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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.

Horror Novel Review: Weekend by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1986 novel, Weekend, involves the most memorable senior ditch day ever!

9 friends, who have a tangled web of personal relationships and conflicting feelings towards each other, head down to Mexico for the weekend.  They’ve got a mansion to stay in, one that belongs to the absent parents of their friend Robin.  Robin once had a great singing voice and a great future but, at the last party that her friends threw, someone spiked her drink with insecticide.  Now, Robin can barely speak and is only being kept alive by a dialysis machine.  The weekend in Mexico starts out as a fun but soon, secrets are being revealed, live are being put at risk, and who knows who will survive to the end!

The majority of the story is told through the eyes of Shani, who is a well-written and complicated character.  As opposed to the characters who populate the majority of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, Shani is nether perfect nor totally evil.  Instead, she’s someone who has very real emotions and, even more importantly, very real reactions to everything that’s going on around her.  (Christopher Pike’s novels have always felt a little less generic than R.L. Stine’s.  That said, Pike’s novels also have a tendency to be a bit more unnecessarily complicated than Stine’s.)   That said, the other characters are not as well-written as Shani and, with a total of 9 people staying at that mansion, it can get a bit difficult to keep straight of who is who.  Keep a notebook nearby so you can jot down who betrayed who at which pep rally because it’s not always easy to keep track of it all.

I always enjoy books about people stranded with a killer for the weekend and Weekend does a good job of keeping you guessing as to who is responsible for what.  The finale, in which everything is explained, is enjoyably over the top.  Pike, wisely, chooses to embrace the melodrama when it comes to wrapping everything up.

Weekend is an enjoyably over-the-top novel.  If nothing else, this book might make you appreciate your own occasionally overdramatic friends.  Because as dramatic as they may be, they’re nowhere near as bad as the folks in Weekend.

Horror Novel Review: Friday the 13th Part II by Simon Hawke

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s been five years since Pamela Voorhees’s went on a murderous rampage at Camp Crystal Lake.  Mrs. Voorhees is dead, Camp Crystal Lake has once again been declared off-limits, and the sole survivor of Pamela’s rampage is officially considered to be missing.

Paul Holt, who is renowned for his program that trains summer camp counselors, has opened up a camp on the shores of Crystal Lake.  With the help of his on-and-off again girlfriend, Ginny, Paul is training his counselors on how to handle every situation and also making sure that they all know better than to go wandering around the remains of Camp Crystal Lake.

Of course, Paul assures the counselors that Jason Voorhees is just a myth and he’s not really wandering around the woods, regardless of what the old-timers in town say.  Of course, Paul is wrong.  Jason is out there and he’s not at all happy about having a bunch of rowdy people partying so close to his home.  One night, when most of the counselors head into town, a small group remains at the camp and they soon come face-to-bag with Jason himself.

The novelization of Friday the 13th Part II was published in 1988, a full seven years after the film was first released.  As such, it follows the plot of the film fairly closely, even to the extent of starting with an extended flashback to Alice’s battle with Pamela Voorhees.  The kills happen in the same order and in the same way as they did in the film.

What writer Simon Hawke adds to the story is much the same thing that he added to his novelization of the first film.  He gives each of the character’s a backstory and explores how they feel about being at Camp Crystal Lake.  He makes them a little less generic than they were in the film.  For instance, Terri — who was pretty much just a girl who didn’t wear underwear and liked to skinny dip in the film — is revealed to actually by fiercely intelligent and independent in the novel.  We learn a lot more about Mark’s determination to be seen as being an individual as opposed to just the counselor in the wheelchair.  We learn that Sandra’s older brother once visited the Spahn movie ranch.  Ginny and Paul’s relationship also takes on a bit more depth in the novel than it did in the movie.

That said, for fans of the franchise, the most interesting thing about the novelization will be the passages that take place in Jason’s mind.  Hawke presents Jason as being someone who was shunned even as a child and who only had his mother in his life.  Jason is also revealed to being addicted to murder, needing the rush that he gets from the hunt.  We learn a bit more about how Jason has survived in the woods for all those years and what exactly he was doing in that abandoned cabin.  To be honest, it’s not as if Hawke really brings anything new to Jason’s mentality.  Anyone who has watched the movies knows that Jason is addicted to murder.  But it’s still interesting to see the other characters through Jason’s eyes.

The novelization of Friday the 13th Part 2 is an improvement on the first novelization though, again, it’s probably something for Friday the 13th completists only.  A copy of it can be found on the Internet Archive.

Horror Novel Review: Friday the 13th by Simon Hawke

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the woods of New Jersey, there sits a summer camp that was abandoned after a child drowned and two counselors were subsequently murdered.  Now, nearly 20 years later, Steve Christy is determined to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, the summer camp that his family started and lost their fortune trying to save.  Steve has a group of young and enthusiastic camp counselors helping him to get the camp ready to go and, as they soon discover, Steve is a tough taskmaster.  He’s so tough that even his occasional girlfriend Alice is thinking about abandoning her job at the camp and returning home.

Of course, it’s not just Steve’s temper that the  counselors have to watch out for.  There’s also someone else lurking around the camp, someone who is determined to kill everyone involved in trying to reopen it.  One-by-one, the counselors fall victim to the killer until finally, only one survivor is left to fight for her life….

Interestingly enough, the novelization of Friday the 13th was first published in 1987, seven years after the film came out.  The novelization follows the plot of the film, with each of the murders happening in the same order and in the same way.  In many places, the dialogue is recreated verbatim.  The same person is the murderer in both the book and the film and the book ends with the same twist as the film.

The most interesting thing about the book — really, the only interesting thing about it — is that the book goes into a bit more detail about everyone’s backstory before they ended up at Crystal Lake.  As such, we witness Mrs. Voorhees actions right after the drowning of her son, Jason, in which she begs the Christy family to rehire her as their cook.  We also learn about the background of each of the victims, who are a bit less generic in this book than in the movie.  We especially learn a lot about Jack and Marcie’s relationship, though I have to say that it’s hard to imagine the confident movie version of Jack having much in common with the more insecure Jack who shows up in the novel.

I was a bit disappointed by the book’s backstory for Steve Christy.  My personal theory has always been that Steve Christy, with his glasses and his mustache and his ascot and his air of superiority, was a former member of the SDS who later became a Weatherman and helped in the abduction of Patty Hearst.  I always assumed that he was working so hard at Camp Crystal Lake because he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and he needed a place to hide out.  The book, however, portrays Steve as someone who just feels like he has to redeem his family’s name.  I think my theory was a bit more interesting.

The novelization of Friday the 13th is probably something that will be best appreciated by Friday the 13th completists.  (There’s really not much reason to read it otherwise.)  A copy can be found at the Internet Archive.