When I was a kid, my dad would take me either horseback riding or to the bookstore on weekends, sometimes both (my dad is the best). Whenever we went to the bookstore, I would get one of two books: the next in the Baby-Sitters Club series or a new R.L. Stine. I think I had all the Fear Street books, and it was a big deal for me, when I grew up, to give them away to younger cousins and such. My friends and I even started a kind of Fear Club, where we would write scary stories and then meet once a week to read them to each other. They were all just rip offs of the newest Fear Street book, but we didn't care. We would have told them a million times and been just as riveted.
One day, tripping around NetGalley to see if there was something to read, I came across the relaunched Fear Street books. Lucky me, I was granted access to the second one, Don't Stay Up Late. It was good, but not as good as I remember the Fear Street book being. Slightly disappointed, I still signed up for the third book, The Lost Girl. And that's where I remembered my long-lost obsession for these books.
If I'm being honest, I figured out the plot in about two seconds, but that doesn't matter. Even though you can figure out what's going on with Lizzy, you're still left wondering why. It's different, especially when I think back to the older Fear Street books, the ones where it was the second string quarterback or another student with some kind of vendetta. I think that's why I liked this one more than Don't Stay Up Late. That one felt more like a grown up Goosebumps (which, I guess, Fear Street is, really), but this one felt like one of the old Fear Street books that I love. My favorite in the older series were the Fear Street Saga novels, where Stine went into depth about the curse that hangs over Fear Street. This one reminded me a lot of those, maybe because (SPOILERS) this book deals with the past a bit.
Lizzy is...strange. She shows up randomly and then glues herself to Michael in the most obnoxious and weird ways. She pops up at his house and holds his hand in front of his girlfriend, and I kept wondering what was wrong with this girl. It felt like Michael was often dealing with an escaped mental patient, but that's what kept the characters interesting. No one could understand why Michael stuck up for this obviously deranged girl, but he did. He made sure to include her in everything he did, even when the reader is screaming at him to stop. Maybe he likes them crazy, because he was mad about her up until the end.
Writing books for teens is vastly different today than it was when I was a kid. Sometimes I go through the old books I still have and roll my eyes because I can't believe I made my parents spend money on some of it. Maybe the reason I like these new Fear Street books is because Stine doesn't seem to have updated his writing. That sounds terrible and horribly inaccurate for what I'm really trying to get at. Okay, he adds cell phones and things like that (you know, typical teen things, right?), but the kids in his stories deal with the supernatural and the strange, yet it's so tame compared to some teen books today. Relationships are already established and no one is trying to jump into bed with anyone else because they're trying to figure out why their friends are being murdered by this strange pulsing light, thank you very much.
God, I sound old.
Anyway, yeah, these are fun reads, and I'm already excited for the whole line of them. The stories are chilling and they're books to curl up in bed at night and get lost in. That's really all I'm asking for sometimes. And some tea. And maybe a blanket. If the weather wasn't trying to kill me.
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