Sunday 28 October 2012

A Book Review - Trick or Treat by Richie Tankersley Cusick (Point Horror)


I don't think I've ever given 5 stars to a Point Horror - except perhaps LJ Smith's Forbidden Game trilogy, and I have that from a different publisher - but this one deserves it. It has everything that I want from YA horror - a small-town setting, an interesting plot, a villain that I wasn't expecting, a heroine that I empathise with (well, mostly), romance (there's never enough romance for love-junkie me, but this had more than most), supporting characters that I would want for my own friends were they real.

The book is - obviously - set around Halloween. Autumn is my favourite time of year and Halloween is my favourite holiday ever, so instant bonus points there. Martha has just moved to a creepy old house in a small town after her father decided to get married and spring it on Martha as a surprise. Nice parenting there, Dad. Dad and Martha move from Chicago to small-town Bedford, and two or three days later Dad and Sally - new stepmama - jet off to Hawaii on a work assignment / honeymoon, leaving Martha, who looks about 12 and has an emotional, sensitive, easily-spooked nature, in the care of new stepbrother Conor, who is a year older and whom Martha has met once.

Let me just say now, this chick has my sympathy, and I'm more than willing to forgive her any histrionics she may have down the line. My own mother had some strange ideas about parenting, and became emotionally (and occasionally physically) absent a couple times when she had a new boyfriend, but if she'd pulled that kind of junk I'd have been on the next plane to stay with relatives.

So Martha has complicated feelings for Conor - it's implied, but never outright stated, that she fancies or maybe loves him but also finds him disturbingly intense - and is alone with him in this spooky old house, and has to face a new school a month and a half after the year has started. Luckily she makes friends with the Chambers cousins: Blake, the charismatic basketball player / Big Man On Campus; Wynn, gentle and introverted; and Greg, a teacher and school counsellor in his late twenties.

The Chamberses are a little shocked at first, because Martha reminds them of Elizabeth Bedford, a friend of Wynn's (and ex of Blake's) who lived in Martha's house and was murdered a year ago on Halloween. Martha and Wynn become good friends and Martha and Blake start dating, but her happiness is diminished by the creepy house, and the strange things that happen in it: the scarecrow with the carving knife in its head that she finds in a tree by the porch, the shadowy figure she keeps seeing in her closet, the cold drafts in her bedroom, the fire that starts downstairs while she's asleep, the figure in the upstairs window, and the threatening phone calls from someone who calls her Elizabeth.

I love the creepy atmospherics of this book - Richie Tankersley Cusick's gothic horror style is so very well-suited to Halloween. The decaying old Bedford place, the time of year, the alien feeling one gets from being thrown into a new family, new home, new school - they all combine to make an atmosphere that's truly chilling even before the weird things start happening. The weird stuff ratchets the tension up a notch, and then a couple more, until I was unable to put the book down and ended up sitting in a bath that had long since got cold.

Martha is a bit more emotional than I usually like my heroines, but considering her situation I'm inclined to cut her some slack. LJ Smith aside, Conor, Martha's stepbrother, is probably one of the sexiest and most intriguing male leads I've come across in YA horror, or any YA fiction for that matter. The hint of romance between them adds tension but also comfort. (I've been arguing the potential existence of this with people online, and some are insistent that it's not there while others are equally insistent that it is - but that's the delight of a Cusick story, I guess. There's always a certain amount of ambiguity.) Certainly the scenes where they're giving each other support are among the most heartwarming - and in some ways heartbreaking - that I've read within the genre.

The Chambers cousins, as supporting characters, aren't as fleshed-out as I'd like, but I like what's there.

The only criticism I have of this book is the same one I have for all of Ms Cusick's: it's not long enough. This is, of course, not the fault of the author who was likely labouring under a maximum word-count, to fit in with other Point Horrors. Not all Point Horror books could be turned into longer stories, but Ms Cusick writes such nicely twisty plots and interesting enough characters that I find myself wanting to know much more about them. Even as a 200-pager, though, it's pretty close to being a perfect YA novel.

Verdict: Quite possibly the best Point Horror I've read.

A Book Review - My Secret Admirer by Carol Ellis (Point Horror)


One of the first Point Horrors I read, and still one of the best.

Jenny's just moved to an unspecified town in an unspecified state, somewhere out west where big red cliffs, called rimrocks, surround the town. She's scared of the rimrocks, but when she gets invited to a school-organised scavenger hunt and gets partnered with handsome dark-eyed David, he talks her into climbing them to look for a bird's nest. A storm comes up and they get separated in the dark, and while Jenny's alone she thinks she hears someone cry out, although she can't make out any words.

The next day, the group find out that beautiful, bitchy Diana had a fall from the rimrocks that night, and is in a coma. Jenny immediately mentions the scream she thinks she heard, but no consensus is reached as to whether she was just hearing the wind.

Jenny's parents go away for a few days, leaving her alone with the dog. She starts receiving gifts from a secret admirer: sweet, thoughtful presents like flowers and wind chimes. But someone is also trying to scare her, leaving a dead snake wrapped like a present in her mailbox, closing the windows and shutting her dog in a hot car, and trapping her in a phone box while he - a sinister, leather clad figure on a black motorbike with a full-face helmet - repeatedly rides towards the booth, threatening to run her down if she tries to leave.

Jenny can't trust anyone in town but her secret admirer - but who is he? And who is threatening her?

As I mentioned, I think this is a great book. It's simple and cleanly-written enough for kids to follow, with enough action to stop them getting bored, yet it has a lasting appeal for me; at 28 I still enjoyed it. Jenny's an odd one; her personality is not particularly well-developed, yet what you do see of her has its own certain charm that makes me want to root for a happy ending for her. The scary scenes are quite chilling, and unique enough to be memorable, particularly the phone booth scene. I remember drawing cartoon strips of this book when I was 8 or 9, and having my dad draw the motorbike for me. I didn't do that with many books, but these were particularly powerful images that stay in the mind after reading.

