Growing up, the Losing Christina series were probably among my favorite installments of the Point Horror series from Scholastic. I'm so old that when I read them, they hadn't yet been rebranded into Losing Christina, just as the vampire trilogy hadn't yet been renamed Vampire's Promise. I loved Christina-- she was a strong, dreamy, romantic heroine who grew up on an island and had to rise up against the terrifying adults who psychologically tortured young girls like her, getting rich, sadistic pleasure from breaking them until they either died... or went insane.
The premise of these books is incredibly dark and even rereading them as an adult gives me chills. They were even more terrifying as a child, because I couldn't understand why none of the other adults or children would listen to Christina about what was going on. As an adult, I do understand-- it's hard to believe that people are capable of doing terrible things; especially if you might have helped to facilitate those terrible things by supporting and even relating to the people who did them. It's easier to brand the truth as a falsehood when cognitive dissonance challenges your worldview.
Poor Christina finds this out the hard way in THE FOG, when the Shevvingtons make it their business to destroy the beautiful but fragile seventeen-year-old Anya. In THE SNOW, the Shevvingtons turn their attention to the needy and immature Dolly, Christina's best friend from the island. Dolly loves the Shevvingtons and thinks they are wonderful. No matter what Christina tells her, she won't hear anything bad about them. Even when they put her in unsafe positions or make her feel bad about herself, she truly believes that they mean well for her because they are adults.
I've joked in other reviews that this should be called the Gaslighting Christina series because it truly is a series that builds on how the people around you can bully, lie, and manipulate you into thinking that you're the one in the wrong when you're not. As evil as the Shevvingtons are, it's far more terrifying how the other adults in the story listen to them, and how successfully they've groomed the children in the school to carry out their work and act as their minions.
Part of the reason I loved this series so much is because I was bullied when I was Christina's age, and I found it really inspiring to see a girl rise above all that hate and toxicity like granite, even when she felt like she was about to lose all hope. Christina is such a strong heroine, and her flaming personality is a bright candle in all this Gothic gloom. These books seriously need to be rebranded with better covers because they hold up so well. I'd love to see them made into a mini-series the way FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC was. It's such a good, terrifying story and the writing is so lyrical and chilling.
I would honestly recommend this trilogy to anyone. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free!
I recently found out that a whole bunch of old YA books from the 80s and 90s are available for free on Kindle Unlimited. Since I have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, I thought, "Why not revisit some of these old gems and review them as an adult?"
R.L. Stine is basically the Stephen King of the grade school set. For kids, he wrote about monsters. For teens, he wrote all kinds of thrillers involving murder. THE BABYSITTER is one of the books he did for Scholastic's Point Horror line. It's about a girl named Jenny who gets hired to be a babysitter for an adorable little boy named Donny. But soon she starts getting creepy notes and phone calls from a man who calls her "Babes" and tells her "company's coming."
Who is this stranger? And what do they want?
Unfortunately, this book wasn't very fun for me because I knew who the bad guy was from the literal beginning. I think I might have actually read this before, but I didn't actually remember this book until a line at the end that made me go, "Oh-- wait." I think part of the problem is that there really aren't that many characters in this book, so the red herring doesn't work.
Also, the formatting for this book isn't great. Paragraphs bleed out across multiple lines. There are many typos. Donny's name becomes "Denny" at one point. Oops. It's like when you write your final paper the night before it's due and you're hungover and then you wake up the next morning and realize you did an utterly crap job and also your spacing is all off. That's what this editing is like.
R.L. Stine churned these out like machinery so he's much more hit or miss than some of the authors who seemed to put more time in their work. He wrote some really good books, but he also wrote a lot of really terrible ones. Sadly, this is one of the latter and I'm not impressed.
P.S. "Jenny Jeffers" might be one of the whitest names I've ever heard.
TENDER IS THE FLESH has been on my radar for a while but I was a little worried about picking it up because it sounded intense and, as I have said in previous reviews, I am a soft and jellied wimp when it comes to horror. And this is no gentle, easy read: it's a dystopian work translated from Spanish (by way of Argentina) about a futuristic world in which a plague has rendered animals poisonous to humans, so humans are being born and bred for the consumption of other humans, either literally (as meat) or consumeristically (for sport, "leather," or extremely niche and sadistic forms of fetish sex).
***WARNING: this review will have spoilers and will discuss extremely disturbing things that happen in this book***
I am not a vegetarian but I don't actually eat a lot of meat, for a combination of reasons, which resolve around health (too much meat, especially processed, can lead to colon cancer and pancreatic cancer, among other health risks), ethical reasons (mass-produced meat is often taken from facilities that don't raise or slaughter animals humanely, and takes a huge toll on the environment), and financial (meat is expensive and alternatives are a lot cheaper (it's very easy to make seitan from vital wheat protein, or soak up and fry some textured vegetable protein-- and unlike 90s alternatives, it tastes great). I've read FAST FOOD NATION and watched interviews with Temple Grandin (an autistic woman who is famous for how she has helped change meat processing plants for the better, to be more humane, because of her incredible ability to empathize with animals), so I already know that a lot of the times, knowing the secrets behind the food on your table can sometimes leave you thinking that ignorance is bliss. But it's also sticking your head in the sand, because at the end of the day, you do vote with your wallet, and I feel like people who can afford to care should care about what goes on the table and in their mouths.
