Bringing back the Nenia's KU nostalg-o-rama challenge because a whole bunch of new YA horror books from the past just got added to KUBringing back the Nenia's KU nostalg-o-rama challenge because a whole bunch of new YA horror books from the past just got added to KU...more
I was tearing through these Point Horror releases for a while until I turned to cleaning out the books I'd bought for my Kindle. This one just sat half-finished, gathering dust, until I decided to get on with things for Mystery & Thriller week, because timing is everything.
Diane Hoh was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid and even indirectly inspired some of my own work, along with D.E. Athkins and Christopher Pike. I liked that her stories were edgy and didn't talk down to her audience the way R.L. Stine's sometimes did, and the fact that she had a series set in university made them seem extra "adult" and edgy, considering that the Point Horror novels are all mostly middle grade Scholastic imprints.
The only book in this series I actually read as a kid was THE SILENT SCREAM, which is a typical murder mystery with a supernatural twist. I gave it four stars rounded up due to nostalgic value and because the mystery is really well done and genuinely creepy. I was excited to read further on in the series as an adult as I feel that they hold up reasonably well in terms of quality.
In DEADLY ATTRACTION, we return to Salem University. Jessica and Ian reappear from the first book, but the main character in this story is Jessica's friend, Hailey. Hailey and her roommate, Nell, are just nice ordinary girls having fun eating out with their friends, when they see one of the hot shot jocks named Robert Q putting the moves on a townie waitress named Darlene while he's on the rebound from his rich ex. Hailey feels sorry for Darlene and tries to be extra nice to her because of the way Robert's crowd slut-shames her, and she and Nell even try to give her a fancy makeover.
But unfortunately, things pan out exactly as Hailey feared. Robert dumps Darlene like yesterday's news, and Darlene gets very, very angry. Understandably so, Hailey thinks... until weird things start happening. Like her and Nell's dorm room being trashed, a car being destroyed... and then, pretty soon... actual deaths. Just how upset is Darlene with Robert Q? And is Hailey's own life in danger?
Unlike SILENT SCREAM, this book has no supernatural elements. And unlike SILENT SCREAM, it doesn't seem to be plotted out as well. SILENT had all these really great clues but DEADLY felt much more disorganized. I felt like there were way too many red herrings and the book spent too much time on things that weren't really focal to the plot. It was a much more uneven book in terms of quality and I didn't really like Hailey as much as I liked Jessica in the first book.
The series is now charmingly dated with its talk of typewriters and lack of cell phones, but the teenagers still act like teenagers, even if it's a "golly gee" hamburgers and sodapop brand of teenager that's more typical of small towns in the midwest. I found it amusing but I'm not sure I want to read further on in the series. I feel like this probably should have been capped at the first book.
A while ago, I was doing a fun challenge where I was snapping up all the republished 80s and 90s YA and middle grade novels I could find on KU (there are a surprising amount of them) and reviewing all of the ones that piqued my fancy. Many of them were Point Horror, since those books, along with manga, were probably the biggest influence on my as an author (which you will probably immediately recognize if you're familiar with my work-- pulp horror meets OTT K-dramatics).
DEADLY STRANGER was actually really surprising in a fun way for several reasons. First, it's edgier than I was expecting for a middle grade title published in the early 90s, with plenty of allusions to sexual content, some pretty graphic violence, and casual mentions of drinking. Also, the two heroines are literally sneaking away from their parents to go on a ski trip without telling anyone, so there's that.
Shenanigans ensue when they pick up a hot guy who looks like a movie star from his totaled car. Only-- oops, it turns out he's a rapey bad man and he whips out a gun and pulls the ol' "now drive," so they're stuck with him and whatever his sinister plans are. And they are SINISTER.
Because I was a little trash can before I grew up and became a big, mature dumpster, I could totally see young me writing fanfic about the hot kidnapper guy because HOW DO YOU THINK I GOT STARTED ON THIS PATH TO TRASHDOM???? Hot guys = no questions asked. God, I was dumb. I mean, I still am, but at least now I know it. But the fact that he is hot adds a nice bit of tension to all of the gross horror that is the villain of this book WHO, I might add, is one of the most terrifying Point Horror villains that I have encountered in ages. Bravo.
Also, the two girls, Kelly and Lauren, are both very smart. Lauren's the pretty one and Kelly's the cynical DUFF, but they're actually REALLY ingenious in how they try to outsmart the killer. The fact that both of these realistic teenage characters were written by an older man just makes me really happy, because we often see examples of dudes writing young women badly-- here is an example of it being done well. The note in the ceiling was ingenious. Also the ending? *chef's kiss* You just know that Kelly is going to be the last girl standing in a horror movie. She's that fucking smart.
I liked this a lot and the only reason it isn't getting a higher rating is because the beginning took a while to get moving and the ending began to drag. Good stuff.
This is the final book in the Losing Christina trilogy. The first book is THE FOG, the second book is THE SNOW, and the third book is THE FIRE. I read all of these in middle school; my school library had a little wooden bookshelf in the corner filled with Point Horror novels and other YA pulp, and I can't tell you how many times I went over to that corner and availed myself of the latest trash.
I still remember the first time I read THE FIRE. It was nearing summer and hot. I was a shy thirteen-year-old, about to start my first year of high school. I really admired Christina's bravery and how she stood up against all the bullies who were gaslighting her and trying to bring her down. She was such a romantic figure, and in between first loves and her coming-of-age, she had to fight against the sadistic and evil Shevvingtons: adults who got pleasure out of emotionally abusing children to the point that they "broke."