I enjoyed the setting a lot, too. It's never specified exactly where the book is set, but I have in mind Utah or Arizona. I've always felt particularly comfortable in those places, so I may be attaching my own emotions when I say that the setting, despite its starkness, is very comforting and provides a really nice contrasting background for the scaries.

A great book, really nicely written.

Verdict: A shining example of early suspenseful Point Horror.

Saturday 27 October 2012

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


Jenny's back! After the tragedy of the last book, she's finally getting her life back on track. She has a good therapist and a new babysitting job. In a reversal of fortune from the last book, the house and the parents are normal, and her charge, Eli, is seriously weird. But she wants to stick with the job - until the phonecalls start again. Mr Hagen can't be back from the dead, can he? Who is terrorising Jenny, and why?

Not a bad sequel to The Baby-Sitter. It's written in much the same way, and my comments for that book stand for this one. The only thing that really bothered me was the lack of continuity when it comes to characters. Aside from Jenny, there's nothing familiar carried over from book 1. This is explained away by saying that she didn't want anything around to remind her of the past, but this rings false to me. I've been through tragedies. I work as a crisis worker for others who have. And I can see her dropping her prankster boyfriend from the last book because he couldn't be serious - but her friends? At the risk of sounding judgemental, it takes a pretty unbalanced person to feel like she has to drop all her friends - who weren't involved in the previous traumatic incident - just because they remind her of it. Most people just don't do that. Jenny lost cool points with me due to that.

Verdict: A decent sequel, which would be okay to read alone. Not the best, not the worst, but a fine way to spend an afternoon.

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


This is one of the books that I always think of as the flagship stories for Point Horror. It is perhaps the most famous of the PH titles. It's an odd book for me - in my head it's long and epic, and when I start reading I'm surprised at how quickly it goes by.

Jenny's just started a new babysitting job, for an adorable, if overly mischievous, kid. The house is a creepy old mansion, but she adores the child. Then she starts getting phone calls - "Hi Babes. Are you all alone? Don't worry, company's coming..."

I've never found this series of books particularly scary, but more comfortable in a sort of middle-America way. Aside from a couple of startling places, the horror doesn't really begin until the last fifteen or twenty pages. I think that's what I liked about it, really - phone calls (which could have been pranks) aside, this book could easily have ended differently, with nothing being wrong at all. It's more psychological thriller than horror, and that's a nice change. I appreciate the subtlety - particularly considering this is coming from R.L. Stine, who is often too graphic for my tastes.

Jenny is an appealing character, as is Donny Hagen, her babysitting charge. The rest of the characters are basically non-entities, only there to interact with Jenny. The plot is simple, straightforward, and works well. It's not a 4-star for me, but certainly a high 3, for a quick, fun read.

Verdict: A simply-written psychological thriller that makes a quick, pleasant read.

A Book Review - Prom Date by Diane Hoh (Point Horror)


Oh good Lord, a later Point Horror that's actually really good. Blessed be!

Excuse me, I'm being facetious. I'm just so happy, though. I've certainly noticed - and I'm not the only one, this is something I see echoed in just about every Point Horror blog I've read - that the later PH novels are just, well, not great. Some of them are memorable, with wild plots often involving supernatural stuff, and a handful are excellent - The Stranger comes to mind (although that's not a great example, I have no idea why that one was released under the Point Horror imprint at all) - but the majority of the books released post-1994 don't hold a candle to classics like Trick or Treat, My Secret Admirer, Beach Party or The Train.

I'm happy to say that Prom Date is a delicious return to those golden days.

Margaret is an intelligent, soft-spoken, not-especially-popular girl who works in her beautiful mother's dress store, which at this time of year is filled with the Beautiful People (known as the Pops) who are all trying on prom dresses. The Pops are the bane of her and her friends' lives. There's sleek, bitchy Stephanie; perfect overachiever Kiki; elegant, sophisticated Liza and sweet, pretty Beth. They rule the school and make everyone else feel like something stuck to the bottom of your shoe. (Not that anything would dare stick to the bottom of these girls' shoes.)

Then the senior picnic comes along, and Stephanie is shoved off a watchtower onto the rocks below. Who killed Stephanie, and why? There are so many candidates...

Margaret is surprised when Mitch, one of the most handsome, popular guys in school, starts showing interest in her. But before long, nasty things start happening, both to Margaret and to the store. The dresses that the Pops chose for prom are cut to ribbons. Someone slips poison in Margaret's milk and she narrowly avoids death when she gives it to a stray cat in the alley behind (who is unfortunately not so lucky). Then she gets hit on the head and shoved in a dumpster, and the dumpster set on fire, and is just barely rescued by Mitch. Kiki is attacked and has her face smushed, and the replacement prom dresses are cut to ribbons. Someone is out to destroy the girls who are lucky enough to have prom dates...

I really, really liked this book. There were so many things I loved, and so few that I didn't. First, huge kudos on writing a longer book! I never feel like Point Horrors are long enough to really get a feel for the characters, but Prom Date stands at 274 pages, and the difference really shows. Secondly: dresses. Can I drool a bit? Oh Em Gee. I love 90s fashion, and I love books where characters' clothes are described. These books totally need more shopping scenes.

Third, I utterly adore Margaret. She's got to be one of my favourite Point Horror heroines ever. Quiet but not shy, not popular but not cowed by those who are, soft-spoken and kind but unafraid to speak up - often with a quick, sharp wit - when she or her friends are being put down. This girl is awesome. She's more complex than the one-dimensional heroines you tend to find in teenage horror. She's totally someone I'd want to be, or want to know.

