - anyone who reads these reviews of mine will know which I'm talking about - but I will say that despite not having as memorable a plot as some of her books, this is one of her better efforts.

Verdict: Simple and forgettable, but very enjoyable at the time.

A Book Review - The Diary / Let Me Tell You How I Died by Sinclair Smith (Point Horror)


I always think of this book as one that I don't really like, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was too subtle for me as a kid. I know that I didn't remember it terribly well, and it took a little while to get into this time, but once I was in I found I really liked it.

Delia is one of those introverted girls - shy, bookish and tied to a life with an ageing aunt who doesn't seem to like her much. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life after she graduates in a few weeks. When she finds a diary in her locker, she assumes it's a present from her boyfriend - she's an avid journaler, and it's just the kind of gift she'd love to get. But it turns out that the diary isn't blank, it's full of the life story of another girl, and there's a mystery as to where and who it came from.

Delia reads the diary, more and more of it every day, and slowly she starts becoming more and more like Laura, the girl who wrote it. Her personality changes and she becomes an extroverted party-girl. She dresses like Laura and gets her hair cut and dyed and her nails painted the way Laura had hers done. She picks up a paintbrush and discovers that she's a talented artist, despite never having painted before. All good things, right? But she also starts skipping school, and being mean to her friends, and having violent fantasies about people who upset her...

A past life regression from the town psychic indicates that Delia has lived before, and she finds out that Laura died in a freak accident the day Delia was born. Except it wasn't an accident - it was murder...

Delia starts having visions of the past, including Laura's murder. And Laura's murderer seems to know that something's rotten in Denmark (or Pleasantville - yes, that really is where this is set) because s/he is leaving threatening messages for Delia.

I hope I've got the gist of the book down, and apologies if I got anything wrong. It's quite a complex story for a teenage horror book, and I've only read it once or twice so it's not etched into my memory the way childhood favourites are. It's a good book, though, and I'll read it again in the future. Delia's a great character, and deeper than most of the protagonists in Point Horror novels. The transformation she goes through as Laura's personality takes over is eerie and surprisingly believable. I also didn't suspect the killer, which is always nice.

On the whole, I thought it was a pretty great book. This is the Sinclair Smith I know and love, which is why The Waitress was such a bitter disappointment. But The Diary, as well as other Smith novels like Second Sight, Amnesia and Dream Date are inventive and well-written, and reaffirm my faith in the author.

Verdict: Eerie, compelling and nicely crafted.

A Book Review - Halloween Night II by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


In many ways, this is a rerun of the first book. After becoming friends with Brenda in the end of Halloween Night and promising to be a nicer person, Halley's turned into a brat again and is doing exactly the same things as in the first book, including stealing Brenda's boyfriend Jake - despite the fact that she's already dating Ted, the guy she seduced away from Brenda last time.

(Good Lord, R.L. Stine, where do you get these douchebag teenage boys from? Are high school boys just like this in the States? It's been ten years since I was in high school, but if my foster kid had behaved like any of these guys he'd have been in for some serious verbal whipping.)

So the pranks continue, as in the last book. Halley "accidentally" pours sulphuric acid over Brenda's hand in Chem. Someone sticks rotten pumpkin flesh in Brenda's locker. And Brenda and Traci and their new friend Angela decide to humiliate Jake - and maybe Halley - by setting up a haunted house and then pretending that they're going to kill him. A bit weak really.

Brenda's parents are marginally less scummy than in book 1, although they don't seem to have any real sympathy for Brenda's sulphuric acid burn. Halley is insensitive enough to bring the person who tried to kill Brenda last year into the house, saying that everyone deserves a second chance. Now that shit is wack. If someone brought the guy who tried to kill me into my house, I'd scream bloody murder. And then I'd kick them both out. And if I were a teenager without the authority to do that, I'd call child protective services, because clearly Brenda's parents are neglectful to the point where their daughter nearly gets killed TWICE, after receiving threats each time that the parental units didn't take seriously.

Even though Brenda's a whinger, I just feel so bad for her.

I'm tempted to up the rating again, because even though these books were uncomfortable to read, R.L. Stine obviously has talent - he makes me feel for these (annoying) characters, and get angry on their behalf. But I'll leave it down, because I'm trying to grade the Point Horror books against each other, in the context of teen horror, and these certainly aren't the best.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting too old for Stine. He writes so many really unpleasant characters, and I like to surround myself with nice people, of both the real and the fictional variety. Some of his Fear Street books are still great, but I'm still looking for a book this autumn that makes me happy the way Beach Party did.

Verdict: Arrgh! It's Night of the Living Rerun! But with more death.

A Book Review - Halloween Night by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


Spoilers abound for this book; it's too hard to review it without them. Also swearing. Sorry.

