Category Archives: Book Review

Horror Book Review: Lights Out by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Never go camping!

Seriously, if there’s any lesson to be learned from the nearly 600 posts that showed up on the site through the month of October in 2023, do not go camping.  If you take nothing else away from Horrorthon, I hope you’ll take away a strong disdain for camping in general and summer camp in specific.  Seriously, the wilderness is full of monsters and summer camps seem to breed madmen.

Just consider R.L. Stine’s 1991 novel, Lights Out.

In Lights Out, Holly is spending the summer working as a counselor at her uncle’s summer camp and it absolutely sucks!  Not only does the summer camp have a long history of weird events and tragedy but no one seems to be happy about Holly being there.  Holly doesn’t like the outdoors and she doesn’t like bugs and she certainly doesn’t like snakes, even if they’re just made out of rubber.  The other counselors, rather than trying to help Holly out, spend the entire time bullying her and then threatening her to keep her quiet.  At one point, they even throw leeches at her!  Seriously, who does that!?  Who not only collects leeches but also throws them at someone!?

Why is everyone being so mean to Holly?  Well, a lot of it because the two resident mean girls think that Holly is going to steal the attention of the male counselors.  But Holly feels that there’s something even more sinister happening at the camp.  Someone appears to be vandalizing the camp and trying to force her uncle to shut the place down.  Eventually, one of the counselors dies when someone shoves her face against the pottery wheel.

Of course, the camp doesn’t shut down.  It takes more than just one murder to shut down a summer camp.  Things come to a head when, despite being terrified of the outside, Holly takes part in leading the camp’s nature hike.  Why is Holly even working as a camp counselor?  I know it’s because her mother demanded that she do something more than just hang out around the house during the summer but, seriously — there’s a lot to do in Shadyside!  There’s so much Holly could have done!

The main message of this book is that camping sucks and I could definitely agree with that.  If the girl on the book’s cover had red hair, she could have easily been me whenever I was up at my grandfather’s farm in Arkansas and I was trying to figure out if there was a snake in the nearby high grass or if all the hissing was just my imagination.  As for the plot, it was basically Friday the 13th with a much smaller body count.  (Christopher Pike would have killed off the whole camp.  R.L. Stine is a bit nicer.)  It’s a bit of a silly book but the message comes through loud and clear.

CAMPING SUCKS!

Horror Book Review: The Dare by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

Horror Novel Review: The Rich Girl by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1997 novel, The Rich Girl, tells the story of two teenage friends.

Emma is poor and worried about how her family is going to be able pay for her mother’s medical needs.  Sydney is rich and worried that Emma is going to stop being her friend just because she doesn’t like Sydney’s boyfriend, Jason.  As you can probably guess, one of these friends has much larger and far more serious concerns than the other but this book is called The Rich Girl and therefore, Sydney is our main character.  Sorry, Emma.  Only rich people get to star in Fear Street books.

Anyway, Sydney and Emma work at the local movie theater.  One night, they come across a duffel bag that someone has been left behind.  It’s full of money!  In fact, there’s more than enough money to help out Emma’s mother.  Sydney wants to turn the money in but Emma points out that her family needs the money and, even more importantly, Emma needs the money.  Emma wants to go to college and she wants to finally buy some pretty clothes and she wants her mother to be alive to see her do both.  Sydney and Emma decide not to turn in the money but to instead bury it out in Fear Woods.  They’ll leave it out there for two weeks and then, it’ll all belong to them!  Yay!

Sydney and Emma promise each other that they won’t tell anyone about the money but then Sydney tells Jason.  Jason demands a some of the money for himself, though if he could just shut up and be patient, Sydney would eventually have half of the money and everything about their toxic relationship suggests that she would give him however much he wanted.  Anyway, all of this all leads to violence and Jason’s apparent death.  Sydney and Emma hide Jason’s body but Emma can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching and following her.  Could Jason be back from the dead!?  Does Zombie Jason want revenge!?  Or could it be something else?

This book had a big twist at the end but it was pretty familiar twist and I saw it coming from miles away.  I appreciated the kind of dark ending but neither Sydney nor Emma were particularly compelling characters.  This one kind of felt like Stine an autopilot.