Mitch is lovely. I'm not usually a fan of the sensitive-jock or sensitive popular guy trope, but it kind of works here. Like Margaret, he's better developed than your average Point Horror love interest, and I credit that to the extra length of the book. He's a real sweetheart, and I'm glad, because Margaret deserves someone no less than brilliant. And if their romance progresses a little fast, with only a couple dozen pages between first interest and first I-love-yous? That's okay too. This is the end of high school, after all. :)

I really quite like Margaret's mom, too - an actual present, decent parent for once!

Even the Pops have some depth to their character. I was particularly touched by Kiki's thoughts as she was walking alone, about how hard it was to balance everything in life and put out a flawless, poised image. I was a Kiki in high school, although rather than being in the popular crowd I flitted from crowd to crowd, being welcomed and accepted by all and committing to nobody. I spent a lot of years trying to be close to perfect in all possible areas - good grades, extra credit projects, art classes, volunteer work, popularity, prettiness, being someone who people could rely on but would never need anything from others - and, on the occasions that that failed, providing a smooth untouchable surface that made it appear like I wasn't the slightest bit ruffled by anything. Being a secondary character, we're not provided with Kiki's motivations other than a general fear of messing up, and I'd like to have seen more of her. That said, I'm pretty darn impressed with the fact that we hear the Pops' feelings at all; usually background characters are solidly in the background, and any information we get on them comes via conversations with protagonists.

It's generally agreed that info dumping is a sign of an unprofessional author, but I love info dumps. I'm not a fan of books that are totally dialogue-driven, I like to see people's inner thoughts.

Bitchy in places, scary in others, cheerful in more, this is as comforting as hot tomato soup on an autumn day. I just read it three weeks ago and find myself wanting to read it again.

Verdict: One of the best of the later books, with one of the most developed heroines. Brilliantly entertaining.

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


This was like, the fifth Point Horror book I read this autumn, and after reading another dozen I had to go back and change my 3-star rating to a 4-star, because it stayed with me.

Basic plot: Hannah and friends, along with a bunch of kids from her school, are travelling by train from Chicago to San Francisco. While getting something out of the baggage car, they find a coffin that they realise belongs to Frog, a schoolmate who died recently and who they were all mean to before his death. Hannah - who is already claustrophobic and scared of the train - starts getting attacked by an unknown assailant. Despite the fact that she's locked in the coffin amongst other things, none of her friends seem to take the threats and attacks seriously, even though another friend is stabbed by an ice pick. Hannah is seeing Frog's burned, almost-unrecognisable corpse in various places, and theorises that he's the one playing tricks on her, but nobody believes her.

There's good and bad about this book. The bad, or the hard-to-swallow, is that Hannah's friends don't take her seriously. If I were knocked unconscious and locked in a coffin - I italicise it again, because it's still kind of awesome and terrible to me - I would damn well expect my friends to believe someone is trying to hurt me, and would be furious - like supernova furious - if they wrote it off as a prank. And if a corpse showed up in my bunk, I'd expect them to believe that, not say I was dreaming. I can't figure out if Hannah is a total flake, to have these friends who blithely shrug off her tales of terror, or if her friends - and for that matter, the teachers and detective on the train - are just really dim.

Also, a couple of the things the characters say made me go, WTF? Like, "The train won't leave without us." Uh, what?

The good is that Hannah and her friends are likeable characters, despite their assorted faults, and the book is chilling. I've had it for about twenty years and I still get freaked at some of the scenes. Now that's lasting power. :) The plot, aside from Hannah's friends' disbelief, is well-crafted and the killer's motivation is solid. (After so many books with really shaky reasons behind everything, this is very welcome!) And bonus points for creativity for setting a horror story on a train. Working within those limits couldn't have been easy.

Verdict: Towards the top of my Diane Hoh pile. Better than The Fever and Funhouse, not quite as good as Prom Date.

A Book Review - Help Wanted by Richie Tankersley Cusick (Point Horror)


I liked this book a lot. It's quite different to the other Cusick books I've read - for one thing, Robin's mother isn't entirely absent, although we don't see her much - and there's more of a "normal" background than in books like Trick or Treat or Teacher's Pet. It is still a good read, though, with that creepy gothic feeling that Ms Cusick does so very well.

Robin, reserved and introverted class brain, applies for a job cataloguing books in a personal library. She's a little hesitant, because the job happens to be at Manorwood, a decaying gothic mansion that is home to Parker Swanson - the confident, arrogant hottie who just started at school - and his fragile blossom of a stepsister, Claudia. Worse, the books that are to be catalogued belong to Claudia's dead mother, a medium (and reported witch, or something that rhymes with it) who killed herself some months back.

Someone is trying to terrorise Claudia, and bleeding-heart that Robin is, she's determined to protect her, even when Robin herself starts seeing phantoms in the bathtub and getting threatening notes tacked to her door. Claudia thinks it's her mother, haunting her from beyond the grave. Robin thinks there's a more prosaic meaning. Parker just thinks Claudia's a fruit loop. What's the truth?

The truth, or at least my subjective version of the truth, is that this is a pretty good book. It's probably at the lower end of the 4-star area, rather than the higher end the way The Lifeguard was, but still deserves a 4-star rating IMO. Robin is an interesting heroine, although I'd have liked to delve a bit deeper into her character - but I don't really expect to be able to in a 200-odd page book. I like that she's bookish and quiet; I find the bookish quiet heroines hold my interest much more than the party-girl ones. Parker could have been a bit more drawn out; I don't feel like we got enough of him, and he had a whole lot of potential. Ditto for Walt. Claudia is the one who really steals the show - she's a beautifully-written, very convincing portrayal of a wounded-flower girl who isn't quite sure if she's sane or not.

The plot is nicely twisty, as most of Ms Cusick's stories are. Particularly young readers might find it hard to keep their attention on the book - while I started reading Point Horror at 8 or 9, I preferred Stine and Hoh and didn't really appreciate the subtlety of Cusick until I was 13 or 14.

