Review: Don't Stay Up Late

A Fear Street Novel
By R.L. Stine
Available now from St. Martin's Griffin
Review copy
Read my review of A Midsummer Night's Scream

I have fond memories of the Fear Street series. I don't remember how many of them I read in elementary and middle school, but it was a lot.  I liked them more than Goosebumps because people actually died (often in rather gruesome ways), and I enjoyed the mythology of the Fear family's curse.  They aren't high brow (or even particularly high quality fiction), but I do get a kick that the series is being restarted for a new generation.  I'm not sure how many I'll personally read, but I'm sure I'll be there for the book starring Brandon Fear.  (He's a senior at Shadyside High, apparently.)

When DON'T STAY UP LATE starts, its connection to the series seems tenuous.  Lisa Brooks does live in Shadyside.  Her family moved there recently, and she's made three good friends: Isaac, Saralynn, and her boyfriend Nate.  But her new life is derailed by a car accident that kills her father and leaves her with horrifying hallucinations.  Fear Street itself comes into the picture when Lisa takes a job babysitting for a family on the street, with a sweet boy named Harry Hart.  The only catch is that she can't let him stay up late.

The disparate plot lines (Lisa's hallucinations, the creepy kid, a serial killer killing teens) take a bit to come together, but in classic Fear Street fashion they do and lead to an ambiguous ending.  All of R.L. Stine's usual tics are on display, including the fake-out cliffhangers.

I do think the treatment of mental illness in DON'T STAY UP LATE could use some updating.  A mental hospital is a horrific place where patients are free to lick visitors before they even make it to the reception desk.  I do find it strange that no one is concerned with leaving a child alone with a teenager whose visual hallucinations are not under control. 

DON'T STAY UP LATE was fun for the nostalgia factor, but even back in the day this wouldn't have been one of the stronger entries in the series.  (Only two deaths?  By evisceration? Pfft.)

Review: A Midsummer Night's Scream

By R.L. Stine
Available now from Feiwel and Friends (Macmillan)
Review copy

I outgrew R.L. Stine's books pretty quick.  I still kept reading them regularly, at least through seventh grade, because they were fun.  Formulaic, yes, but the Fear Street books especially were chock-full of inventive deaths.  For a morbid little kid an inventive death goes a long way.

Nowadays, I have a fond nostalgia for Stine.  It helps that I met him once in person and he was incredibly nice.  (I was super awkward because my friend dropped out on me and I was the only person over eighteen there alone.)  Without that nostalgia, I might not have finished A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SCREAM.  But I'm sure the intended audience for the novel will enjoy it.  There's one death that's probably going to make my dreams a little freaky for a night or two.

The plot is simple: Claire and her best friend Delia have small roles in Mayhem Manor, the remake of a never-finished horror film.  Three members of the original cast died on tape.  Pretty soon, bad things start happening to the new cast too.  It's made clear that the studio will shut down if the production fails, but it's still hard to believe they don't close down the film for everyone's safety.  As for the connection to A Midsummer Night's Dream, it's fairly faint.  Each girl has a crush on a guy who has a crush on the other girl.  There's also a hairy man, Mr. Puckerman, with potions.

There was one aspect I found disappointing.  I remember Stine being delightfully gross, but I don't remember him being gross about gender.  There's a third girl, Annalee, who goes after Jake when Claire keeps failing to make a move.  She's catty about it, but it still grated on me when Claire and Delia constantly derided her for being a slut.  No wonder she didn't care to observe their unspoken hands off.

Don't go into A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM expecting complex characterization and an involved plot.  The characters are types, and sometimes hard to keep track of since there's a bunch of them.  The plot is only complicated in that it often requires people to act quite stupid.  Claire, for instance, keeps using potions she steals from Mr. Puckerman despite always grabbing the wrong one.

But I can't help but find something comforting about Stine's formula.  He's keeping cheesy teen (and child friendly) horror alive.  Just take a look at the fine work of Bitching, Books, and Baking to see how big the genre used to be.