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.