THE FIRE is probably the weakest book in the trilogy. Having read them all back to back, I would say that THE FOG is the strongest. The writing is lyrical and gorgeous and it features some truly unique metaphors and symbolism. THE SNOW is also quite good-- but THE FIRE falls back on the symbolism of previous books, to the point where it begins to feel a little repetitive. The advantage to this is that you can go right into THE FIRE, as I did as a kid, without reading the previous books.
In THE FIRE, the Shevvingtons have turned their focus on Christina. She was always their victim, but in THE FOG and THE SNOW, they had their eye on other girls. Now they're planning on leaving, and starting their evil anew in another city, but before they go, they want Christina to suffer as she never has before. The stakes have never been higher, and as Christina finds herself in rooms splashed with gasoline and carrying purses filled with matchbooks, she begins to realize that her end is not going to be one of ice, but one of fire.
I honestly really enjoyed rereading this trilogy. I'm revisiting a lot of my old favorites and some of them definitely don't hold up (*stares at R.L. Stine*). Cooney's work does, though, and I think these books in particular would make an excellent mini-series like Flowers in the Attic. They also seriously need to be rereleased with new and pretty covers, because I think she's a heroine to rival Katniss Everdeen in terms of sheer number of shit that gets thrown at her over the course of these books. In THE FIRE, she's broken down and getting tired, but I never stopped rooting for her. Not once.
I'm going to start Cooney's Vampire trilogy next and after being pleasantly delighted by the Christina trilogy, my hopes are very high regarding the rest of her work!
Just as many bodice ripper authors ended up publishing smutty versions of the Gothic and Regency romances they read as girls, all of my published books are basically smutty versions of the YA pulp I read growing up. Nightmare Hall, as well as the other Point Horror novels, are a huge part of the inspiration behind my Horroscape series, with each book highlighting a YA horror/thriller trope I loved (can you guess which ones? lol).
I remember reading THE SILENT SCREAM when I was a kid and thinking that I was reading some really good shit because this is one of the few books that actually had college-age characters instead of teen or middle grade ones, so it gave the books a really "mature" feeling that made them feel extra edgy.
In this book, a girl named Jess is starting her first year at college. She's living off-campus in a place called Nightingale Hall along with a bunch of other coeds: artistic Milo, low-key Ian, tightly-strung Cathy, athlete Linda, and the repair guy, Trucker.
Right away, you know this isn't going to be a chill year. The book opens with a pretty graphic description of the house mother finding out that one of her female residents hung herself. Then Jess finds out that she actually got the dead girl's room and weird things start happening. Objects turning up missing or destroyed, spooky letters, and all kinds of unexplainable creepiness.
And the question: Did Giselle, the dead girl, really take her own life?
Part of the fun of these vintage YA is the dated pop culture references. I loved seeing Tom Selleck and Kim Basinger referred to as sex symbols in this book. Also, the students at this school use typewriters and have to go to the school computer lab if they want to use a computer. The story also held up pretty well. I knew who the bad person was from the beginning, which took out some of the fun of trying to figure out whodunnit, but the mystery was well crafted and well written.
Looking forward to reading the rest of the series! I only ever read the first book!
This kind of sounds like a YA version of what my friend Heather Crews writes.
Really excited to read this as part of my YA challenge! I found out that This kind of sounds like a YA version of what my friend Heather Crews writes.
Really excited to read this as part of my YA challenge! I found out that a lot of older vintage YA are available for free through KU, and this is one of the books on my list because #vampires. :F...more
"The first novel centers on a young girl's discovery that the exciting, rich boy she's fallen in love with is involvedPart of my vintage YA experiment
"The first novel centers on a young girl's discovery that the exciting, rich boy she's fallen in love with is involved in the mysterious disappearance--and possible murder--of another girl."
It's like Janice Harrell reached into the mind of teen me and wrote all the stories I wanted to read about. Really wish I'd found this author when I was a teen. :(...more
I have this project I do where I look up vintage YA pulps from the 80s and 90s and review them! Some of them are rereads from my childhood but some of them are new to me. SUMMER LIGHTNING by Wendy Corsi Staub is new to me. It looks like she made a switch to writing thrillers for adults but she used to write books for kids. This is one of those, a Harper Prism title about ghosts and doomed love.
Set in Maine, our heroine is a girl named Melissa Loring, a Jane Everygirl who wants to be a writer when she grows up. When we meet her, it's her seventeenth birthday and she's just been given a computer as a birthday gift so she can hack out her books on there instead of a typewriter. She and her family live in an old Victorian house and her bedroom is in the turret room and if you think that's ripe for horrific ghostly happenings, you'd be right. It is.
As soon as she turns the computer on, she sees a weird message. She also has blackouts where she hears voices and strange music. Pretty soon, she starts to think that she's seeing a strange boy. A boy who makes her double-think her attraction to her long-term boyfriend, Tripp.
The set-up for this book is really good and I think it will appeal to any fans of Caroline B. Cooney, as there's some really lush Gothic imagery that's almost lyrical. And for a YA book, it's surprisingly sensual. I guess this is Harper and not Scholastic's Point Horror, so maybe that's why it talks about going all the way and has some pretty intense kissing scenes. Maybe Harper decided to skate the prurient edge a little more with their YA thrillers. I don't know, but I kind of liked it. It made me feel like I was watching one of those so-cheesy-it's-good 80s horror movies.
There are some pretty dated references in here-- music, pop culture, Nancy Reagan-- but rather than dating the book, they end up being charming and kind of sweet. The computer stuff also seemed pretty legit. Like the person who wrote the book actually knew a thing or two about technology.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with this little book. It got damn creepy at the end.
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.
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.
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.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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