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.

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.