The Bookworm: 'Cat'

Cat, by R.L. Stine. 132 pages. Pocket Books. May 1997.

They didn’t believe me—and they didn’t want to hear a wild story about cages that opened by themselves and cats that attacked humans. They wanted to be alone so they could make out. (pp. 106–107)

That has to be one of the all-time best paragraphs I have read in a Fear Street book—or at least the ones I have noted while reading. Unfortunately, it is one of the few redeeming qualities of Cat.

Cat tells the story of Marty, Shadyside High’s basketball phenom, and his two best friends and teammates, Barry and Dwayne. They are the “three musketeers,” and they accidentally kill a cat that lives under the bleachers in the school gym. Not only do they become targets for the school’s Animal Rights Club, they are hunted down by a killer hell bent on cutting them up Freddy Krueger style. Can Marty weave his way through intense peer ridicule, save his life, and win Shadyside the state’s basketball crown before it’s too late?

Cat is another whodunnit that keeps you guessing until the last few pages, mostly because nothing makes sense until our old friend deus ex machina makes an appearance. Cat features the supernatural, which I am torn about. When I was a kid, I always felt it was sorely missed in the series. I wanted ghosts and strange creatures and the unexplained—the stuff of In Search Of… and Unsolved Mysteries. I didn’t want the protagonist’s boyfriend’s psychotic twin brother to be the source of all the confusion and mystery. Boring! I have become more of a realist as I’ve gotten olden, so supernatural elements feel farfetched and out of place sometimes, especially since they have very rarely been a part of the series.

Cat immediately follows The Rich Girl in the series and is another short one. At 132 page, it is the second shortest Fear Street book I have read. The two books are also the latest I have from the original series, so I wonder if the later books are shorter. (Looking at the list of Fear Street books on Wikipedia, Cat is the 45th of 51 books in the original series, so it is almost at the end. As much of a fan of Fear Street as I am, I did not know how many books are in the original series. I also don’t have Drop Dead Gorgeous, the latest book in HarperTEEN’s Return to Fear Street series. At some point, I need to make a list of the books I have and those I don’t.)

As a cat person, I am not a fan of a cat getting killed. That’s not cool. But I knew what I was getting into and got over it. And the cat … well, I’ll say it uses some of its nine lives.

One thing I realized while reading Cat is that Fear Street characters are always studious; they are always good about doing homework and studying. They are model students. They stress about tests and spend hours reading history textbooks. I don’t recall a Fear Street protagonist or main character who did not take school seriously (which is not saying much given my memory these days—and the number of Fear Street books I’ve read). I am sure part of the good-student characteristic is to impress the target demographic and model good behavior. It is not unrealistic, but as someone who was not diligent about studying, it sometimes makes me roll my eyes.

Another thing I noticed in Cat is that Fear Street is not mentioned until page 75. It is unclear if Marty lives on Fear Street—he mentions walking along Fear Street, but not living on it—so I am unsure what the book’s connection to Fear Street is. This is something I wish I would have tracked better: each book’s connection to Fear Street. Some books may not even mention it.

Also, Marty is allergic to cats, but we do not learn that until sometime around page 70.

In the ridiculous/I’m-being-way-too-much-of-a-realist category, the cat Marty and company accidentally kill had lived in the gym for a month. A month! I think it’s both odd and hilarious that nobody at the school did anything about it for a month. Nobody had a problem with it darting across the gym and causing chaos during classes and basketball practice for a whole month.

In the dated-reference category, Marty’s friend Barry is described as looking like “the guy who plays Superman on television” (p. 4). I assume it means he looks like Dean Cain from Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Unlike The Rich Girl, this copy of Cat is in perfect condition. The covers show a little bit of shelf wear, but the pages are crisp and sharp. The binding was so tight that it seemed like nobody had opened the book before.