In U.S. culture (and other cultures as well, I assume) there's this almost fetishistic view of meat among some people. It seems to be tied into masculinity, as if by eating meat you prove somehow either your virility, or your complete dominion over the so-called lesser beings that inhabit this world. People lob around the insult "soy-boy," as if eating soy over dairy somehow makes someone less of a man, because real men eat meat. Bazterrica runs with this premise in her book, where the government has converted the way they process meat to accommodate for human flesh, and shows, by replacing with animals with humans, how utterly inhumane the meat industry is, and how we, as a society, dissociate ourselves from the process by which an animal becomes food. We even see that removal begin in the language itself: pigs become pork, baby cows become veal, sheep become mutton, etc.
Marcos, our narrator, is a depressed man who works in such a facility. His father is dying with dementia and his wife has left him following the death of their baby. He hates the meat industry and he hates that they don't call it what it is, tiptoeing around semantics by referring to human meat as "special meat" or as "head" when they're alive. Infractions can result in death, with those who commit the crimes ending up as meat, as well. He still remembers a time when real animals were slaughtered, and he knows that some people are unable to come to terms with this. His father is one of those people, and we are led to believe that this is one of the reasons for his cognitive decline. When Marcos is gifted a premium-grade human woman as a gift by his employer, she's the last thing he wants, but he ends up raising her as a pet and then as something more, as the line between consumer and consumed becomes terrifyingly thin.
This book wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be-- I think because I've had to participate in a biology lab and have had to be wrist-deep in organs for science. People were a little cagey on the details, so if you're worried about whether this book will be too much for you, I will say that it goes into pretty great detail on the slaughtering process. There's an entire chapter about how humans are stunned, killed, and packaged. There's a part about human experimentation, run by a pretty sadistic doctor that the hero compares to Menegle (who was a Nazi scientist, in case you didn't know). There's animal cruelty, where a group of teens beat a bunch of puppies to death. And then there's a whole bunch of minor cruelties mentioned in asides. Pregnant "head" get their arms and legs cut off so they can't damage their babies. Rock stars and celebrities can sell themselves into a hunt, where gun nuts can hunt them and then eat them. One of these freaks captures and kills a famous rock star and brags about how eating his dick will make him virile. There are brothels that let you fuck and then kill women, and one of these same freaks refers to the process of raping the fourteen-year-old he eats as "tenderizing," jokingly.
The ending is disturbing and infuriating because I feel like it implies that a lot of our moral outrage is hypocritical and results in non-action, or is a mask for our own sublimated desires and cognitive dissonance. Which is a sad and depressing thought, but anyone who's ever been on Twitter knows that sometimes people who scream the loudest (or in all caps) can be huge hypocrites. I've seen people on Goodreads try to cancel authors for writing problematic queer rep, who also have J.K. Rowling books on their shelves with five-star ratings. I guess the point of dystopians is to make people uncomfortable and force people to confront incredibly jarring aspects of society, but this message is particularly chilling.
As a thought experiment, I think this book works, and it's no more or less disturbing than some of the classic dystopian novels I was forced to read for school, like 1984, BRAVE NEW WORLD, MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM! (the inspiration for the movie, Soylent Green), LOGAN'S RUN, or THE HANDMAID'S TALE. As a cohesive world in and of itself, I have questions. It doesn't really tackle some of the problems with eating human meat, such as prion disease (there was a group of people in Papua New Guinea who ended up with prion disease because of ritualistic cannibalism where they consumed their dead), or insect alternatives. For example, crickets/cricket flour has as much protein as skinless chicken. Were insects also victim to this so-called plague? (Which, the book hints, might not even exist-- the government might have made up a plague just to give themselves an excuse to legalize and legitimize cannibalism as an extreme form of population control, and yet another way for the rich to consume the poor, this time figuratively).
It's a truth universally acknowledged that if a book exists and it's about vampires, then I want to read it. VAMPIRE came out in 1991 in case you couldn't tell from that gloriously cheesy Day-Glo cover. In it, a girl named Darcy comes to live at her attractive young uncle Jake's for the summer. Jake lives above a horror-themed funhouse called the Dungeon of Horrors, and a whole bunch of attractive young people work in there. It's like Dawson's Creek... for goths!
But unfortunately all is not well and good. There's a serial killer running about who thinks he's a vampire. He slits the throats of young women and leaves red marks that look like bites. It's got everyone creeped out, including Darcy... especially when it looks like the vampire might have his eye on her as his newest victim.
VAMPIRE was a fun book. Some of these older YA horror novels are really cheesy and have terrible writing, but this one is pretty well-written. The teenagers act like teenagers and there's a lot of drama and red herrings to keep it from being too predictable. I was totally wrong in guessing who the "vampire" was. So that was cool.
I'm giving this three stars because the pacing was a little uneven and this felt like a much longer book than it actually was because of it. I found myself skimming ahead to the creepier scenes. I wish this had been a bit more tightly plotted because it had the makings of a really good story at its core. That said, it was nice to read a story when vampires are made creepy and erotic as they should be. No sparkling in this book-- only murder, mayhem, and gore. YAAAASS.
I'll definitely be checking out more of Ms. Cusick's work.
