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.