The Bookworm: The New Boy
The New Boy, by R.L. Stine. 150 pages. “An Archway Paperback published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.” 1994.
What a hunk! When handsome, mysterious Ross Gabriel comes to Shadyside High, all the girls want to date him…even the ones who already have boyfriends! Janie, Eve and Faith go so far as to make a bet…which one of them will he go out with first.
But then the murders begin, and it starts to look like dating Ross means flirting with a gruesome and untimely death. Will Janie’s dream date with Ross turn out to be the night of her life? Or the night of her death?
And now for something completely different.
Though R.L. Stine is better known for Goosebumps, his series of scary stories for children, I was a bigger fan of his franchise for young adults: Fear Street. Back in fifth and sixth grade I had a voracious appetite for the novellas, buying a new edition every month or so at the Waldenbooks in the Sycamore Mall. I amassed quite a collection, which I thought I donated to Goodwill. However, I thankfully discovered my stack of Fear Street books in my closet when I returned to the Midwest last year.
The Fear Street series made a huge impression on me during a formative time in my life, especially in regards to writing; I envied Stine’s prolific creativity, and aspired to write my own series of horror/science fiction novellas. But besides a snippet or scene here and there, I remember almost nothing of the books at all. So I have decided to reread many, perhaps all, of them out of nostalgic curiosity; they will be adventurous filler between the books in my regular reading queue.
I started with The New Boy because it was the first Fear Street book I read. I ordered it in fifth grade through the famous (at least to me) “book order” catalog system we used a lot at Grant Wood. (The book order catalogs were printed on extremely thin and flimsy paper, and I have no clue why.) For whatever reason, the title and short description caught my attention, and I told my mom to order it. As she filled out the order form, I remember her asking, “Are you sure you can handle it? It’s not going to be too scary?” As the above quote from the back cover attests, Fear Street was not Goosebumps. It was for big kids, and I was a big kid; it was, I apparently thought, time to step up to the plate and read like one. And from the moment I received The New Boy a few weeks later, The Boxcar Children and Baby-sitter’s Club were forever relegated to undeserving kid stuff. The book floored me and I jumped headfirst into the Fear Street series. Seventeen years later, as I began reading The New Boy for the second time, I was eager to discover why.
There was no doubt in my mind that the rereading experience would be completely different. After all, I was an 11-year-old boy when I first read it. I am now a 28-year-old man who has a BA in English, been published, and is currently writing (or trying to) a novel of his own. The New Boy is now far below my reading level, so I was not expecting much when I opened it to the first page on Wednesday. However, it turns out I expected too much.
As with all Fear Street novellas, The New Boy takes place in the fictional town of Shadyside and all the main characters are students at Shadyside High. Janie, Eve, and Faith are all smitten with “the new boy,” Ross. Money from “the most successful dance in the history of Shadyside High” goes missing and murderous teen hijinx ensues. Everyone suspects Ross, whose troubled past is revealed to Janie. When Janie is targeted by the real killer at the end, Ross saves her — not before, of course, the perpetrator spills all the beans to illuminate the mysteries of the missing money and murders.
The New Boy is not bad. It is embarrassing. At times I needed to stop reading and say to myself, “I can’t believe this shit. This is just awful.” Awful in that rudimentary way. Because, let’s face it: this is young adult fiction. The New Boy or any other Fear Street novella was not going to win any celebrated or pretentious literature award. This is novel and story writing at its most basic, and serves as a primer for far more symbolic and meaningful texts. It is a Lifetime original movie compared to Lawrence of Arabia.
Each chapter is its own mini-drama set inside the overarching storyline, and each concludes with a soap opera tease that makes you turn the page. Most of those teases — potential revelations or explanations — turn out to be “Gotcha!” practical jokes or very anti-climatic. In one chapter, Ross leaves his French book at Janie’s and she drives to his house (on Fear Street, of course) to return it. An old woman answers the door and says no one named Ross lives there (gasp!), and slams the door in Janie’s face, ending the chapter. The next day at school, Janie confronts Ross and tells him about the incident. She wants to know what’s going on, and he responds, “Janie, I’m going to tell you the truth.” End of chapter. Turn the page…
“The old woman is my grandmother,” Ross confided. “Her mind isn’t quite right anymore. Sometimes she gets confused. She calls me by my father’s name. And sometimes she confuses my father with her younger brother who died twenty years ago.” He sighed. “It isn’t easy having her live with us.”
So lame. While there may have been a ton of suspense when I was 11, this time I expected a senile grandmother to easily and conveniently explain the incident.
Thinking about it now, I think “convenient” sums up The New Boy, and probably young adult fiction in general, in one word. Once again, it serves to introduce young readers to the conventions of fiction. The Fear Street series excels in that sense. And I really should not have expected anything more. Written in the span of just days, the Fear Street and Goosebumps books were a model for cost-effective, mass-market publishing: easy to write, extremely low overhead, and oodles of profits. According to the copyright page, The New Boy was first printed in January 1994. At the end of the book is an advertisement for The Dare, the next book in the series: “Coming February 1994.”
I have to say, though, reading The New Boy was a trip down memory lane, especially in regards to the Fear Street franchise and its quirks. There were certain things I could never understand. Probably set somewhere in Ohio (Stine grew up in Columbus), Shadyside is depicted as the quintessential and stereotypical Any Town, USA. But its murder rate rivals that of Gary, Indiana. People get killed all the time, and most of the victims are high school students. I’m a public school kid through and through, but I would seriously consider sending my teenage children to a private school if I lived in Shadyside. Studying, and even teaching, at Shadyside High is a serious health risk. Yet all is well because the events of one book have no bearing on another. Though the setting is the same, and many of the same locations are featured, there is no overlap with events or plots. The number of students killed in my collection of Fear Street books probably equates to an entire graduating class, yet it seems the characters in one book do not exist in another, so there is no net affect on the town and school as a whole.
And then there’s the mystery of the infamous Fear Street. The street itself must span an entire county because it is home to abandoned houses, mansions for the rich, middle-class folks, poor people, and dark and mysterious woods. (However, I guess that is a good description of First Avenue in Iowa City, too.) After all that has happened on Fear Street, who the hell would want to live there? I could never figure it out.
Regardless, rereading The New Boy was fun, and I am definitely looking forward to the next Fear Street saga in my queue.
New word I learned: Though this is classic sixth grade reading level material, there was one word I did not know: “cruller.” One of the characters works at a donut shop in a mall and a customer asks how much the crullers are. A cruller is, according to my MacBook dictionary, “a small cake made of rich, sweetened dough twisted or curled and fried in deep fat.”