THE CHEERLEADER was later renamed DEADLY OFFER after this, and the two sequels, were rebranded as The Vampire's Promise trilogy. I used to own the third book, FATAL BARGAIN, and actually wrote fanfiction about it. Even though Cooney mentions multiple times that the vampire in this book is definitely not hot, fifteen-year-old me begged to differ, and wrote an alternative timeline where one of the girls gave in to his bite and went away to be his vampire bride forever. So, for those of you who read my books and asked yourselves, "Was she always so fucked up?" The answer, clearly, is yes.
I'm rereading a lot of my old childhood favorites in a challenge that my Goodreads friend Mark has helpfully dubbed Nenia's KU Nostalg-o-Rama™. Some of the books in the NKNoR™ challenge definitely don't hold up at all, but so far all of Caroline B. Cooney's books do. She just has such an interesting, quirky way of writing. It's melodramatic, poetic, and... interesting. Something about it always appealed wildly to melodramatic, poetic teen me.
I wonder why...
THE CHEERLEADER is about a girl named Althea who feeds her classmates to vampires in order to become popular. She's a sad and lonely girl with a bit of an entitlement complex, and doesn't understand why she can't be a cheerleader, too. So she gives the vampire one of the cheerleaders so she can take her place. The vampire doesn't kill the girls-- he just makes them "tired" and kind of soulless. They basically slump around, lacking the will to do anything except exist.
It takes about two girls for Althea to realize that maybe popularity isn't worth being what is basically a murderer, because even though she's not killing these girls, she's definitely hurting them. The vampire is really the dark jewel in this crown, though. His lines are great and he's so seductively evil. You definitely understand how he lures his prey in... and why people find him hard to resist.
Reading this book as an adult was interesting because when I was a young and unpopular teen, I was like, "Yeah, fuck those cheerleaders! They deserve it!" And I didn't really like the ending or understand why she gave it all up when the consequences hardly seemed bad. But now, reading this as an adult, I'm like, "Really, teen me? Do they deserve it?" Also, I somehow missed how awful Althea was when I was a teen. Maybe because I was awful too, so I saw in her an ally who resonated with my own negative self-image and feelings of frustrated entitlement. I got two very different readings out of this book, reading it as a depressed teen and a happy adult. Both versions of me still secretly thought that she should have chosen the option of being his vampire bride, though.
Two qualms with this book, though:
1. WHERE THE HELL ARE ALTHEA'S PARENTS? She lives in this massive house... by herself? We never once see or even hear about her parents. Not once. It's weird.
2. The lack of closure at the end. What happens to the vampire's victims? Do they just stay empty shells forever? I wanted answers, dammit!
I was originally going to give this four stars but I'm really annoyed by the ending.
It's a shame that Tankersley Cusick didn't write more adult horror because she has such an amazing style and I feel like when she tries to sanitize it for her young adult audience, so much of the vitals are lost. I mean, when you compare this book to the magnificence of BLOOD ROOTS, it's almost like apples and oranges.
That said, across all her works, this author does many things that I love. Her attention to atmosphere is truly incredible and reminiscent of those old gothic novels from the 60s and 70s that are all towering castles and mist-tossed moors. She also understands my (that's right, me, personally-- obviously this author writes for MEEEEE alone) personal need for villainous love interests, because her books always offer not one, but at least TWO suspicious hot guys. And best of all, she just has some really wonderful passages of writing, whether it's descriptions of nature, wistful meditations on human emotion, or obsessive teen passion.
At first I thought this book would get a much higher rating from me. he heroine, Kate, is a high school student on her way to a writing retreat with her teacher. Right away, though, things are weird. She's greeted at the train by an ominous dude who immediately tries to warn her away. Then there's another ominous dude who claims to be the brother of the famous writer who headlined this retreat, and he starts talking about how important fear is, how it's such a necessary drive, and just generally skeeving everyone out, but because he's hot it's ok. And then there's the way-too-friendly teen cook who is Kate's accomplice but maybe also an assailant. Who is the bad guy and who is the good guy? I guess you'll just have to find out.
What ended up making this a bit of a slog for me was how circular it all felt. I felt like in my favorite YA Cusick book, HELP WANTED, there were some really chilling scenes and some really impressively colorful characters. But that was a different teen horror imprint and maybe Point Horror wants their authors to reel it in, because this felt reeled in. The ending was ridiculous, in the way that some of those 70s and 80s teen slasher movies could be ridiculous (I'm thinking of one in particular), and I found myself rolling my eyes a little at the drama of it all. Also, there's a girl in here named Tawney who's also working in the kitchen and I think she's supposed to be developmentally disabled, but she also ends up being the butt of a lot of jokes. WHOOPS. HI 90S. DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE.
So overall, this was kind of eh. I mostly just skimmed it to read her interactions with the suspicious (but hot) guys and to get to the actual passages with creepy horror. You could definitely give this one a miss.
The only reason I knew about this book was because I picked up Grady Hendrix's PAPERBACKS FROM HELL and this was one of the titles that he had offhandedly mentioned that he liked. It also didn't sound like it was going to be super gory, and even though I am the biggest wuss on the planet when it comes to horror, I do like atmospheric horror.