Horror Book Review: Best Friend 2 by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Apparently, R.L. Stine’s readers who so upset over the brilliant (but dark) ending of Best Friend, Stine felt the need to not only give them a sequel but to hold a contest to allow his readers to chime in and have a say in what should happen in the sequel.  (To be honest, that sounds like more of a publicity stunt than anything else but hey, whatever works.)  The contest was won by a girl in Wisconsin, which should be perfect evidence that the contest was rigged because everyone knows that Wisconsin is a made up place.

Anyway, in 1997 — something like five years after the publication of Best Friend so, seriously, how long did this contest last — Stine gave the world Best Friend 2.

Best Friend ended with Honey Perkins apparently murdering Bill with Becka’s knife and then promising to testify that Becka killed Bill in self-defense in return for Becka being her best friend and Becka …. agreeing!  (Woo hoo!  Way to go, Stine!)  However, the girl from Wisconsin decided that 1) Bill wasn’t really dead (despite the fact that he certainly appeared to be dead at the end of the previous book) and 2) Becka went back on her word and reported Honey to the police.  Honey was put in a mental hospital but, as this novel begins, Honey has broken out of the hospital and enrolled at a school near Shadyside.  Honey tells everyone that she’s Becka and then she tracks down Eric, who was Becka’s boring boyfriend who was dumped for Bill in the first book.  Eric was so heart-broken that he had to transfer to a new school.  (Awwwww, poor Eric!)  Honey puts Eric out of his memory by murdering him.

At Shadyside, Becka is still trying to recover from the trauma that Honey put her through.  Becka is in therapy and she even discovers the true origins of why Honey is so obsessed with her.  That’s right, it turns out that Honey is motivated by more than just a fanatical desire for Becka to be her friend and it’s actually kind of lame.  Seriously, I hope that girl in Wisconsin never ever wrote anything else because she’s one of those writers who had to overexplain everything.

Anyway, Becka finds herself being stalked again and getting threatening phone calls and all of the usual stuff.  Eventually, the stalker is revealed and it’s another twist and …. ugh.  It’s a super lame twist.  This is why you don’t let contest winners write books.  Basically — should I reveal this?  What the Hell, this book is over twenty years old.  Consider this to be your SPOILER WARNING but basically it turns out that Honey is not the one doing the stalking this time but instead, it’s Becka’s best friend from the previous book who is upset over the fact that Becka never visited her in the hospital after Honey injured her.  But there’s nothing about the character, from what we’ve seen of her, that suggests that this sort of thing would drive her mad.  This is just a twist that comes out of nowhere.  I mean, what are the chances that Becka is going to have two people in her life stalking her because they feel that she wasn’t a good enough friend?

(That said …. why wouldn’t you visit a friend who was put in the hospital by someone who was stalking you?  Becka is kind of selfish but still, everyone in this book overreacts.  Most people would just say, “Okay, I guess I’ll go find a better friend.”)

Anyway, Best Friend was Stine at his best but this sequel is lame and I blame the imaginary state of Wisconsin.

Horror Book Review: The Best Friend by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

R.L. Stine’s 1992 novel, The Best Friend, deals with everyone’s worst nightmare, the acquaintance who claims that you’re one of their best friends even though you don’t really know or remember much about them.

Becka seems to have the perfect life for a Shadyside teen.  She lives in a nice house on Fear Street.  She’s got wealthy parents.  She has lots of friends.  She’s a popular student at Shadyside High.  She just dumped boring old Eric for the hottest guy around, Bill.

But then Honey shows up.

Honey Perkins was in the same 4th Grade class as Becka and she has now returned to Shadyside.  Honey swears that she and Becka were best friends in the 4th Grade and that they were always getting into trouble together!  Becka barely remembers Honey and she certainly doesn’t remember ever being friends with her.  In fact, Becka remembers Honey as being one of those students who rarely spoke and didn’t have any friends.  Honey, however, insists that she and Becka were besties and now, it’s time for them to be besties again!  And that means getting rid of all of Becka’s other friends!

It’s always kind of fun to make jokes about how dated most of R.L. Stine’s books are today.  He was writing for young readers in the 90s and, as such, he filled his books to references to what he thought teenagers were into in the 90s.  Some of those references were probably correct while a good deal of them were obviously selected by a middle-aged man trying to think like a much younger woman.  Unavoidably, Stine’s book also seem dated because of all the advances in technology over the past few years.  Stine was writing at a time when personal computers were exotic (and boxy) and everyone was dependent on a landline phone.  Most of Stine’s book offer a look into what the world was like in the days before the Internet and social media.