The only thing I wasn't keen on with this book was the way Robin treated Parker. She really seemed to dislike him, and we were never given any concrete reason why. Oh, she thought he was arrogant, and he was, but he was always nice to her, and I'd have liked to see a couple of scenes that let them get closer together. Cusick writes her romantic - or sometimes just creature comfort - scenes in such a beautiful way that my heart feels all prickly during them, and I'd like to have seen more of them here.

Or maybe just more Parker. Parker was hot. I do have a thing for those arrogant-but-good-hearted blonds. :)

Verdict: Nice juxtaposition of the chilling and the comforting. A wonderfully twisted read.

A Book Review - Funhouse by Diane Hoh (Point Horror)


It's funny, Funhouse was so full of holes and places that required great suspension of disbelief. Yet I really quite liked it. Maybe that's due to my nostalgia; Funhouse was one of the earliest Point Horror books I owned as a kid. (That said, The Fever was the first one I had, and was one of my favourites as a 9 and 10-year-old, yet my adult self didn't like it at all. So nostalgia doesn't account for everything.)

The basic plot points are as follows: Tess lives in a small coastal town along with her group of friends, all of whom are from rich families whose parents are part-owners in The Boardwalk, an amusement park on the beach. At the beginning of the book, the Devil's Elbow roller coaster flies off its tracks, killing at least one person (a boy Tess' age; I don't think it's mentioned whether any others died) and injuring many, including a girl and boy implied to be from Tess' group of friends. Tess sees a shadowy figure underneath the roller coaster just after the accident, which she mentions to her friends. Later, at home, she receives a taunting note that implies that the accident was not, in fact, accidental, and asking Tess who she thinks will be next. Will it be her?

One by one, Tess' friends are attacked, and it soon becomes clear to her that someone is after the kids whose parents own The Boardwalk.

Spoilers abound for the rest of this review, because it's impossible to review this particular book without them, so be warned.

I said at the beginning that this book is absolutely FULL of plot holes. The biggest concerns the initial roller coaster disaster. The killer's aim is to punish the parents who own The Boardwalk by harming their children. Indeed, Tess shouts words to this effect at her cynical, disbelieving ex - "Haven't you even noticed that the kids hurt the worst so far all have parents on The Boardwalk's board of directors?" Yet - and I'm not particularly technical, so correct me if I'm wrong here - I see NO POSSIBLE WAY to engineer a roller coaster crash so that I can choose who will be killed or badly injured. Short of convincing your friends to ride it at the same time, and keeping too many other people from getting on, I can't even see a way of even ensuring that the right people will be on it. I suppose there's a faint possibility that those three kids rode it a dozen times every day, all together, but I doubt it. Most likely, IMO, is that causing the crash was a spontaneous decision by the killer, but the chapters that are written from the killer's perspective belie this.

Later in the book, the killer steals the heroine's keys, so that she'll go and look in the Funhouse for them and fall through the floor onto the beach below. This just seems like a sloppy trick to play on someone, as a) she may not even notice her keys are lost; b) she may not care / may have a spare set; c) she may not think to look in the Funhouse; d) she may fall through the floor and land on cushiony sand without much injury, unless it's a really long drop (and how far can it be, from boardwalk to beach? Fifteen feet, max?); and e) her best friend may volunteer to look instead. Which is what happened. Sloppy sloppy.

So yeah, the killer really didn't seem to know what s/he was doing. And her / his motivations were pretty suspect. Without giving away the ENTIRE plot, I gotta say that most teens I know, if they discovered what s/he discovered, would most likely be shocked for a while and then shrug it off. Unless s/he already had huge, hidden mental problems - which is never mentioned - I don't see how they could turn into a murderer from learning what was, ok, a pretty rotten secret, but not really a life-destroying one.

I snark, I admit it. My navy SEAL always yells at me for being bitchy about enemy weaknesses. Be thankful, he tells me. Every time the bad guy messes up makes one less battle you have to fight. In person, I get his point, but I still find it hard to tolerate idiocy, and when it's a fictional villain who's acting like a moron, I reserve the right to snark about him / her.

Snark aside, though, I did think this was a cool book. With the isolated feelings that Tess has, staying alone in her stepmother's condo and having no real relationship with her father or stepmother, an overbearing ex-boyfriend and only one friend that she really gets on with, it's a recipe for an uncomfortable Sati, yet something about the book was quite fun. It was certainly fast-paced and kept my attention. The ending hurt my heart a bit, but it was certainly unexpected the first time I read it.

Verdict: Simple, easy-to-read cotton candy for the brain.

A Book Review - Camp Fear by Carol Ellis (Point Horror)


This is a really difficult one for me to review.

Rachel has a summer job as a counsellor at Camp Silverlake. For the first week, the camp is open to counsellors only as they prepare the place for the campers. Her fellow counsellors are an interesting bunch: three other girls and four guys from varying backgrounds, some of whom know each other from summers at the camp as children, others who are newcomers.

Things seem tense amongst some of the counsellors, and Rachel soon learns why: seven years ago, when five of them were campers, a boy died accidentally. There seems to be more to it, but Rachel doesn't know what. Soon nasty tricks start being played on the counsellors who were there that summer, and each one plays upon their worst fears. But who is doing it, and why?

I can't say that I actually liked the book. Yet I thought it was good. The writing was pretty smooth, as far as short teenage horror novels go. The horror mechanism - by which I mean the scary things that happened - was unique enough to hold my interest; scaring your victims by playing up to their fears and phobias is much more interesting than just slashing tires and leaving threatening notes. The characters were as deep as could be expected from a 200-odd page book aimed at teens that features eight main characters who all want page time, and none of them acted in a particularly irritating and / or unrealistic way, the way they seem to in a lot of books.

Why didn't I like it? It's hard to put my finger on a reason. It was sad, very sad. And lonely. Maybe it was the plotline, maybe it was the camp setting with its lack of tried-and-true friends and absence of parental figures. Either way, it wasn't a comfortable book for me to read. I like my teen novels set against a backdrop of familiarity: high school, parents, home, friends that the protagonist knows and trusts. Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but at least for most of the novel it's there. Camp Fear just left me feeling lonely and alone.