ELIZABETH is the story of a sinister fourteen-year-old girl who starts doing bad things to the people around her under the direction of a ghost named Frances who lives in her mirror. She also ends up adopting a cat familiar at some point who she names Mr. Scratch (and no, he doesn't die-- hooray!). It's written in first person and has the chatty, unreliable narration style that a lot of self-published horror these days has.
I don't want to say too much more because of spoilers, but one of the focal questions about this book is whether Elizabeth is a witch or just a psycho. The ending doesn't really deliver on this, either, so if you're not a fan of vague endings, this might make you made. I personally don't care either way so long as a story is good (I can live with a bit of disappointment), but the story was also... weird.
First, Jessica Hamilton is actually a penname for a dude (as was common in the '70s), so don't pick this one up thinking you're supporting women in horror, as I did. Second, this book is gross. If I had known that huge portions of this book revolve around the underage heroine sleeping with her uncle, I would not have picked it up because that is nasty. It's not, like, endorsed or even particularly fetishized, but it just felt like a cheap way to make the story feel more sensational and gross than it needed to be. Which I guess is maybe why this became a cult horror book, in a way. It definitely has '70s grindhouse vibes.
I'd recommend this book to people who like books that push boundaries and enjoy reading stories with major creep factor. I did read this book to the end, even if I was ew-ing most of the way there, so I'm not going to give it too low of a rating, but I don't think I'd read anything else by this author, either. Yuck. Bonus star because the cat survived though and because Mr. Scratch is a hilarious name.
THE VAMPIRE'S PROMISE is the third book in the vampire series, renamed Fatal Bargain when the series was rebranded. Here, our unnamed villain returns to torment a group of six teenagers who decided to have a party in the haunted mansion that's slated to be demolished. With his home being torn down, the vampire really has nothing left to lose, and he's so hungry... Being one to toy with his prey, he tells the teens that he'll be happy to let them go, provided that they vote someone to be his eternal victim instead.
I owned this book when I was a kid, so I've read and reread this one multiple times. I remember thinking it was ingenious when I was fifteen, but as a thirty-something, I'm slightly more skeptical. This book is better than the second but not as good as the first, and part of what bogs it down is a litany of unnecessary POV swaps-- we're not just treated to each of the six kids, but also one of the younger siblings, one of the older siblings, a carjacker, and a policewoman.
Regarding the actual teens themselves, I thought they were all pretty well done. Lacey was my favorite as a kid and I still liked her the best now, but all of the others are extremely unlikable. Watching them argue about who gets to die is amusing but kind of sad (in fact, Roxanne, one of the bitchy teens, has this hilarious line about how selfish she is that stuck with me for all these years and made me laugh anew last night).
The vampire is really the pieces de resistance of this book. When I was a teen, I wrote fanfiction about this book where he took Lacey to be his bride of the night because that's what I was into back then: vampire brides and darkness. Actually, still true, but I was way more melodramatic about it as a teen haha. I don't have that fanfiction anymore but it just goes to show that I noticed the vampire's rather erotic interactions with his victims even when I was a child. It's canon.
This was a fun series to revisit but it really doesn't hold up as well as some of CBC's other books, like the Losing Christina trilogy, or the excellent Twilight-esque romance, THE STRANGER.
I'm rereading some of the old YA pulps that are available on Kindle Unlimited and among those are some of Caroline B. Cooney's contributions to Scholastic's Point Horror imprint. I grew up reading these books and they influenced many of my own writings. My favorites were the Losing Christina trilogy and the Vampire's Promise trilogy, although the names of those trilogies came later. THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE was actually renamed EVIL RETURNS when it was repackaged into the trilogy, something that confused me as a kid when I went to the library and found both editions, seemingly different books, until you opened up the covers.
Cooney has a pretty unconventional take on vampires. This one lives in a spooky tower and grants wishes that come with strings attached, kind of like Jareth from Labyrinth. Also like Jareth from Labyrinth, he has a somewhat inappropriate relationship with the teenage girls who enter into bargains with him. It's not quite sexual but there's a tension there that made me feel uncomfortable as a kid without quite being able to identify why. This is the stuff that writes a thousand fanfics.
The first book in this series, THE CHEERLEADER, is about a lonely girl named Althea who desperately wants to be popular, so she feeds some girls to a vampire in order to become a well-liked cheerleader. A flawed character to be sure, but relatable and interesting. My only qualms with the series were a lack of closure and the fact that Althea seemingly doesn't have any parents and lives in her house alone?? It's very disjointed and doesn't have the polish of some of her other books I've read.
THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE features another girl with a weird name. Devnee. Devnee is also a new girl who's desperate and alone, but she's a bit more unlikable and greedier than Althea. She doesn't just want to be popular, she wants to be beautiful... smart... everything. And the vampire is only too happy to give her what she wants, as long as she gives him what he wants.
The relationship between Devnee and the vampire definitely feels erotic. Some of the things he says to her could totally be taken the wrong way (but maybe Cooney intended that). Sadly, he doesn't get as much screen time here as he did in the first. He doesn't feel quite as seductive, nor as chilling. Devnee also feels like a ridiculous caricature of a character, and I kind of hated her throughout the whole book-- especially at the end, which feels hugely anticlimactic and devoid of character development.
This is the first CBC book I'm giving less than three stars. It feels very dialed in. It's a shame, because the first one was so good and really provides a lot of set-up for more Faustian bargains. Oh, well.