However, The Best Friend does not feel quite as dated because I think, thanks to Facebook and Twitter (or X or whatever it’s called now), everyone has had the experience of being followed by or getting a friend request from someone you vaguely recognize from the past.  Usually, you can’t remember anything about these people but they’re just so excited when you follow back or when you click on accept.  It’s always a bit weird.  It leaves me wondering if they’ve spent years thinking about me and it also leaves me feeling a little guilty when I realize that I haven’t done the same for them.

As for Becka and Honey, their relationship soon turns into a Single White Female thing, with Honey getting her hair cut so she can look more like Becka and then showing up at Becka’s house when she’s not home so that she can go through Becka’s clothes.  (Seriously, I would push her out my bedroom window if she tried that with me.)  It’s all effectively creepy if a bit predictable.  The books ends with one the darkest conclusions that a one will ever find in an R.L. Stine book.  I mean — YIKES!

Read The Best Friend and then think twice before accepting that friend request.

Horror Film Review: The Stepsister 2 by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Wallner family is back!

Yes, the annoying family from R.L. Stine’s The Stepsister returns in The Stepsister 2.  First published in 1995, The Stepsister 2 picks up a year after The Stepsister.  Hugh and Mrs. Wallner are still married and Hugh is still a blowhard.  Stepsister Emily and Jessie are now as close as can be, though Emily has yet to fully recover from the events of the previous book and Jessie is still sensitive about the death of her friend Jolie.  Jessie’s brother Rich has moved on from reading Stephen King and is now a Clive Barker fan who shoots his own horror movies with his friends.  Rich is considerably more rebellious and bratty in this book than he was in the first one.  And, of course, Emily is still dating Josh.

As for Emily’s sister, Nancy, she’s spent the last year in a mental hospital, working on the issues that previously led to her killing the family dog and trying to kill her sister as well.  (For the record, Nancy blamed Emily for the death of their father and she also never forgave Emily for going out with her ex-boyfriend.  Seriously, sisters should not share boyfriends.)  However, Nancy is coming home and Emily is a little bit nervous about it.

And really, why wouldn’t Emily be nervous?  When Nancy first enters the house, she’s carrying a knife!  Nancy explains that she just found the knife in the bushes and that it was left there by Rich’s film crew but seriously, if you had just spent the year in a mental hospital because you tried to kill the members of the your family, would you chose to step through the front door while carrying a bloody knife?  Later, Nancy wraps her hands around Emily’s throat but claims that she was only doing so to make Emily realize that she’s still scared of Nancy and that she hasn’t forgiven her.  Again, it seems like there are other ways to make that point.  I’m going to be scared of anyone wrapping their hands around my throat.

Nancy’s behavior, though, really isn’t as strange as a scene where Emily and Josh go on a date and they end up ice skating on frozen Fear Lake.  Didn’t we establish, in the previous book, that Emily’s father drowned in Fear Lake while Emily watched helplessly?  I mean, isn’t she worried that she’s going to look down at the ice and see her father’s gray corpse floating by?

Anyway, as you can probably guess, weird things start happening around the house and the stepsisters feels threatened.  Is it Nancy?  Is it the increasingly angry Rich?  Or is it Jessie’s best friend, Cora-Anne?  You’ll have to read the book to find out, but I’m going to tell you right now that it’s pretty much the same story as the first Stepsister so you probably won’t be surprised by the final revelation.  The first time, you can accept people making dumb decisions.  The second time, no one really has an excuse.  Personally, after all this drama, I think the Wallners should maybe look for a home away from Fear Street.

Horror Book Review: The Stepsister by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Emily!

The star of the 1990 novel, The Stepsister, Emily may live in a nice house on Fear Street and she may have a cool sister and a boyfriend who specifically dumped he sister so that he could date Emily (yikes!) but Emily has still had a lot of tragedy in her life.  When she was a little girl, she could only watch helplessly as her father drowned in Fear Lake.

Now, Emily is a teenager and her mother has married a guy named Hugh Wallen and everything sucks!  Hugh is a bit of a jerk, the type who brags about how happy he is to have two new stepdaughters who can help to clean the house and who refers to his family as being a harem because there’s so many women in it.  (DOUBLE YIKES!)  Hugh also gives his son, Rich, a hard time because Rich likes to read books.  In fact, Rich is a huge Stephen King fan.