Possibly I should have left off a rating for this one. I've given it three stars within the context of teen horror, because it was written pretty nicely with an interesting plot, and I'm sure that not all readers are as emotionally affected by setting as I am.

Verdict: Bleak and sad, but worth a read.

A Book Review - Hit and Run by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


I don't always check the authors on Point Horror books, particularly ones that have been in my possession for a long time. (Many of these date back to 1991 - 1994.) Other times I glance at the author and all that registers is that it's one of the 'usual' ones - Diane Hoh, Richie Tankersley Cusick, R.L. Stine, Carol Ellis, Sinclair Smith, Caroline B. Cooney et al - but I don't quite register which one. (That's not entirely true; I almost always register Caroline B. Cooney. I have a passion for Cooney, even at 28.)

Anyway, I picked up Hit and Run when I was half asleep earlier, read the first couple chapters and thought, this must be a Stine.

We have, in this book, a typical mediocre-Stine (as opposed to great-Stine) group of "best friends" who don't really seem to like each other at all - the ringleader (Winks), the follower (Scott), the girl who knows that it's wrong but laughs anyway (Cassie) and the one who's mercilessly and passive-aggressively abused (Eddie). The group like to play practical jokes on Eddie, knowing that he hates them, and managing, in that way that the best (and I use that term loosely) bullies do, to make Eddie look and feel like the bad guy / spoilsport if he doesn't stand there and take it. Then one night they borrow a parent's car and go out to practise their driving (none have licenses) and Eddie hits and kills a man.

Naturally they decide to leave the body and run away, because that's what teenagers always do, right? No moral compasses, any of them. #sarcasm

You know what happens next. Threatening notes, supposedly from the dead guy. One of them gets hit by a car and ends up in hospital, etc. It's been done before, several times - most memorably in Lois Duncan's I Know What You Did Last Summer, a book I read in grade school half a dozen years before they mutilated it and reformed it into a slasher movie.

This book was such a slog for me. Usually even two-star books have redeeming points. I did manage to read this from start to finish, so I can't justify giving it one star, but then I'm not sure I've ever come across a one-star book. There were a few lines here that made me chuckle, but the majority of it was more teeth-grinding than funny or scary. The first thing I really disliked was, as I mentioned, the way these "friends" treat Eddie. The second thing was the whole hiding-a-murder plot. Horror and suspense books only really work when you can empathise with the protagonists and pull for them to get out of their bad situation, right? Yet with characters like this, even if they come through without getting hurt and everything's fine and dandy at the end - it's not, not really, because you (and your closest friends) are still that guy who would accidentally kill someone and then never own up to it. Occasionally - and I do mean occasionally - an author can create characters who are simpatico enough that you root for them despite their heinous wrongdoings. Duncan did. Stine did not. If these guys had all ended up in hospital after getting run down, I wouldn't have cared in the slightest.

Thirdly, some of the activities here just push the boundaries of taste and socially acceptable behaviour way beyond their limits. Sorry for spoilers, but - carrying a corpse around for shits and giggles. Yes, really. I'm not the squeamish type - I'm an ex premed student who has real (ancient) bones in her house that come out for Halloween, and would be entirely happy to have people do the same with mine in a century or two - but even I find some things unacceptable, and the idea that a bunch of teenagers would quite literally play with a rotting corpse, one who presumably had NOT donated his body to medical science or teenage amusement, leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth. Even worse, not one of them seems to realise that this is not okay. Stine is well-known for including scenes of violence and ickiness, but at least it's usually not quite so gratuitous.

Verdict: Yuck on all levels. My kids will not be reading this one.

Monday 22 October 2012

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


I remembered the main plot points of this book quite well, despite the fact that I probably hadn't read it in fifteen years, but I couldn't remember if I actually liked it or not. Happily, it turns out that I did.

Karen (California girl) and her friend Ann-Marie (visiting from New York, where she's been living for a few years) are spending the summer at Venice Beach, and are planning to party nonstop. Karen's recently broken up with her boyfriend, so she's thrilled when she meets two new guys: sweet, handsome Jerry and menacing-but-sexy Vince. She and Jerry really hit it off, but someone starts leaving her messages, warning her to stay away from him. Jerry's maybe-girlfriend-maybe-ex doesn't seem to like Karen. Ann-Marie is acting strangely. And then the nasty pranks start.

This is one of R.L. Stine's best books, I think. I feel a little uncomfortable saying that, because it's a pretty old book - 1991, I think - and I like to think that authors improve over the years. This doesn't always happen with Stine. I don't know if it's because I've been reading too many of his Fear Street books over the years, but a lot of his plots seem to be both outlandish and recycled. With the amount of different criminal and supernatural / preternatural elements that he adds to his books, they shouldn't ever feel stale, yet to me they often do. There are some good titles in the Fear Street series, and also a lot of forgettable ones that feel rushed and lacking in vitality.

Perhaps it's because this is an early book of his, or perhaps it's the different setting, or perhaps it's the fact that Point Horror is aimed at a slightly older reader than Fear Street. Whatever the reason, Beach Party still feels fresh to me. This is going to sound odd, and you may not get what I mean, but it feels honest. Like Mr Stine wrote it because he wanted to, rather than churning it out on contract the way I suspect he does with a lot of his books.

Ah, I don't mean to denigrate Mr Stine. I liked him a lot as an early teenager and preteen, and still enjoy some of his books nowadays. I just find him hit-or-miss.

So yeah, I really enjoyed Beach Party a lot. The characters are a little shallow, but they're fun and pleasant enough to root for. The plot is reasonably tight, and I enjoyed the big reveal at the end. The best thing for me, though, is that this book really captures the zeitgeist of the late 80s and early 90s. I lived at the beach up until about 1989, and as soon as I started reading this, I could have been back there. I put on a Def Leppard T-shirt while I read, stuck some cheerful pop songs from 1990 and 1991 on my iPod, and had a fantastic couple of evenings reading. 1990 was a brilliant year for me, and it was an utterly hedonistic pleasure to be able to revisit it via this book.

