The Bookworm: The Thrill Club
The Thrill Club, by R.L. Stine. 148 pages. Pocket Books. May 1994.
Talia couldn’t speak. She just stared down at her hands, the hands that had killed Shandel and Rudy.
But I didn’t do it, she reminded herself. My hands did, but I didn’t (p. 144).
Not only was The Thrill Club the shortest (I believe) Fear Street book I have read, it was also probably the most far-fetched. And that is saying quite a bit for the Fear Street series. The Secret Bedroom, with its resident poltergeist, was pretty out there, but the twist in The Thrill Club is the stuff of In Search of… lore.
The Thrill Club also holds another distinction: it is the only Fear Street book I own that I did not read when I was younger. (Actually, I may have one book from The Cataluna Chronicles series that I never read. I will need to check on that.) My parents gave it to me for my twelfth or thirteenth birthday, when my reading interests had moved beyond Fear Street, and I never read it. It languished among my other Fear Street books, unread, until last week. Having been published in May 1994, The Thrill Club may also be the latest Fear Street book I own. (By the way, the cover art is classic 1994. I am pretty sure classmates in my fifth grade yearbook are wearing the same Blossom-esque outfits.) B.O. told me the later books are much more paranormal, and The Thrill Club seems indicative of that.
The book focuses on the eponymous Thrill Club: six friends from Shadyside High who meet “every week at a different person’s house to swap stories and frighten one another” (p. 9). Talia is the group’s writer, but due to writer’s block her recent pieces have been ghost written, unbeknownst to anyone else, by her boyfriend Seth. Everyone usually loves Talia’s horror stories, but her use of Thrill Club members as characters creates discontent — especially when the murderous tales become reality. Fellow Thrill Club members Shandel and Rudy are murdered the same way they are killed in Talia’s stories: stabbed near the Fear Street cemetery and hung from a noose in his basement.
Meanwhile, Seth has not been himself lately. His father, an anthropologist at “the university,” died of unknown causes weeks before. Seth reveals to Talia that he was the one who found his father, stone dead, in his study listening to tribal chanting on a tape labeled “TRANSFER TAPE.” Seth becomes obsessed with the tape and plays it for Talia, who is horrified by it.
Obviously, everyone suspects Talia in the murders of Shandel and Rudy. Though she maintains her innocence, she does not recall where she was or what she was doing when Shandel was murdered (Talia’s sweatshirt was stained with blood and she finds a bloody knife hidden in her bedroom dresser) and she was found dazed and confused in Rudy’s basement, her hands cut and burned by ropes. After Rudy’s death, Talia is admitted to the hospital and undergoes psychiatric evaluation. When she is released, Seth invites her and the surviving members of the Thrill Club, Maura and Nessa, to his house. It is then we learn Talia did, in fact, kill Shandel and Rudy — albeit under Seth’s mind control. When Seth spills his guts, he tells Talia that the “TRANSFER TAPE” is “a mind transfer tape” and “if you chant along with the voices, your mind floats free of your body” (p. 142). Apparently, the reason Seth’s father died is because he chanted along with the tape, left his own body, and never returned. In the climax, Seth tries to make Talia kill Maura and Nessa, but his plan backfires and he shares his father’s fate.
Mind control. O-kay… Honestly, I am torn. Though it does fit into the canon of Fear Street bizarreness, it seems too far-fetched, hokey, and convenient. Now, I am not saying mind control is not real (I watched enough In Search of… re-runs to make me curious and opened-minded about the “unknown”). I just thought it was too cheesy. Perhaps I was just disappointed there were no ghosts involved, as “promised” by the cover. I should know better than to create expectations from the cover art, but it is hard not to — especially with October and Halloween spookiness right around the corner. A ghost killed Shandel in Talia’s first story, but I wanted the actual plot to be much more mysterious and spooky. I guess what I am trying to say is that I needed more thrill from The Thrill Club. The Thrill Club itself did not seem too exciting, anyway. Besides Talia’s stories, nobody else offered any thrills except Rudy, who hung a ventriloquist dummy from exposed pipes in his basement. At one point, there was a five page stretch when everyone complained about Shandel, Talia, and Seth being late. No thrills to be had there.
Speaking of thrill, though, The Thrill Club contains the most egregious example yet of an overly dramatic, page-turning chapter transition. At the end of Chapter 3, Seth takes Talia to his room to listen to the “TRANSFER TAPE.” Looking out the bedroom window, Talia sees fellow Thrill Club member, and Seth’s ex-girlfriend, Maura, looking back from an upstairs room in the house next door. “Is she spying on us? What’s she doing there?” Talia asks. The chapter ends. Oh my GOD! What happens?! Next page: “She lives there,” Seth replied calmly. “Didn’t you know we were next-door neighbors?” D’oh!
