The Bookworm: Halloween Night
Halloween Night, by R.L. Stine. 185 pages. Scholastic Inc. September 1993.
“Tell her what?” Brenda snapped shrilly. “Tell her that I don’t want maggoty meat in my bed anymore? Tell her that I’d really prefer it if she kept the headless, decaying birds to herself? Tell her that I don’t need her stealing my boyfriends and deliberately wrecking my car?” (Halloween Night, 130-131.)
This week I was hellishly busy. I worked, painted wood grain paneling in a bathroom, and wrote my longer LV piece. It does not sound like much but it kept me occupied from morning ‘til night. It was crazy. Needless to say, I will be enjoying a couple brews this weekend.
Despite being so busy, I was able to set aside an hour at the end of each day to read Halloween Night. Fittingly, I finished it on Halloween night.
Halloween Night is not a Fear Street book. It is among the dozen or so young adult horror novels Stine wrote outside of his two well-known series. (Other titles include The Baby-sitter (and two sequels), The Dead Girlfriend, and The Snow Man.) Honestly, though, Halloween Night may as well be a Fear Street book. The only difference is the name of the high school the main characters attend and the extra fifteen pages. (I do not think any Fear Street book eclipsed 170 pages.) Also, the plot is somewhat similar to The Stepsister.
As the back cover says, “Brenda hates her cousin Halley.” While her parents are battling it out in divorce court, Halley has moved in with Brenda’s family. For whatever reason, Halley is given Brenda’s room, relegating Brenda to a “closet” (which seems to be big enough, though one of her friends bemoans, “You don’t even have room for your Luke Perry poster in here”). Halley eventually steals Brenda’s boyfriend, then the boyfriend of Brenda’s best friend, and then wrecks Brenda’s car. At the same time, Brenda and her friends are working together on a school assignment: a murder mystery. They develop a story about Halley being murdered at Brenda’s upcoming Halloween party. However, as tensions rise between Brenda and Halley after a number of disturbing events (someone scrawls graffiti on the walls of Brenda’s “closet” in animal blood, leaves a decapitated bird in a jack-o’-lantern, and puts rotting meat in Brenda’s bed), they decide to kill Halley for real.
For realz, yo. For realz.
Plots twists ensue and there is a sequel, Halloween Night II. I wanted to read both before Halloween this year but it obviously did not happen. I will save II for next year.
Thinking about it again, I do think Halloween Night was a bit more mature than your average Fear Street novel. Though it is far from scary, filled with the usual number of red herrings, and the plot twist can be seen from miles away, Halloween Night was kind of gross at times. No one’s face was rubbed off by a potter’s wheel à la Lights Out (which has to be the all-time craziest thing I have ever read in a Fear Street book), but Stine puts his descriptive skills at work when describing the decapitated bird and the maggot infested meat in Brenda’s bed. Also, Brenda is much more developed than her counterparts in Fear Street. Stine revels her inner thoughts and emotions so she comes across as complete and realistic. There are also two longer and very lifelike sequences that really surprised me. “Whoa,” I thought. “Stine can write.” However, they were fleeting examples of well-crafted storytelling and were paled by the hurried final chapters.
There is one thing I failed to mention regarding The New Girl: dittoing. For his job in the main office, the main character uses the ditto machine. What is a ditto machine? It was a printer, technically known as a spirit duplicator, used to make copies before the advent of affordable photocopying. It was a surprising reference I thought I would pass on. It seems like every Baby Boomer I know loved the smell of freshly dittoed pages. My mom once told me that when students received tests at her high school, the first thing everyone did was put it to their nose for a whiff of the duplicating fluid. According to the spirit duplicator Wikipeda page, “The duplicating fluid typically consisted of a toxic 50/50 mix of isopropanol and methanol.” Yummy. (And, yes, Baby Boomers have more or less been running our country since the late-sixties. Reassuring, no?)