I love the cover, too. Simple, beautiful and just a tad creepy - but not creepy enough to rid me of that happy feeling.

Verdict: Elements that pulled together nicely. Great fun to read.

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


Okay, so it's a total ripoff of Rear Window. At least it's a fairly good ripoff. Jody has gone skiing with a bunch of kids she doesn't know, since she was invited by a friend who's now stuck at home with flu. (Does this really happen? If the only person I knew on a trip had to cancel, I'd likely cancel too, particularly if everyone else knew each other and I hadn't invested any money in it. Not to mention the fact that my parents would have been iffy about me going away with a bunch of strangers at the age of 17, even strangers that my best friend vouched for. But maybe that's just me.) Anyway, she goes to a ski resort with six strangers, skis for a couple of days, and then sprains her ankle and ends up stuck in bed. (I've had sprained ankles, and torn ligaments, and broken bones. I did NOT end up confined to bed in a single room, doped up on painkillers. Again, maybe just me.) While she's stuck in bed, she watches people in other cabins (not just me!) and sees what might be the murder of the beautiful, spoilt girl in the cabin next door, who is love-hated by two of the guys in Jody's group and just plain hated by the other four. She's not sure that anything really happened. There was a red stain that could have been blood, but it's gone now. The girl hasn't been seen again, but she did say she might be leaving any minute. There was someone dragging something heavy through the snow, but that could have been garbage bags.

Then the girl shows up dead.

Dear Lord, why do these kids not phone the police?!

For all its faults, though, The Window is a pretty good read. Carol Ellis manages to weave a feeling of alienation through the book, allowing the reader to get a pretty good idea of the isolation and confusion that Jody feels, not knowing anyone properly, not really being able to trust anyone, not being mobile enough to just leave. It's a lonely book, with enough bitchiness and friction between the supporting characters to keep you on your toes, and a bizarre villain who somehow works. Tense and creepy.

Verdict: Not an especially comfortable read, but quite chilling.

A Book Review - Call Waiting by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


You know, I don't even know what to say about this. I remember when it came out, it looked really exciting, but I never got a copy until I was about 16. I remember I borrowed it from friends at least twice. Then I picked up a 3-in-1 collection containing it in a second-hand store. I read it a handful of times since then.

And you know what? I did not remember a darn thing about the book. Not the plot, not the characters' names, not even a single powerful scene like R.L. Stine is famous for including in his books.

I think that the not-remembering was probably self-preservation. It's really not a very good book. It's one of those, like The Girlfriend, that has an interesting premise but doesn't come off well. Our female lead, Karen, is whiny and annoying and just a bit obsessive when it comes to her boyfriend. (Okay, more than a bit. She's about five steps away from Shannon in The Girlfriend.) The "twist" that comes halfway through the book is so blooming obvious that it might as well have been signposted. And the ending? The boyfriend, whose name I don't recall even though I read the book last week, actually decides that he loves whiny obsessive Karen.

Sigh. Perhaps I'm just bitter. My ex decided he loved his whiny obsessive girlfriend too. There seems to be a lot of it going around.

Verdict: One of the few books where I was rooting for the villain instead of the "heroine".

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


It's funny, I remember this being my favourite book when I was 8 or 9. I even chose it to go in our school's time capsule as an example of 90s teenage literature. Fast forward 20 years, and I found it a real slog to get through.

Main plot points: Duffy is sick with an unspecified illness that gives her a terrible fever, so with American healthcare being what it is, she's being kept in hospital. (I'm a little jealous. Here in England the doctor gives you Paracetamol and antibiotics and tells you to take fluids and bed rest. The only time I was sent to hospital was when I was, quite literally, dying. But I digress.) Anyway, Duffy doesn't want to be in hospital. She can't sleep at night because of weird noises coming from the (empty) bed beside her, and she thinks that the hospital is making her sicker. Then someone tries to kill her a bunch of times, with various clumsy tricks, and she finds out that she's getting dosed with the wrong pills, but she doesn't have a clue which of the hospital workers - who all seem to be friends of hers - is trying to knock her off.

Having been pre-med myself until I got really sick, I kind of like horror stories set in hospitals. I've never understood why so many people find hospitals creepy - I've spent enough time in them, both as a volunteer and a patient, that they feel like a second home to me - but I enjoy the second-hand creep factor that comes through books like this, not to mention the multitude of potential murder weapons. So the setting works for me. The prose is a little clumsy, but that alone wouldn't put me off. My main bug-a-boo with the book is Duffy, our heroine. She's - well, she's just not a very nice person. She's very sick, so you have to cut her a bit of slack, but there's a line beyond which you cease being a crabby sick person and become a bitch - and she passed that line early on in the book. She's rude and stuck-up to the (slightly arrogant but kind and friendly) orderly who has a crush on her. She throws tantrums because the food isn't to her liking. She whinges about how awful she feels and then ignores medical advice. I'm trying to remember if I was ever such an awful patient, during any of my many illnesses. Nope. I don't think so. Maybe. Regardless, it still makes for tough reading.

The book culminates with a scene where we find out the who, what and why of everything that's been going on, and where Duffy, fever-ridden and emaciated as she is, manages to fight off the killer and shut them in a cupboard in the morgue. Okay, I can get behind that. I think that was the first time I really liked Duffy, when she was kicking ass. The big secrets, however, are pretty sad, and the book ends on a depressing note.

Verdict: Bleak and depressing, and hard to empathise with.

A Book Review - The Girlfriend by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


Not much to say about this. I seem to remember it as being quite good, yet this time I found it barely readable. There were things that I liked about the book - I liked Scotty and Lora's relationship, and the way they were different from your average teens, and I like the premise of the novel - but it was let down by Scotty being such a...well, I was going to use an alternative word for "cat" but I'll stick with "wimp".