I originally gave this three stars, but had to go and change it to two, because I've been thinking about it this week, and it's been grating on me. I hate having to decrease a rating. Sigh.

I wanted to like this book so much. I ordered this and number two three years ago, having never read them in my younger years, and I was so excited. Halloween is my favourite time of year - one of my favourite things in general - and Halloween-themed books are a huge pleasure of mine. I have Stine's Halloween Party, from the Fear Street series, and that was a really fun book, so I was hoping that Halloween Night would be something similar.

Instead, we have a book that runs along similar plot lines to The Stepsister, but with some of the most unlikeable characters I've encountered lately.

Basic plot points: Brenda's cousin Halley has moved in with Brenda's family and basically taken over Brenda's life. She's got Brenda's room - and Brenda's now sleeping in what appears to be a closet - and she steals her clothes and borrows her car and all that sibling stuff that's supposedly normal but is actually really irritating. Then she goes after Brenda's boyfriend. And Brenda's friend Traci's boyfriend. So Brenda, Traci and other friend Dina decide to kill her.

Or not. They're planning a murder mystery for English class, so they murder Halley's character in their story. And then Brenda starts having nasty tricks played on her - dead birds in her room, writing in blood on her wall, maggoty meat in her bed - and of course she assumes it's Halley who's doing it. And her folks don't believe her. So she decides to kill Halley for real. Or something.

First: Brenda. I want to sympathise with her, because Stine does that - he has a talent for making you angry on the part of the characters who are getting stiffed. But I can't understand if she's genuinely getting a raw deal, or if she's just a whinger. I also can't figure out if she was ever genuinely planning to kill Halley, or if it was all a ruse. If it's the former, then she's sick and twisted. If it's the latter, she's sick and twisted and just s bit awesome.

Halley is a bitch, pure and simple. I do feel for her a bit, because her home life is miserable, but being miserable doesn't give you carte blanche to treat others like shit. Now I realise I may be overreacting here, because I'm a) a spoiled only child (four sisters and two brothers, but I wasn't raised in the same house) and b) someone who grew up poor, without a lot of money for stuff. The combination of these two things has made me territorial when it comes to my things. Mine is mine. I'm (almost always) happy to lend people stuff - if they ask. And if I have a pretty good idea that it'll come back in the same condition it went out in, or that it'll be replaced if it's damaged. YMMV here; I'm sure some of you are more generous than I am when it comes to friends and relatives "borrowing" (ie stealing) your things without asking. But just the description of Halley as someone who thought it was okay to take Brenda's things without permission - that made me hate her, just like I hated Jessie in The Stepsister for the same reason.

Well, I did say I was probably overreacting.

The other characters? Traci's fine. Dina's fine. Ted (Brenda's boyfriend) and Noah (Traci's boyfriend), who both end up hooking up with Halley, are pretty much jerks. I don't know how Stine continually writes these teenagers with no conscience. Thankfully I never knew boys like this in high school, although I'm sure there were a few around.

My main contempt, though, is saved for Brenda's parents. They take in their niece, because her parents are going through a bad divorce - but then they find they have no room. Their solution? Give the niece their daughter's bedroom, and shove the daughter into a closet. Harry Potter, but in reverse. Someone carves a threatening message on their daughter's walls, in blood, and instead of comforting her, or questioning the niece, or calling the freaking police if they believed it was done by an intruder, they get upset with their daughter for being angry about it. Repeat pattern with the burnt carcass of a bird thar shows up in a Jack O'Lantern on Brenda's desk. Someone's threatening their kid, and they're more concerned with her hostility towards her cousin. Point Horrors are full of absent parents and absent-minded parents and naïve parents and sometimes just BAD parents, but these ones get the Scumbag Parental Units Of The Year award.

The plot is just too confusing for me. After Brenda finds maggoty meat in her bed, she decides that she needs to kill Halley for real. Then Halley overhears Brenda talking about it, apologises for being rotten, and cries. We're led to believe that Brenda's continuing with the plot to kill Halley, but then at the party they switch costumes and Brenda gets stabbed instead of Halley, cleverly drawing out the prankster and potential killer. The problem is that it's never made clear whether a) Brenda actually planned to kill Halley, and just changed her mind when Halley apologised, or b) the whole killing-Halley thing was one elaborate plot to draw out the prankster. There are too many red herrings in this book, and the amount of twists and turns make it damn near impossible - for this girl, at least - to know what's going on.

So, two stars. Although it's a bit higher on the two-star rating than, say, Hit and Run.

Verdict: A big disappointment, due to an overly complicated plot and unlikable characters.

