The Bookworm: Missing and The Secret Bedroom
Missing, by R.L. Stine. 168 pages. Pocket Books. January 1990.
The Secret Bedroom, by R.L. Stine. 167 pages. Pocket Books. September 1991.
When the scream faded away Lea opened her eyes. As she stared in openmouthed horror, all three ghostly figures melted together in a glowing, malodorous ball of flame, which slowly vanished in a choking cloud of yellow, sulfurous smoke. (The Secret Bedroom, page 162.)
I picked Missing and The Secret Bedroom to be my latest Fear Street rereads because both, based on their titles and cover art, looked to be the dumbest. However, both turned out to be very enjoyable.
Especially surprising was Missing. Though I remember nothing about most of my Fear Street novellas, I do recall being very disappointed with Missing; it was the one Fear Street book I did not like. From what I could remember, nothing was resolved in the end. The lives of the two main characters are turned upside down when their parents disappear and everyone they know treats them like strangers. In the end they wander off to nowhere in particular as orphans. It pissed me off and was one of the reasons I decided to read Missing first; I wanted to get it out of the way. Thankfully, the book turned out to be much better than I remembered.
When their parents do not return from work one night, Mark and Cara do not think much of it. Their parents had worked through the night before so it was no big deal. However, they did not leave a note or call. When they do not come home the next day, Mark and Cara begin to worry. They become suspicious of a distant cousin, Roger, who lives in their attic and little mysteries begin to pile up: their parents left the car in the garage, Roger is sneaking out in the middle of the night, a gray van is parked near their house, and Mark and Cara find a small, white monkey head with rhinestone eyes in their parents’ room. Exacerbating their worries, they drive to their parents’ workplace to find that there is no record of their parents working there. Also, Mark’s girlfriend suddenly breaks up with him and is sent “upstate” to stay with her cousin. Compounding each mystery is the fact they recently moved to Shadyside (to a house on Fear Street, of course) and have almost no support system.
There was a lot going on in Missing and none of it made sense until the end; everything is, thankfully, resolved in the end, unlike what I remembered. (The only remaining mystery from the book is the symbolism of the white monkey head. I have no clue what it was supposed to represent.) The book has its frustrating moments and there is an unnecessary second plotline regarding someone from their parents’ past. Also, the book is full of those chapter-ending, page-turning mini-dramas, but those are just hallmarks of the genre. As usual, everything worked out too conveniently, but overall I was pretty impressed.
Though corny as always, The Secret Bedroom proved to be a gem itself. Lea and her parents are new to Shadyside and have moved into the shabbiest looking house on Fear Street. (Lea’s parents buy old houses and renovate them.) Upstairs in the attic is a door along a wall that has been locked and boarded up for at least 100 years. After hearing footsteps above her bedroom and the coaxing of a young girl’s voice from the other side of the mysterious door, Lea is very tempted to open the door. But, she wonders, what is on the other side? Who, or what, is urging her to open it?
Does she open the door? I have no clue. Stine uses deus ex machina to conveniently flip the story and introduce new elements, which I did not care for. Afterward, I was left wondering whether the events were real or if Lea was dreaming them. Or were they illusions created by the supernatural? Stine drops hints along the way — those intentional inconsistencies meant to arouse suspicion — but in the end I really have no clue what was real and what was not.
Nonetheless, The Secret Bedroom was well written. It, too, featured a second storyline that was pretty lame, but everything merged together at the end. It is the first Fear Street reread to deal with the supernatural and ghosts. Hopefully there are more to come.
