The Bookworm: 'Bad Dreams'
Bad Dreams, by R.L. Stine. 148 pages. Pocket Books. March 1994.
“You know, like the bed remembers the murder and it’s trying to transmit it to me, to warn me, to—something!” (p. 85)
A short stack of old Fear Street novels has been sitting in my reading queue for years. A few were released in the spring and are a perfect fit for the season, so I want to read them. First up is Bad Dreams.
Maggie Travers begins having bad dreams after moving into a new house on Fear Street. She inherits a four-post bed with a pink canopy left behind by the previous owners and starts dreaming about a girl being murdered in the bed. Maggie wonders if the dreams and unfortunate events that befall her teammates on the swim team are warnings about how far her jealous younger sister will go to get the bed and ruin Maggie’s life.
Bad Dreams is one of the better Fear Street novels I’ve read. It is kind of corny and suffers from the usual suspect of elements—deus ex machina and convenience—but it works, is entertaining, and is believable. It is not horrible or outrageous. If that’s what makes a good Fear Street novel, so be it. The best thing about the book is Maggie’s relationship with her sister; it is vicious and realistic. Their mother is underdeveloped, but she’s not the most important character, so I will let that slide.
There is a lot of foreshadowing in the beginning, and Bad Dreams feels more like a sitcom (minus the com) than any other Fear Street book I have read. Maggie and her sister’s relationship with their mother is forced and synthetic, though adults in the series tend to be basic and stereotypical, almost akin to the incomprehensible adults in Peanuts. The sisters’ interactions with Mrs. Travers feel like something straight out of a Full House episode: cringe-worthy tender and teaching moments that happen only on television.
Bad Dreams stands out because it features a redheaded protagonist—the first I’ve come across in the series, I think. (I’m not keeping track of protagonist hair color, though that would be an interesting experiment.) Hair color is a common character descriptor in these books for some reasons, and blondes and brunettes (who have one gripe about their hair or another) are usually the center of many Fear Street novels. Both Maggie and her sister are redheads, though I’m unsure about their mother. (Love those redheads, as Wooderson famously said.) The color of their hair is never an issue. Redheads endure a lot of undeserved teasing and criticism for some reason, so it’s refreshing that red hair is a nonissue for the Travers sisters. I have a lot of sympathy for redheads because red hair is a maternal family trait.
Relatedly, Maggie sees a psychiatrist and becomes very self-conscious about the stigma of mental health; she assumes everyone thinks she’s crazy and will avoid her. However, that does not happen. Her boyfriend does not care that she’s seeing a “shrink,” though he is not openly supportive either. Though it is tepid, I think that understanding is unique, especially for a book released in 1994.
On to some itemized notes:
• Mrs. Travers is “mainly a vegetarian.” I think she is the first vegetarian I have come across in the series, though she is more flexitarian than vegetarian.
• The book opens with the Traverses getting lost on their way to their new house on Fear Street, which I think is very odd. The family is moving from elsewhere in Shadyside and they can’t find their way to the city’s most infamous street, even after they had been there once before. Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I assume everyone in Shadyside would know where Fear Street is and how to get there.
• Maggie is dating her best friend’s ex-boyfriend, yet there is no tension between the two girls. Granted, it’s unclear how long Justin and Dawn dated, so maybe there was nothing to their relationship. Regardless, the students at Shadyside High get around.
• Maggie has a Trapper Keeper. Trapper Keepers were hot when I was in elementary school, but we were never allowed to have them for some reason. Why were they so popular but prohibited at my school? I have always been unsure, but this article sheds some light on the subject.
• The girl Maggie dreams about has ash-blond hair. I had no clue what ash blond looks like, so I could not picture it. Ash? I wondered, though I did not think it could be right. However, that seems to be the consensus of a Google image search. To me, ash-colored hair looks more like white hair.
• Mrs. Travers has been prescribed “a mild sedative” (p. 123) to help her sleep. When I read that, I immediately thought about the scene in Beetlejuice when Lydia says her mother is “sleeping with Prince Valium tonight.”