Thursday 1 November 2012

A Book Review - The Baby-Sitter III by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


Luckily this is the last Baby-Sitter book to review - I don't have #4 - because I don't have much to say that I didn't write in the review for the first book. (See reviews for #1 here and #2 here.)

This entry in the miniseries focuses less on Jenny and more on her cousin Debra. Jenny goes to stay with Debra's family for the summer, to recover from the last year. But she's still having nightmares, and she's starting to see Mr Hagen everywhere, even when she's awake. Then Debra - also a babysitter - starts getting the same phone calls. Has one of Jenny's stalkers moved onto stalking Debra?

Debra's quite a different character from Jenny - more of a flirtatious, extroverted party girl - so having her as the protagonist makes a nice change. Despite this, the book is darker and scarier than the previous two, with potential threats appearing from all sides - the ghost of Mr Hagen, a sinister ex-nanny who still has a key to the house where Debra babysits, and Jenny's odd boyfriend Cal, as well as the final showdown.

Poor old Jen, she really doesn't deserve to go through this again.

Verdict: Not great, not awful. A decent continuation of Jenny's story.

A Book Review - The Cemetery / The Ripper by D.E. Athkins (Point Horror)


Oh Em Gee this book scared me when I was a kid. The British title for this is The Cemetery (US title: The Ripper) and I first read it when my Papa bought me a copy when I was 9 or 10, and sleeping alone on the top floor of my father's gothic Hampstead almost-mansion, right next to - you guessed it, a cemetery.

Yeah, nightmare central. I've never been so glad for my bratty baby sisters to wake me up at 4am.

This time around, it's still a pretty horrific read. I've read it enough times by now, and remember it well enough, that it doesn't shock me the way it did. Yet it is still quite chilling.

On Halloween, a bunch of friends - well, sort of friends - have a private party on the Point (a sort of rock promontory thing) right next to an ancient cemetery. They get the bright idea to have a séance, but then move onto hide and seek - during which one of them is brutally murdered. They don't know whether to suspect each other, or some crazy stranger who might have been lurking around, or if it's something more sinister. Then a second one of them is murdered, and a third, and a house is set on fire. And Charity - the lead character, as much as there IS a lead in this book - has to find out what's happening and how to stop it.

As Point Horrors go, this one is a bit bizarre. For starters, there isn't one single protagonist who the action focuses on - we start with eleven characters, who all get their own sections where we see the action filtered through their eyes and thoughts. This makes for a lot of info-dumping, but as I've mentioned before, I LIKE an info dump - I find it more interesting than conversation a lot of the time. It also make for shallow characters - eleven leads all wanting page time in a short book means that nobody gets explored in depth. Yet, in this particular book, I think having shallow characters works. It keeps the focus on the action and fear. Don't get me wrong, some of them are very likeable. (And others are loathsome - which, to me, is always better than boring.)

These are not squeaky-clean teenagers. They drink and smoke, and allusions are made to sex - even promiscuous sex - although nothing is stated outright. I kind of like this - it makes a nice change, keeps things fresh. The book itself is not squeaky-clean either: the violence is nasty and often graphic. All in all it's a much darker book than most Point Horrors.

There are little details that I like about the book, things that you wouldn't miss if they were absent, but having them present provides that little extra zing. For example, the names really suit their characters. Cyndi Moray - sleek and dangerous, like the eel. Lara Stepford - classically perfect, at least on the surface. Jane Wales - plain Jane, sweet and old-fashioned. Dorian Moray - elegant and handsome and refined, hiding the nastiness underneath. I suppose someone who chooses a nom de plume like D.E. Athkins (Death Kins) knows the importance of names.

Athkins' writing style is often cynical, sometimes humorous, and brilliant at capturing the essence of the character whose thoughts we're hearing. Take this passage from Cyndi's brain:

Her father, who was inexplicably home tonight, would probably keep the guys trapped in the library, pouring out drinks, and weird fatherly charm. And Wills, who was Lara's current entertainment for, oh, the next ten minutes, would drink his, making that careful, idle, polite, endless conversation that boys with names like William Lawrence Howell were so good at making. Dade, on the other hand, who was all lies and laughter, would say no, thank you, he was driving. But the truth was, he just liked saying no. He liked being in control. Dade was very big on control.

I personally find this style of writing to be excellently entertaining, while my friend finds it frivolous and overblown. I guess you need to make up your own minds.

Verdict: As scattered as my review of it - but it makes it work. Pretty darn scary.

A Book Review - The Watcher by Lael Littke (Point Horror)


I liked the idea of this, although the actuality of it could have been improved upon.

Catherine cares about one thing only: her soap opera. Everything in life revolves around watching the soap and being like Cassandra, one of the lead characters. When a cute new boy at school mentions that he enjoys the show and thinks that she looks just like Cassandra, she's even more determined to turn into a Cassandra-clone, cutting her hair the same way and wearing the same clothes.