LOVE YOU TO DEATH is... not a great book. It actually reminded me a lot of this direct-to-VHS movie I watched in middle school called Devil's Pond. It's one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it bombs, starring, bizarrely enough, Tara Reid and Kip Pardue. They're a newlywed couple spending their honeymoon on a creepy island in a swamp. When the two weeks are over, Reid finds out that Pardue intends to keep her in his swamp forever, and that his love for her is... shall we say, unhealthy. Psychotic, even. Oops.
The whole time you're watching it, you can't help but wonder-- woman, did you not see the entire color guard parade he hired to twirl all those red flags at you?? But psychological thrillers would not be the booming enterprise they are if they did not capitalize on the viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief when it comes to the stupidity of the victim. I would know, after all, being a part of that whole "TSTL for Days" crowd. So many of my own books necessitate that you're willing to believe that, yes, the heroine really can be that naive.
Anyway, LOVE YOU TO DEATH is like a YA version of Devil's Pond. Julie is the sweet innocent girl in her group of Southern friends, led by Queen Bee Tara, descendant of plantation owners and founders of the town they all live in. When the hot, new-in-school bad boy swaggers his broody way through the gates, Tara is on him faster than you can say "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," but Quinn only has eyes for Tara, leading to a schism between Julie and the rest of her jealous clique.
But Quinn is possessive and he has a temper. He's also psychotic AF, with mood swings, paranoia, and a bizarre fixation on another girl, a girl named Alison. Julie soon finds herself trapped in a horrific nightmare as she's alienated from friends and family, and people around her start turning up dead. She soon (lol) suspects that Quinn might be involved, but how far will he go to keep her as his?
I began skimming towards the end because it started to get so dramatic and wasn't written very well, in my opinion. I rolled my eyes at the hammy dialogue. The ending was so weird and way too neat, and the murders were not very suspenseful. It was kind of like watching a car crash... or a bad Lifetime movie. You know you're looking at something that is objectively horrible but find yourself a captive audience to the shit show that is in front of you. I was just invested enough that I felt the need to see this book to the end... and the ending wasn't great, either. It just kind of fizzles.
Caroline B. Cooney was one of my favorite authors in middle grade. I devoured all of the Point Horror books with rapacious greed, but Cooney, with her melodramatic, bodice-ripper-like prose, and her Gothic stories with strong, but flawed heroines, really spoke to me. There was an odd poetry to her writing that wasn't present in that of R.L. Stine or Christopher Pike, and she had the craziest ideas.
THE STRANGER is a lot like TWILIGHT... if TWILIGHT were written by R. Lee Smith in the 1980s. Nicoletta is a dramatic young teenage girl who feels that her life is over because she's been kicked out of her beloved music club for the ultra-talented new girl. Forced to take a new elective, she ends up in "Art Appreciation" instead, where she becomes fascinated by the mysterious and stoic new guy, Jethro, who sits alone and acts as if the world is an alien mystery.
She follows him "home" only to learn that he doesn't have a home to go to. Instead, she ends up in the woods, following him through the ice and snow to a cave bordered by mysterious lakes and guarded by a stone totem. There she learns... that Jethro is not like other boys.
When I first read the premise of this book, I was thinking that the boy was going to be an evil demon or something like that-- but that is really not the case! This is a romance, but it's also a Gothic mystery, and features some truly beautiful writing and fascinating metaphors. The "villain" of this book is pretty scary, and reading this was a mistake, because one of the scenes in here definitely gave me some nightmares (my fault for reading it in the middle of the night). I'm honestly heartbroken that this gem is going unread because it's been branded as young adult pulp.
...But don't worry! If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for FREE like I did. I was absolutely delighted when I learned how many Point Horror novels are on KU. As part of my most recent harebrained book blogger scheme, I plan on revisiting a lot of these gems-- some new to me, others beloved old favorites-- and seeing which ones hold up and which ones... don't. This one is new to me but I wish I'd read it as a teen because I think I would have loved it even more then.
This is a lot like if the CW decided to do a hot take on The Mummy. Lana is a young teenage girl obsessed with Egypt. She lives in Colorado, which has just gotten an Egyptian exhibit on lease at the Boulder Natural History Museum, where she works as a volunteer. It seems like a match made in heaven... except the mummy they have as the focal piece is part of a sad Romeo and Juliet-esque story. Prince Nefra and Princess Urbena, both dying before they could be married...
Then strange things start happening. Lana hears voices. Lights go on and off. She receives strange notes and scorpions in her bed. Nefra demands the return of his princess to break an unspecified "curse." And that princess might just be Lana, who looks just like Urbena with her trendy Egyptian haircut and exotic beauty. GASP!
I bet you didn't see that coming.
As part of my most recent reviewing project, I'm tackling the YA pulp horror/thriller novels that were so popular in the 80s and 90s. Some of the authors are old favorites I'm revisiting, but there's been a couple that are new to me. The only book I ever read by Steiner was called DREAMSTALKER, which I liked enough that I remembered the title of it twenty years later. I was curious to see what her other books were like, because I remember reading DREAMSTALKER as a kid, breathless with anticipation and chills.
