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?