If you were in high school and someone dared you to kill the school’s toughest teacher and then proceeded to tell the entire school that you were planning on killing the school’s toughest teacher, what would you do?

Me, I would probably pretend to be sick for a few days and stay home until everything blew over.  Or maybe I’d transfer to a different school or send an anonymous note to the police or maybe I’d even suggest to the teacher that he should take advantage of my state’s open carry laws.  What I’m saying is that I would do something other than consider the dare and agonize over whether or not I should actually kill the teacher.  I would like to think that killing the teacher would not even be an option for me.  You say to me, “Are you going to kill him?” and I reply, “No.”  What I don’t do is be like, “I don’t know, I guess.”

In 1994’s The Dare, Johanna has a slightly different response.  She knows that murder is wrong but the guy making the dare is Dennis Archer and Dennis is totally hot and rich and self-absorbed whereas Johanna is poor and kind of plain and a little bit insecure.  Dennis and his friends enjoy daring each other to do things.  All of their risk-taking actually does lead to one of Dennis’s friends accidentally getting shot.  That would be enough to convince me not to hang out with Dennis but Johanna is a bit more forgiving of accidental shootings.

Mr. Northwood is a total badass who teaches History, which was always my favorite class in high school.  Mr. Northwood doesn’t care whether or not Dennis and his family are planning on flying to the Bahamas for a week, he’s still not going to give Dennis a makeup midterm.  If Dennis misses the midterm, he’ll fail the course and he might not get to run track and eventually make his way to the Olympics.  But if Dennis stays for the midterm, he won’t get to go on a trip to the Bahamas that he could conceivably take any other time during the year.  As you can guess, it’s a difficult decision but Dennis ends up going to the Bahamas.  When Dennis discovers that Northwood was serious about not giving him a makeup midterm, Dennis starts flirting with Johanna and encouraging her to imagine all the different ways that they could kill Mr. Northwood….

YIKES!

As you can probably guess, the main problem here is that Johanna is kind of an idiot who can’t even find the strength to say, “No, I will not murder my neighbor and teacher, no matter how many times the hottest guy in school asks me too.”  Johanna actually does have other friends, none of whom have ever asked Johanna to kill anyone.  But Dennis is just so hot!

I guess it can be argued that this novel does capture the way that some students feel towards the tough teachers.  When I was in high school, I always assumed that any teacher who was tough on me was doing so because they had a crush on me or they were jealous of me and my naturally red hair.  I got mad at my teachers and I sometimes talked about how much I hoped they would quit or move away but I never made plans to kill them because I’m not psycho like that.

Anyway, The Dare is one of those R.L. Stine books where everyone was so consistently illogical, I assumed the entire thing was meant to be a dream.  Seriously, a hot guy is not worth going to jail over, Johanna!  This book suffered from a lack of likable characters and a lack of a believable plot.  Mr. Northwood was cool, though.  History teachers for the win!