In the 7th grade we were required to submit a book report once a month. Our teacher trusted us enough to choose what books we wanted to read and report on, and every month I would disappoint her by choosing yet another volume from R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series.
Fear Street was horror fiction for the kids too scared to upgrade to Stephen King. Stine began writing the anthology series near the end of the pulp horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s, taking many of the same elements used in those adult novels and toning them down just enough to market them as young adult. And because these were young adult books in the 1990s, their real audience became middle schoolers like myself wanting to feel cool by reading teen books.
Typical horrors a teen living on Fear Street might encounter included (but were not limited to) ghosts, lots of witches, the occasional vampire, vaguely defined undead entities, that one werewolf, and so, so many sociopathic classmates. Most often, like a bad Scooby-Doo villain, the antagonist was probably going to be found out as a teenager hellbent on some type of bloody revenge through convoluted means. Are you being haunted by some ancient evil? Nope, your ex-boyfriend just hasn’t learned that toxic co-dependency is bad.
For the entirety of my middle school years, Fear Street was my near-exclusive read. A Barnes & Noble opened not too far from our home in the early 90s, and we visited it almost weekly. In the Young Adult section there were several shelves, nearly filling a bookcase, of all the various Fear Street titles. I mostly ignored the nearby bookcases bursting with plenty of other teen horror writers such as Caroline B. Cooney, Lois Duncan, and Christopher Pike (Pike’s novels were notorious with every kid my age for their similarity to Fear Street, but with sex!).
In the summer of 1994, I read my first Fear Street novel. The Stepsister was a twisted take on the wicked stepsister trope. The cover laid out an ominously lit scene of a terrified teen girl reading through a journal while a menacing blonde girl (in a shoulder-padded power stance) looks on, reflected in a mirror, ready to pounce. It is safe to assume the blonde is the titular stepsister, but just how wicked is she? Twist! It’s all a misdirect from the real killer whose actions punch plenty of holes into the plot. But as a twelve-year-old, I was still genuinely shook by twist endings.
I devoured this book while sitting on the bleachers one night watching one of my older brother’s baseball games. Those games were so boring, but my mom insisted me and my little sister tag along as she drove him and his teammates to every well-manicured ballpark and sandlot in Northeast Philadelphia. Books were my survival that summer, and after reading The Stepsister, the Fear Street books were all I carried on those trips.
After I read my way through the primary series I found plenty of spinoffs to occupy my time. While Fear Street delivered on thrills, it was the multitude of spinoff series that brought on the real horror. Typical plots featured beleaguered teens battling possessed cheerleaders, possessed houses, possessed cars, possessed amusement parks. There was the Fear Street Saga, a prequel series that explained how a lot of witchy mayhem birthed the curse on Fear Street. A shower scene in Fear Street: Cheerleaders gave me a complex for years afterward about being boiled alive. And then there was 99 Fear Street: The House of Evil, that include a sub-plot in which a young boy and his puppy are walled up behind some drywall to suffocate and quickly decay. It takes two more books in the series for their remains to be discovered, and it’s as gruesome as you think.
And this is what I wrote my book reports about. After I finished each book I would write a quick synopsis of the plot with very little analysis. As a finishing touch, I would draw a reproduction of the book’s cover in pencil and staple it to the front of the report. Luckily, the covers were rarely as bloody as the stories that followed them.
My teacher would write “Nice cover!” under the standard B grade she would give all my papers. She begged me to try a different type of book every time, and I relented only once with an equally lousy discussion of Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain. Another B, but she did like the drawing I attached to that one of a falcon. I wonder how well that falcon would have fared against some possessed undead cheerleaders? Get on that R.L. Stine!
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