Throughout the month of October, instead of Tordotcom novellas, Tuesdays are devoted to the (equally short) works of Mr. R. L. Stine. (You can find pt. 1 and pt. 2 here, if you missed them.) Tinka’s been enjoying the change-up, and she can’t wait to dive into 2 even more batshit entries this week. So once again, without further ado…
The Thrill Club
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Talia Blanton could scare you to death. She writes horror stories—stories that often give her friends starring roles. Everyone loves Talia’s terrifying tales—until they start to come true. One by one, Talia’s friends become Talia’s victims. Is Talia making her stories come true? Or is someone trying to turn Talia’s real life into a horror story?
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MOTHER OF GOD this book was so (unintentionally) racist. On MULTIPLE levels. We can START with the cold open, in which our supposed Black main character Shandel gets introduced, only to get STABBED TO DEATH at the end of the first chapter.
Only–psych!–it’s actually a short story our REAL main character, white girl Talia, wrote to deliver to her weekly Thrill Club meeting, which SHANDEL IS A MEMBER OF.
Shandel is more than understandably FURIOUS but also freaked the fuck out, and our whackadoo heroine doesn’t help matters by preceding to PULL A FAKE SWITCHBLADE ON SHANDEL as a joke. (Yes, you read that correctly. No, it makes no sense unless Talia is a member of the fucking KKK.) No one else knows it’s a fake, so Shandel is now (OF COURSE) incandescent with fear and then rage. (At this point, Talia is basically a walking-talking hate crime, so…yeah. What an intro.)
By the middle of the book, these macro aggressions turn into mortal aggressions, and poor fucking Shandel turns up ACTUALLY stabbed to death in the cemetery.
So the one Black character is fake-murdered, then fakeout fake-murdered, then REAL murdered. Others get murdered too, in truly wild fashion (this one has a HIGH body count for Fear Street), but Shandel’s murder one sets the tone. Yick.
Also, to add another layer to the racism extravaganza that is this book, it turns out that masks and chanting recorded by anthropologists (always a bad sign) from a “primitive tribe in New Guinea” (gag) play a massive role in the plot. So we get some solid xenophobic/fetishistic colonialism on top of the American anti-black racism.
SPOILER TERRITORY
So, turns out, our Karen-in-training Talia isn’t QUITE as racist as we thought, because SHE didn’t write the intro story where Shandel dies (or indeed any of the stories, all of which kill off a member of the Thrill Club [which is bonkers]). Her friend and other thrill club member Seth did. She’s had writer’s block, and he’s been ‘helping’ her. (I cannot understand this, nor the fact that as Thrill Club members keep getting murdered in real life, in the exact same way that happened in these stories, not only does Seth KEEP WRITING THEM, but Talia KEEPS READING THEM ALOUD during club sessions. Madness.)
Turns out, Seth’s pretty fucked up (and not just in the obvious way because he keeps writing his friends’ grisly deaths). See, ol’ Seth has gotten ahold of his father’s tapes that record some Papuan men chanting, and he’s realized that this chant, when accessed properly (????) can cause a directed transference of souls, meaning he can possess other people when listening to the tape.
Turns out, his dad did this before the book’s beginning, leaving his real body to rot while he took over someone else’s. Seth’s now doing this and regularly possessing Talia (because she ‘used’ him to do her homework, and write her stories, or some shitty excuse) to MURDER their best friends because…I have literally no idea. There’s probably a reason given in there somewhere, but it didn’t really make sense and I certainly don’t remember it. It ends with Seth’s death, and the reveal that poor Shandel was only murdered accidentally, because Seth-as-Talia grabbed the REAL knife (why was there a real knife?!?) instead of her fake switchblade…which makes no sense. But then again what part of this does?
In the end, Talia seems marvelously well-adjusted to the fact that she possessed-murdered all her friends, but that’s probably because she’s a latent monster herself, so it’s not that big of a shift.
Rating: WTF WTF WTF WTF…also, so many types of racism.
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Switched
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: There’s a little cabin in the Fear Street woods where a girl can really lose her mind. In fact, she can change it into someone else’s. That’s what happened to Nicole and Lucy. Now Lucy is in Nicole’s body, and Nicole is in Lucy’s. What a trip! But for Nicole, what a trap! Because Lucy is using Nicole’s body to get away with murder!
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Hahahaha, the first note I wrote, 4 pages into this one, was “OK this writing is way worse.”
And I stand by that assessment, even if there are some plot twists that Shyamalan’d everything all to hell.
It STARTS with Nicole, a whiny, juvenile brat, having a shitty day at school and running into her BFF Lucy, only to have Lucy propose OUT OF THE BLUE, “Let’s switch bodies.” This is how the FIRST CHAPTER ENDS.
I mean, this part was terrific. It was great to have the supernatural buildup, usually so fraught and comparatively slow, just slam into the book out of nowhere, right away.
But that begs the question, was this written by 9 year old me?! There’s no character development, no interstitial plotting, no non-functional interactions, it’s basically nothing at all like other ones I’ve read so far in this series. (Also there’s no “cabin in the woods,” like the blurb suggests.) And there is a BIG reason for most of this, but that gets into
SPOILER TERRITORY
Ok, so before we get to the BIG twist, I want to talk about the seeming body count in this one. It is HIGH. After switching bodies, Nicole-as-Lucy goes to Lucy’s house, only to find her parents already stab-murdered on the floor.
Again, YAY for no transitions. Just BAM! Body switching. BAM! Murder. BAM! More murder.
Nicole quickly decides that Lucy must be the murderer, and that she switched bodies to avoid culpability (which would be badass and hilarious):
“Oh, how cold! I realized. How cold, Lucy!”
This is how humans talk to themselves, yes?
Nicole’s inner monologue continues, very human-sounding: “This has been the longest day of my life, I told myself. And the saddest.”
Also, our friend Nicole has a weird obsession with her murder-friend Lucy’s small hands and a complex about her own “big, long-fingered hands,” which she misses once they swap bodies?? (“I always teased Lucy about her tiny hands. I always told her she’d have baby hands for the rest of her life.”) Is this a thing?! Is this some weird stand-in for the typical Fear Street dysmorphia/ “I’m-not-TOO-pretty-but-these-are-the-ways-I-actually-AM-pretty” stuff?
I began to sense there was more to this gonzo story once we got to Lucy’s boyfriend’s house, and “his head had been sliced off.” Not only that, but “the head stood upright a few feet in front of the body, propped against the leather couch.” One eyelid droops in a “hideous wink.” Now THIS is a level of OTT that I was not prepared for, but it also really tipped Stine’s hand that this couldn’t be real.
(I’m so s-m-r-t, I can guess the twist of a ‘made for kids’ book from the ‘90s that I might even have read back in the day.)
Turns out, Lucy WAS Nicole’s bff, but she died 3 years ago in a car accident, and this has caused Nicole to suffer periodic psychoses where she hallucinates graphic deaths and sometimes even thinks SHE’S turned into Lucy. So I guess the lack of pacing or a real plot is meant to signal that Nicole’s psychosis isn’t all that into backstory or motivation.
Doctors from the mental hospital track her down in the end, and we get a perverse epilogue where Nicole is nearing her discharge date but is ok with her life because “Lucy visits every day.” That just seems sad AF, not spooky or thrilling.
The damn thing is still terribly written.
Rating: Meh.
