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.