In The Girlfriend, Scotty - the boy next door with the perfect life - has the perfect girlfriend, but when she goes on vacation he meets another girl and takes her out a few times. Then she goes all bunny-boiler on him, having decided that he's hers now. And Scotty spends the rest of the book alternately trying to avoid her, trying to tell her he doesn't want her, and running from (what he thinks are) her intimidating older brothers. While simultaneously lying to his girlfriend Lora about having ever met Ms bunny-boiler, and trying to placate Ms bunny-boiler so she doesn't tell Lora.

Oy veh. What a balancing act.

I want to sympathise, I really do. I've been in Scotty's situation, and it's not fun. But while I want to sympathise, I want even more to give him a kick up the backside and tell him to stop lying and stop pandering to the stalker, and tell her to take a hike. Several times during the book, he talks to her on the phone, or goes over to her house, to tell her that he can't see her anymore. And each time he goes away convinced that she's got the message this time, and won't be any more trouble. Uh, no. That's not how lunatics work, Scotty, and I'd expect even a teenage boy to be aware of this instead of being so naïve as to think that politely (or even impolitely) asking a crazy person who's obsessed with you to please leave you alone will make them do so.

What would I have done? First real instance of unhingedness, I'd have gone to my girlfriend and told her the truth, or perhaps an edited version of it. I might not have said that I'd taken this other girl out because she was hot and I was bored and lonely - I'd probably have said I felt sorry for her because she was new in town and didn't seem to have any friends - and I knew it was a stupid thing to do, and I'm sorry. Then I'd have flipped Ms bunny-boiler the bird, said, "Good luck with blackmailing me now," and then if she continued stalking me I'd have told my parents and the police. Simple.

Of course, eventually Scotty has to come clean, which he should have done to start with, because you can't let a situation like that go on indefinitely. Either someone finds out, or you end up a statistic on Unsolved Murders.

Teenagers. *eyeroll*

Verdict: An interesting premise, let down by a hero with no spine or common sense.

A Book Review - The Dead Game by A. Bates (Point Horror)


I'm trying to work out why I don't read this book more often - I always think of it as one that I don't like much - and I can only conclude that I'm put off by the dark, depressing cover, because it's really quite a good book. In a departure from the usual sharp delineation between victims and perps that you usually find in these books, The Dead Game is set around a trio of friends who decide that they want revenge against a bunch of schoolmates who they feel cheated them out of something that was rightfully theirs - good grades, class rank, athletic winnings, etc. They devise a game where they make 'hits' on the cheaters - the hit taking the form of a public embarrassment, preferably one that will expose them as the cheaters and liars that they are. But the hits go wrong, with things having more serious consequences than expected - one ends up in hospital, and another dies - and when they call an end to the game, someone continues playing until all the targets have been taken out.

I liked this book for a number of reasons: the inventiveness of the plot, the passion of the characters, and the lessons that they come to learn. The characters are vibrant and relatable with strong voices, and right from the beginning I was drawn in by them. I felt their pain and their anger at the unfairness, and how I hated those cheating rats who'd robbed them. Although I've never been a vengeful person myself, I could understand their feelings, and I wanted their targets to pay. As the book went on, the characters' righteous anger was overtaken by fear, confusion and eventual regret and remorse, and those were palpable too.

By the end of the book, our wannabe-vigilantes have had their trial by fire, and learned that there are more important things in life to worry about than class rank and athletic prowess, and that you can't take revenge on cheaters and liars and other rotten people without becoming a bit of a rotten person yourself. Lessons that we could all do with a recap on sometimes, I think.

Verdict: An intriguing plot, vibrant characters and morals to be learned make this a gripping read.

A Book Review - The Dead Girlfriend by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)


Another book that I can't quite work out my feelings for. R.L. Stine is probably one of the most popular YA authors, and I attribute this to the powerful - and sometimes horrific - images that are so prolific in his novels. While I didn't really remember the plot of this, several of the scenes - the waterfalls, the electric keyboard, the cat in the spaghetti pot - were embedded in my memory without being attached to any book or plotline. That kind of heavy-handed imagery is a little too clumsy for my adult self, but very effective on teens and preteens.

In this novel, we have Annie, who has just moved to a new town. The first person she meets is the mysterious, attractive Jonathan, and she is immediately interested in him, an interest he seems to return. However, at school she finds out that his last girlfriend died (either a few months ago or a year and a few months ago, it's not clear - although I assumed the latter) when she fell off the cliff at the waterfall. Her death was ruled an accident, but rumours fly that Jonathan had something to do with it (he was there that day, and allegedly left her alone for a few minutes, which is when she fell).

Annie starts having some nasty tricks played on her, ranging from the mild (erasing a disk containing a research project) to the really awful (killing her cat), and she has no way of knowing if it's got anything to do with Jonathan and his dead girlfriend or not.

This isn't Stine's best. Nor is it his worst. Annie is kind of a blank canvas, neither particularly likeable nor loathsome. Jonathan is kind of interesting - I'd like to have seen more of him. I didn't guess the killer, although I probably should have.

Verdict: Lightweight fluff that I enjoyed while reading - and will most likely forget in the next couple days.

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


This is a truly odd book. It's one of the first Point Horrors I owned, back when I was 8 or 9, but I couldn't really get into it well back then. I know I read it - I can tell from the cover that it's been read a lot, LOL - but I didn't really remember it very well.