THE MUMMY almost has an L.J. Smith vibe to it. There's paranormal elements and a strong, plucky, and yes, of course, beautiful heroine as the focal point, and a ton of attractive boys work at the museum, vying for Lana's attention. L.J. Smith's books were also like this, notably the Vampire Diaries, which had not one, but two, potential love interests for the beautiful and tragically doomed heroine. Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine are perhaps the most popular authors from this age of teen horror fiction, but I liked a lot of the women authors the best-- they tended to inject Gothic melodrama and doomed romance into their books, probably because they grew up reading bodice-rippers and Victoria Holt, and wanted to instill that same breathless thrill into their own writing.
Well, I love Gothic novels and bodice-rippers, too, and I must say that Steiner does a great job capturing everything that made those types of books fun and adapting it for a younger audience. Anyone who enjoys L.J. Smith is probably going to enjoy this book, especially if you also like that cheesy-so-bad-it's-good movie, The Mummy.
I first read DREAMSTALKER when I was in middle school. Usually the young adult pulp was kept in a small bookshelf along the far wall, but somehow this one had gotten mixed in with the more sophisticated titles. The moment I saw that jagged font and horror movie cover, twelve-year-old me knew she was in for a treat.
This book is about twins named Karen and Kerr. Both of them are attractive but Karen is more popular than Kerr, even though he's the better looking one. He's needy and clingy and wants his sister to be with him all the time. Karen, however, is ready to move on from Kerr and be a little more independent.
Anyway, Karen starts having dreams that seem like they predict the deaths of her classmates. The school bully dies of an asthma attack with flowers shoved down his throat ("natural causes," say the police), her boyfriend gets crushed in a football match, her best friend dies of fear while covered in red paint ("natural causes" again), and then, soon, she starts dreaming of her brother's death, too.
Someone is trying to torture Karen-- but who? Why? And HOW?
I read another book by this author called THE MUMMY that was actually pretty good. It was kind of like something L.J. Smith would write-- paranormal romantic horror. This was more traditional YA horror movie thrills and chills. The dream sequences, which were terrifying when I was a kid, just seemed silly and cheesy now. The twist shocked me enough that I remembered it twenty years later, but I wasn't as impressed this second time around.
Also, THE PSYCHOLOGY IN THIS BOOK IS SO BAD. Karen's psych teacher keeps talking about dream symbolism, shadow dreams, and psychic abilities. I'm sorry, since when did Venkman retire from Ghostbusting and become a suburban Colorado high school teacher? That is not psychology and as someone who actually studied and has a degree in psychology, this made me cringe super hard.
Read this for the cheese factor, and to see the most incompetent doctors and policemen I've ever encountered in fiction, where murder is basically labeled a natural cause if you aren't found with a knife embedded in your throat.
I'm reading (and rereading) a bunch of old YA books from the 80s and 90s. Some of them are new to me, but others are old favorites. FOG, SNOW, and FIRE were beloved Point Horror staples for me in my middle school years, although the books were later rebranded into what is now known as the Losing Christina series. I've joked that it should be called the Gaslighting Christina series, as this trilogy is an incredibly dark look at the psychological torture and emotional abuse of children.
Christina comes from an island off the coast of Maine called Burning Fog Isle. It's super small so once kids grow up, they have to go to school on the mainland. Thirteen-year-old Christina is excited about making friends, and boarding at a luxurious seaside inn with the other older island children: Anya, Michael, and Benj.
Pretty soon, though, Christina finds out that her new home and school have some pretty serious problems. The guest rooms in the inn are pretty and quaint, but the children live in an unfurnished room at the top of a rickety and steep staircase where it's drafty and cold. Mr. Shevvington and Mrs. Shevvington, their caretakers, are also the principal and the English teacher of the school, respectively. They give new students surveys, asking them about their fears, and English assignments describing what they think it might feel like to die or have their parents abandon them.
Christina doesn't understand why none of the other adults or children seem to see through the Shevvingtons when what they're doing to her seems clear as glass. Anya, whom she shares a room with, becomes fascinated by the sea, and the Shevvingtons do nothing to curb that fascination. Indeed, they encourage it, and seem delighted by the fact that Anya might destroy herself on the waves. Because it seems like maybe they've done this before. To other girls. In other towns.
And if Christina isn't careful, she might be next.
Caroline B. Cooney is an amazing author. Not all of these books hold up over time, but everything I've read of Cooney's so far has. I think it's because she has a beautiful, unique writing style. It's like one of those sensational 1970s Gothic romances reimagined for a child, without being condescending in the least. I love the melodrama and the passion; there is restraint in the writing, but many of her books have this subdued sensuality that borders on erotic at times. And the atmosphere! The Maine coast is practically a character here, described with such lavish, chilling detail that you can almost smell the briny, cold sea air.
As a child I found it so chilling that there could be adults who might get enjoyment from torturing children. As an adult myself, I know better now-- but I think this book does a good job showing how some adults abuse their power to fuck with kids. And honestly, this is part of the reason this series is so near and dear to my heart. Christina is isolated by her peers and picked on by teachers, people who should be in her corner but instead encourage the bullying. I had that happen to me in high school. I was bullied pretty badly-- by students and by some teachers-- when I was just a year older than Christina. I spent most of my freshman year hiding in the library or the bathroom at lunch to avoid being picked on. So this trilogy really stayed with and resonated with me, because it helped me feel like maybe I could be strong like Christina was, and that I wasn't alone in my misery.