But Cassandra is being stalked by someone intent on terrorising her, and soon someone starts stalking Catherine in identical ways. 

As I said, I liked the premise of this book, but I felt that the execution could have been improved upon. Catherine is kind of a non-entity; the only standout personality feature is her obsession with this soap opera. I'm not even sure that she HAS a personality other than that which is copied from Cassandra. The book feels choppy to me, and inconsistent with disparate elements. Catherine appears to be this shy, slightly odd girl with few friends - and then we find out she's also a cheerleader. (What?) Travis, the new guy and Catherine's love interest, seems to have a dark past that is alluded to and then basically ignored. The motivations for the villain seem to come out of nowhere. There are some interesting threads here, but they never quite weave together in any kind of regular pattern, and I feel that they should either have been developed or cut loose.

Verdict: Interesting plot, fell down a bit on the writing side.

A Book Review - The Waitress by Sinclair Smith (Point Horror)


I don't even know what to say here. I'm so totally meh about this book. I remember never caring for it, even as a preteen, and I wondered if that had changed. Sometimes my opinion on these books does change - I didn't like The Lifeguard much when I was young, and now I think it's great - but as far as The Waitress goes, I still don't care for it at all.

Funnily enough, I can't quite put my finger on the reasons why. It's formulaic, but lots of books are. The characters - including the heroine - are shallow, but again, plenty are. All I can think is that I didn't get any real emotion from it.

Basic plot points (because I don't care enough to give more than the basics): Paula is new in town and has a job waitressing at the Dog House, a restaurant owned by Trixie, an eccentric 50-something who still dresses and talks like a teenager. Trixie's niece is the beautiful and bitchy Coralynn, who for some reason has it in for Paula and tries to make her life hell. I think it's over a dude, whose name I believe was Garth. Coralynn likes him and refers to him as her "boyfriend" but he likes Paula and says he and Coralynn only had one or two dates. Typical teen stuff, with added bitchiness.

Pranks are played, nothing too serious. Nobody dies. The only person who really gets "attacked" turns out not to have been attacked at all, it was just appendicitis or something. Although one person was killed prior to the events of the book - I forgot about that till just now.

The whole thing was just...blah. The reason for the anger and violence (so to speak) was just weak. There's nothing to like about this book, and nothing to hate either - and that almost makes it worse.

YMMV, of course. I know some of my sixth-grade friends liked it, back in the day. Me, I'm wondering if Sinclair Smith actually wrote this book, since he / she (I'm not sure if Smith is a man or a woman, and can't find the information online anywhere) is usually pretty good. I was a big fan of Second Sight and The Diary, thought that Dream Date was very inventive, and even The Boy Next Door which I HATE - it scares the pants off me - at least evoked some kind of feeling in me. The Waitress just left me entirely numb.

And the annoying thing is that, regardless of any notes I make for myself - in a year or two I won't remember how blah it left me feeling, and will likely read it again. *rolls eyes*

Verdict: Meh.

A Book Review - The Accident by Diane Hoh (Point Horror)


This was one of my childhood favourites. Reading it again, I'm not quite sure how to feel about it. 

I think I'd have liked it better if I'd read it under a different imprint, at a different time. It's not really a horror story, more of an urban fantasy, and as I'm reading these books in October (Halloween season!) horror and crazed killers are what I want. In addition, I came to this one off the back of Trick or Treat, so anything was bound to be a disappointment.

That said, it is a nice book. There's not a lot of suspense in it - I think any reader could have worked out early who the bad guy is - nor many chills, but it's nicely written with a very appealing heroine. Megan is shy and dreamy, so when she first sees a ghost in her mirror she thinks she's imagining things. After all, three of her friends were in a terrible accident that day and she's under a lot of stress. She's not dreaming, though - hanging out in her mirror is Juliet, a girl Megan's age who drowned in the lake. She begs Megan for a chance to take over her body for a week, so she can experience life again, and Megan - the soft-hearted sort - eventually agrees. But she spends the week worrying, because someone is attacking her friends and family, leaving taunting pictures for her as clues as to who will be next. And Juliet isn't acting like someone who'll be gone in a few days.

I didn't like the whole picture thing, it felt random and unnecessary to the plot. The reasons behind the attacks on Megan's family and friends were never explained to my satisfaction, particularly since none of them were killed and few of the "accidents" were serious. But the writing was good enough to keep my attention, and Megan is a fun heroine. Even if she did make the unspeakably stupid choice to swap places with a dead girl. (Don't. It never goes well.)

Verdict: Lighter than other Point Horror books, with a certain sweetness to it. Good for kids, or for anyone looking for something light and fun.