Perhaps the most awkward thing about Emily’s mom marrying Hugh is that Emily now has a stepsister named Jessie.  Jessie is the type who complains about the house, complains about Emily’s dog, complains about how Emily’s biological sister has red hair (and trust me, that totally turned me against Jessie), and who will probably steal everyone’s boyfriend as soon as she gets a chance.

But is Jessie capable of murder?

That’s the question that Emily has to solve because there are strange things happening around the house, from fires getting set to innocent animals getting killed to peroxide being put in shampoo bottles.  Emily overhears Jessie on the phone, saying that “I really could kill her!’  Is Jessie being literal or is she just venting her frustrations?  When Emily reads in Jessie’s diary that she was once accused of being involved with a murder, does that….

Wait, wait, wait, WAIT!  Emily is reading Jessie’s diary?  Not cool, Emily!

Seriously, Jessie has her issues but it’s not as if Emily is the most accepting of stepsiblings.  I mean, it’s one thing to get upset because Jessie doesn’t like her dog or because Jessie makes fun of her room and her clothes.  That’s totally understandable.  Jessie seems to have issues with people with red hair so, as far as I’m concerned, Emily shouldn’t even say hello to her when they pass on the street.  But to then accuse someone of being a murderer just because you resent the fact that your mom was dumb enough enough to marry their father …. that’s going a bit too far!

Well, no worries.  Things do work out in the end.  The wannabe murderer is discovered and all of the siblings work through their issues and try to be nicer to each other.  Yay!

This book was interesting for me to read, just because after my mom and dad got divorced, I was always worried about what would happen if my mom remarried and I ended up with some stepsibling moving in with us and basically getting in the way.  I would be nice to them now but seriously, I was a brat when I was 13.

Anyway, this book was okay but it was also one of those Stine books where you could easily guess who the murderer was, just be eliminating all of the obvious red herrings.  There wasn’t really a lot of suspense to the book but I appreciated the somewhat realistic portrayal of a family trying to figure out how to adjust to their new situation.

Horror Novel Review: Ski Weekend by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Woo hoo!  IT’S A SKI WEEKEND!

Of course, this ski weekend is taking place in an R.L. Stine novel so maybe don’t get too excited just yet.  Bad things are probably going to happen.  A group of friends from Shadyside High decide to spend the weekend skiing because, apparently, every form of entertainment and leisure was located only an hour or two from Shadyside.  If you live in Shadyside, you can go skiing or you can go to the beach or you can to summer camp or maybe even explore the bayous.  You just have to drive for an hour or two.

(Okay, I can’t remember if Shadyside has a bayou nearby but I imagine it does.)

Ariel is big into science.  Her friend Doug is a troubled tough guy with a heart of Gold.  Shannon is Doug’s girlfriend, who is pretty and what else do you need to be?  Originally, Ariel’s boyfriend Randy was a part of the group but Randy, apparently being a Hang Time fan, decided that he would rather leave and go play basketball than spend his time risking his life on the slopes.  I don’t blame Randy.  Do you have any idea how many people die in skiing accident every year?

Anyway, after Randy and Ariel have a big fight and Randy drives off in his car, an older guy named Red pops up out of nowhere and comforts her.  Everyone is so touched by the concern of this weird older guy that they’ve never seen before that they agree to give Red a ride to his home.  Unfortunately, they get stranded in a blizzard and are forced to take shelter at a farm house that is owned by a redneck named Lou and his wife, Eva.  Lou is kind of a perv but everyone decides that it would be better to stay with him than to sit out in the car and freeze to death.

Well, of course, it turns out that there’s more going on here than just a car getting stuck in a blizzard.  Lou turns out to be dangerous but it also turns out that Lou is not the only person in the farmhouse who has secrets.  It looks like Randy made the right decision leaving to play basketball.

First published in 1991, Ski Weekend has some chilling moments that really capture the idea of being stranded somewhere and not sure of when you’re ever going to get to leave.  There’s a bad person who wears a ski mask and seriously, ski masks are pure nightmare fuel!  That said, this is another R.L. Stine film that is dependent upon a group of people doing something monumentally stupid.  Seriously, it’s nice that Red asked Ariel if she was okay but there was nothing about his actions that really required the Shadyside kids to go out of their way to give Red a ride home.  Today, they would just get him an Uber.  Remember that the next time that people say all of this new technology has ruined the world!