I admire Christina as a character just as much now as I did then, if not more so. Her bravery and resilience makes you root for her over the course of the trilogy. She goes through hell, only to climb out of it, grim-faced and maybe a little worse for wear, but flying her "tri-colored hair" like a war banner. I actually named one of my characters in my books-- Christina Parker from the IMA series-- after this character, Christina Romney. This book made me think of Christina as a strong and resilient name that was synonymous for survival, and when I wanted to write a book of my own about surviving against all odds, Christina was the first name that came to mind... because of THE FOG.
Anyway, as you can probably tell, this series is very important to me and I'm absolutely delighted to be able to say in all honesty that it does hold up. You can read it for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. I plan on reading the other two books soon and seeing how they weigh against this one.
FREEZE TAG is a "new to me" Point Horror novel that was first published in 1992. Meghan has been best friends with the Trevor family her whole life. She's the literal girl next door, in awe of their warmth and close-knit family bonds. Lannie is the interloper, the creepy girl that no one likes. But Lannie has a special power: she likes to play "freeze tag": only... when she freezes you in the game, you freeze for real.
Meghan and West are now going out, but Lannie doesn't like this. Because Meghan was frozen by Lannie when they were children, and she only unfroze her if West would "like her best." So Lannie breaks up the school's golden couple by threatening Meghan with another freeze, as well as West's younger sister, Tuesday, and anyone else who gets in the way of her and what she wants.
This is the darkest story I've read by Caroline B. Cooney. Darker even than Losing Christina, which is an entire trilogy devoted to the psychological torture of children by adults. There's just something so sickening about Lannie's extreme sociopathy and what she is doing to West. It's basically sexual assault-- he's a victim, blackmailed into being her boyfriend and all that entails. Parts of this book made me so uncomfortable; she's so fucking evil.
On the other hand, that darkness is part of the reason this book holds up. Cooney takes a silly premise that R.L. Stine might come up with for one of his Goosebumps books, but she makes it genuinely terrifying and believable. I'm also in love with her poetic descriptions and her ability to set a scene. The winters in this book juxtaposed against the summers, and all of the sights, scents, and sensations are all so well done. In some of her books it can feel a little dialed in but not in this one! Not at all!
The ending was a bit dissatisfying but also really interesting. I kind of wish there was an epilogue, but on the other hand, it's fun to imagine what might have gone from there, too.
I enjoyed the first book, BLOOD CURSE, in this series enough that I wanted to check out the sequel. The best way of describing these books is kind of like a gender-reversed Vampire Diaries. James, the dumb, perfect human boy, has attracted the attentions of a vampiress named Rina. The only problem is, he has a human girlfriend named Chelsea. Rina pays James visits in the night for sexy neck biting sessions, but he still stays loyal to Chelsea despite his growing attraction to Rina. But how does she fix that? By killing her!
...Except, oops! She accidentally made Chelsea into a vampire instead. And while Chelsea was ambitious as a human, she's positively evil as a vampire. She's decided that Rina must die and James will be hers-- as a vampire-- and enlists the help of the very vampire who turned Rina, a man named Vlad, for assistance.
This book... was frustrating. First, James is such a dope. I didn't buy him as a love interest and couldn't understand why two human women would waste their time over this dope. People talk about Bella Swan being a dopette, but at least she was smart and passionate. James has all the passion of a slice of whole grain bread and he's not very smart. Why would two vampire women waste their time on this twit? You have all of eternity... come on!
Also, this book jumps the shark about fifty times. I'm not exactly expecting realism in my vampire novels but it really felt like Harrell had no idea what to do with this one and just crammed as much as she could to pad this out to novella length so she could publish it. It showed. I was incredibly bored.
I recently found out that you can get a whole bunch of older young adult books for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. If revisting the Point Horror novellas that were a staple of your youth isn't reason enough to sign up and subscribe, I don't know what is. #notsponsored
BLOOD CURSE is about-- you guessed it-- vampires. Rina is a vampire who was turned as an innocent young waif by an opportunist (and sexy!) vampire named Vlad. Now she's curious about the high school experience because she's fallen for a teenager named James. Rina will do whatever it takes to possess James, be it seduction or murder, which is unfortunate, because James has a girlfriend...
While reading this book, I kept thinking about how it was giving me L.J. Smith vibes. I was really enjoying it! So, naturally, I checked out the author's backlist to see if she had any other goodies I could enjoy once I finished with this one. While checking out the synopsis for TEMPTATION, I couldn't help but notice the blurb: "From the creators of the bestselling Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle."
Say WHAT? Is Janice Harrell a ghost-writer or pen name for L.J. Smith? COLOR ME YES. I mean, I have no idea and can't confirm, but the blurb seems to imply a relation between the two authors. Having finished BLOOD CURSE, I would say that Janice Harrell is probably an author you will love if L.J. Smith is a favorite of yours. Her books have that same breathless, yet, repressed vibe of sexuality, with surprisingly deep emotional arcs and some truly good scenes of horror.
I really enjoyed this horrific vampire romance between a young female vampire and a teenage boy. Word of warning is that it ends on a mega-cliffhanger, so it doesn't really work as a standalone. I know if I had read this as a kid growing up and had the book end there, I'd be mad as shit.