Richie Tankersley Cusick is an interesting writer. Her writing style is more subtle than some of the other Point Horror authors like Diane Hoh or R.L. Stine, perhaps a little more sophisticated, and as a result I think she probably appeals more to teenagers than to the preteen crowd. She's not as heavy-handed on the imagery as some of the authors, and that means that (for me, at least) her plot points don't stay in the memory for that long. There's no single image, in this book or any other of hers, that stands out for me years later the way the jellyfish in the bed (in R.L. Stine's Beach Party), the girl who gets locked in a coffin (in Diane Hoh's The Train) or the leather-clad biker who terrorises a girl trapped in a phone booth (in Carol Ellis' My Secret Admirer) do. Yet this is not necessarily a bad thing; the lack of that sometimes overwhelming imagery means that most of her books feel fresh and new each time I read them.

As far as The Lifeguard goes, I enjoyed it very much. The plot is average: Kelsey arrives on a small island for a vacation with her mother, to stay with mom's boyfriend and his kids, only to find that the thirteen-year-old daughter is missing and that there have been a couple of suspicious drownings recently. The parents are absent for most of the book - this is a recurring theme in teenage horror novels - and Kelsey is left in the company of mom's boyfriend's two sons: sweet, shy Justin and dark, intense Neale, as well as two other island kids, bubbly Donna and arrogant-but-charming Skip. Due to a note she finds in her room (that says, "I think someone is going to kill me"), Kelsey becomes convinced that Beth, the missing daughter, has been murdered. She just doesn't know by whom. And then the terror starts, with wet footprints on her rug when she thinks she's alone in the house, a body that appears and disappears, and a crazy old man who keeps showing up and yelling warnings.

While it's a little light on depth - although to be fair, you can't expect too much from a 200-page teenage book - Ms Cusick has a way of creating likeable characters that you want to root for. Combine this with a creepy, almost gothic feeling that weaves its way through the narrative, and a sense of loneliness during the scenes that feature Kelsey alone that contrasts nicely with the cheerful comfort of the supporting characters, and you have a very enjoyable, somewhat haunting read.

Verdict: An excellent YA novel that is probably at least partly responsible for the success of Point Horror in the early 90s.

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

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.

A Book Review - Second Sight by Sinclair Smith (Point Horror)

I actually have finally gotten around to reviewing some of the books I've been reading lately. They're not *great* reviews (like my friend Gaele's) - because, well, a) I don't get paid for reading and reviewing, and therefore don't have the time (or energy!) to make them pristine, and b) Most of the books I've been reading lately are of either the cheesy teenage Point Horror or the cheesy adult Harlequin / Silhouette / Mills & Boon type, and neither of those are the type of books where readers expect fabulously written reviews.

I may eventually put these in a blog of their own, if I find that I get to writing reviews for all the books I read, but for now they'll make a home here. You can also find all my book-related stuff on my Goodreads profile.


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I read this once when I was a kid, and remembered it vaguely. This week, after seeing it on a list of Point Horror books and thinking, "I kinda liked that one, I think," I ordered it from eBay. Devoured it in an afternoon. I'm not sure if it's just because I've only read it twice, but I really did enjoy this book.

When we meet Grayson, she's just got her sight back after a restorative operation, having been blind for several years. She's a little unsteady on her feet, but she's getting better. Unfortunately her vision doesn't come free. She's started having visions of people being pushed to their death. She reads about a celebrity who died falling off his balcony, and assumes that he was the one in her visions - but the location doesn't quite match up. And then she realises that there's to be more than one murder, and that each vision incorporates pieces from the next one. Her doctor doesn't believe her, but she manages to enlist the help of a police detective, and is shocked to find out that the cornea transplant that restored her sight came from a psychic who worked with the police. The murderer somehow knows that she's seeing things, though, and will do anything to stop her.

There are holes in the plot. Of course there are. Firstly, I don't know a lot of police detectives that are happy to work with psychics, particularly untested teenage ones. (I do know quite a few psychics.) Secondly, the motivations for the killer are very thin, and never properly explained. What explanation there is seems quite random. The name of the killer is the same as the name of her friend's boyfriend - who we never meet - but it's never explained whether this is coincidence, or whether the friend's actually been dating the killer.

That said, I enjoyed the book a lot. Grayson is a pleasant heroine who I would like as a friend. Her love interest is sexy and intriguing. The neighbor girl that she makes friends with early in the book is fun and light, and the parties that she gives provide a background to see a different side to Grayson from the serious recent-invalid that she is during the rest of the book. The New York City setting provides a nice respite from the usual small towns that you usually find in Point Horror. The suspense was good, and I didn't have a clue who the killer might be - I had three or four people who I suspected heavily, but didn't know which, if any, it was.

What I liked most about the book, though, is the way Sinclair Smith treated Grayson's psychic ability. This next sentence may completely rob me of any credibility that I've had thus far, but here goes: I am a psychic. Sort-of-kind-of-a-bit. I'm an empath with some very limited psychometric and future-telling abilities. And I cannot tell you how tired I get of programs like Medium (which I find annoying as hell) and Ghost Whisperer (which I do actually like) and myriad books where the psychic hero or heroine is reliable, even infallible. Because it just doesn't work like that, ya know? I've never met a psychic yet who was totally reliable in their visions and / or predictions, although I've certainly met some who are better at it than I am. Mostly we muddle around, and if it helps at all with things, it's only a bit. But books and movies and television shows treat it as this great Powerful Supernatural Gift (you can almost hear the capital letters when people say it) that makes it easy to get any answers that you're looking for.

Second Sight didn't do that. Grayson made mistakes. It took her a while to realise that her visions were getting mixed up, and that the locations of the murders and attempted murders weren't exactly the way she saw them. And she mucked up when it came to identifying the killer. For a reason that was later explained, but still. And I really liked that. It made it a story about an ordinary girl with some psychic ability instead of a story about a psychic, if that makes any sense.

Verdict: A plot full of holes, but enough charm to more than make up for it.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

Procrastination

At some point I am actually going to have to get round to inputting the rest of the blog posts in here. I only have, like, a quarter of them left. I just kind of forgot to do the rest.

Blame it on becoming a Goodreads librarian. :) My obsessive-compulsive self is in heaven, being able to organise and catalog.