Horror Novel Review: Sunburn by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have to admit that, with everything I’ve got going on right now, I kind of rushed through the 1993 R.L. Stine novel, Sunburn.  In fact, I read it so quickly that I had to go back and re-read some of it because this is one of those books that ends with one of those totally incoherent R.L. Stine twists that essentially comes out of nowhere.  I couldn’t really find any evidence that Stine in any way set up the twist nor could I find any explanation as to how the twist could even work.  Of course, I kind of had to rush the re-read as well but I’m going to go ahead and declare that this is the silliest twist that R.L. Stine ever came up.

How silly is this book’s twist?  It’s so silly that I actually guessed it about halfway through the book but then I laughed and said, “Nah, no way.  No one’s that stupid.”

The book opens with a fairly effective scene in which Claudia awakens on the beach, totally covered in sand except for her head.  The tide is coming in, Claudia is going to drown, and the friends that she came to the beach with have vanished.  Fortunately, the totally sensitive and hot Daniel comes walking up and saves Claudia’s life.  Claudia takes Daniel to her friend’s house so that he can see the people who abandoned her but Daniel vanishes as soon as her friends show up.  Could Daniel be a …. GHOST BOY!?

(“We’ll call you …. Ghost Boy!” is a line that I was waiting for but which, sadly, was never uttered.)

Claudia is hanging out with a beach house with some of her friends from summer camp.  Hopefully, hanging out at the beach can help all of them recover from the trauma of something terrible that happened the last time that they were at the camp.  (They were traumatized at the camp but they still want to hang out with each other.  Make of that what you will.  I’ve never been to summer camp so maybe it’s just a crazy bonding experience, I don’t know.)  Claudia is confused because her best friend Marla is acting strange.  In fact, Marla appears to be the one who encouraged everyone to leave Claudia on the beach!  Claudia wonders why Marla is acting so strange.  Maybe it has something to do with the tragedy that happened back at camp, as it did directly effect Marla’s family.  Or maybe it’s because of a totally weird twist that basically comes out of freaking nowhere.

A lot of weird things happen in Sunburn, from ghostly Daniel to the weird camp tragedy to the fence around the house that occasionally becomes electrified.  I haven’t even gotten into the bit about the dog gets eaten by a random shark.  (It was an evil dog, don’t worry.)  This is a weird book and I think Stine pretty much just made it up as he went along.  It’s entertaining, though.  When a YA thriller has got a twist as random as this one does, how can it not be entertaining?

Horror Book Review: Gimme a Kiss by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1988 book, Gimme a Kiss, deals with everyone’s worst nightmare.

Jane Retton’s diary has been stolen, photocopied, and passed around all of the students at her high school!  Everyone at the school is reading about how Jane lost her virginity to her committed boyfriend and how she totally loves him.  Everyone at the school declares that this makes Jane a total whore, even though the diary makes it clear that Jane has only had sex with her boyfriend and she only did that after she was sure that she was in love with him.

Here’s the thing, though.  The diary is a lie!  Jane is still a virgin and the only thing that she wrote in her diary was her fantasy about what she would like to do with her boyfriend!  And now, just because Jane has upset the school’s snooty cheerleaders, everyone thinks that she’s sexually active….

Wow, this book is really a product of the 1980s.

Anyway, Jane decides that the best way to handle all of this would be to fake her death so she decides to pretend to fall off of a boat and …. wait, what?  I’m not really sure that I see Jane’s logic here.  It didn’t make much sense when I read the book and, looking back on it, it still doesn’t make much sense.  Still, Jane decides to fake her death so that everyone will reconsider the way they treated her while she was alive.  (Because, certainly, it’s not like everyone’s going to be even more pissed off at her if they discover they were put through a peroid of mourning for nothing….)  But then someone starts coming after Jane and her classmates for real…. Could Jane’s true enemy be someone close to her?

This book was only 122-pages long.  It was a quick read, which is always a good thing.  The plot didn’t make a bit of sense and it felt like something that Christopher Pike just tossed on the page to make a deadline.  As opposed to other Christopher Pike books, the characters come across as being rather flat.  I will applaud the book for embracing the melodrama, especially in the scene where Jane learns the real reason why she’s being targeted.  But otherwise, this is lesser Pike.