DAUGHTER FROM THE DARK isn't the type of book I normally gravitate to, but I loved the authors' other work, VITA NOSTRA, so much that I resolved that I was going to read whatever else they wrote that was translated into English. It was one of my favorite books that I've read within the last year or so, quickly topping my list of "best fantasy books." So important note for those of you in a similar position: if you've read VITA NOSTRA, don't be fooled by the similar covers: the two books are nothing alike.
VITA NOSTRA is a dark magic school story imbued in metaphysics and suspense. DAUGHTER FROM THE DARK is one of those fantasy horror stories grounded in realism, like Joe Hill and Stephen King's works. The main character is a radio DJ named Aspirin who finds a young girl in an alley. Initially, he's going to leave her, but he goes back and takes her with him to spend the night at his apartment. It all ends up going horribly wrong. The girl might or might not be human and the teddy bear she has might or might not be a monster.
It isn't possible to say much more about this book without major spoilers, but Alyona, as we later learn she's called, is creepy and manipulative AF. But Aspirin is also bad in some ways, too. He's cowardly and he hits Alyona at least once, and he's so used to living his life like a selfish, callous bachelor that he isn't at all equipped to take care of a child, human or no. At one point, when she gets a fever, he's literally just like, "Oh well, so what do I do now?" and goes to the neighbor for help who's shocked that he never even considered aspirin (ironic, considering his stage name LOL). There really isn't much of a plot, either. The story is entirely character driven and moved by the suspense of whether what's happening is real or not and what will happen with the two main characters.
I really liked the beginning of the book but I began to get bored by the end. VITA NOSTRA was really long and I'm glad that this book was shorter, because if they were the same length, I probably would have DNF-ed. The ending was weird and unsatisfying, and a bit of a let-down after spending so much time with these characters. I liked the story and thought it was interesting, but it's not something I would read again, like VITA NOSTRA, and I would be unlikely to tear after someone in the streets, screaming, "YOU NEED TO READ THIS! IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!" the way some books make me feel. This one is just kind of meh, and that's okay, but considering how much I love-love-loved their other effort, it's a bit disappointing.
That said, I am pretty amazed by how different all their works seem to be. VITA NOSTRA is a book that reminds me of SCHOLOMANCE and POPPY WAR-- an epic fantasy with an academic setting that features an unlikable, and incredibly flawed MC. Their other English-translated work, THE SCAR, appears to be high fantasy-- also featuring a morally grey protagonist. This is urban horror meets suspense, with a dash of magic-realism. It makes me really want to read all of their other works, because they don't seem to be derivative of each other at all, and that makes me want to read more and find out what I'm missing.
Zoje Stage seems to be taking things that most people like and find wholesome and turning them into objects of horror. Children? Check. Nature? Check. What's next... bake sales? Dogs? Sunsets? Whatever she picks, I'm sure I'll find it totally validating, because this book reminded me why I hate camping and hiking so much. Nature can be creepy. I don't think I've ever been so freaked out by trees since I read UPROOTED by Naomi Novik.
This book is about a family that ends up moving to the middle of nowhere so the husband, Shaw, can paint. His wife, Orla, is a retired ballerina and now that her star has faded, she's going to be the one taking care of the kids in their reclusive cabin in the woods. But what first seems like a rustic and charming idyll quickly starts to become uneasy and horrifying as the family starts to see things that can't be explained... like lights, strange weather, and other phenomena that defy rational explanations, but somehow seem to be tied to the mysterious white pine on their property. And then, things start to get really, really twisted...
...Like a tree root! LOL jk.
For the first 75% of the book, I was deliberating on giving this book 5 stars. Stage captures in this book the ambient horror that made Ira Levin such a lasting read. You don't need blood and body counts to make a horror novel good; the atmosphere in this book is fantastic. Regardless of what you end up deciding about WONDERLAND, it is, unquestionably, a better book than BABY TEETH. The character development is more refined, it is less cheesy horror movie and more Kubrickian, and the writing is much more mature-- and even lyrical in some parts. I liked this a lot more, and found it way less frustrating than I did BABY TEETH, which felt like a bad 80s horror movie at times.
The last 25% of this book got a little weird. And I don't want to say any more about it, because I don't want to spoil the ending, but to explain why this didn't end up getting a more solid 4 stars from me, or even a five, I want to tell you about this movie called The Langoliers, which is one of Stephen King's lesser-known projects. It's a horror movie that is filled with pulse-pounding, spine-chilling build-up, which is ruined in an instant during the grand reveal where you are treated to some truly heinous CGI. I have a shelf on Goodreads called "The Langoliers Effect" where I shelve horror novels whose effects are slightly tarnished by their reveals, and I feel like that is slightly the case here. It doesn't spoil the book but it does get kind of weird, and not necessarily in the good kind of way.
If you enjoy Ira Levin or M. Night Shyamalan 's good movies, I think you will like this. The atmosphere is nicely crafted and the writing is great and it is so freaking creepy. Even if you didn't like her first book, BABY TEETH, I would still urge you to give this one a try, as it's quite a different book from her first, and she's improved so much between then and now that I'm really excited for whatever she decides to put out there next, because I'm sure it will be even better.
P.S. The children are named Eleanor Queen and Tycho and the parents are named Shaw and Orla. Wot.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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