The Bookworm: 'The Dead Lifeguard'

The Dead Lifeguard, by R.L. Stine. 183 pages. Pocket Books. June 1994.

I congratulated myself. I had gone nearly five minutes without picturing Cassie sprawled on the dining room floor, her head in the fireplace. (p. 91)

It has been a hot and humid summer. To beat the heat, I dove into a pool-themed Fear Street book complete with mystery, partying lifeguards, and our old friend deus ex machina sipping Mai Tais poolside.

Summer had just started and the lifeguards at North Beach Country Club were just getting to know one another when someone starts killing them. It’s a curse, one says, something that happens every year. Lindsay has no clue who is killing the lifeguards, but she is the one who finds the bodies, led to the grisly scenes by a mysterious voice only she can hear. Is it the ghost who haunts the club, the ghost of the dead lifeguard?

Part of the “Super Chiller” series within the series, which are usually longer and supposedly scarier than the regular FS books, The Dead Lifeguard kept me interested and guessing. Some of it is not logical, but that’s the fun of reading FS books. One night while I was reading on the couch, The Foxy Lady was watching Bridgerton. She caught me watching and chuckling and said we were doing the same thing: consuming trash. Trash?! Are FS books trash? I suppose they are. They are my pulp fiction. They are good, senseless fun—much like Bridgerton.

The Dead Lifeguard is a whodunit with who-is-it mixed in. It is told from multiple perspectives. Each chapter is narrated by a different character—for a while, at least. Lindsay is the main character and ends up telling much of the story, especially at the end, so the multiple narrators system falls apart. I’m unsure why there were multiple to begin with. Probably page filler or misdirection. It is refreshing and different for the series, but mostly useless in this case.

The Dead Lifeguard features another female protagonist who has self-image issues. Lindsay finds faults with her appearance and compares herself to the other female lifeguards. I understand that self-image issues are common—I suffer from them, too—but this characteristic feels too forced and a stereotype, one that plays to the target demographic.

Lindsay calls the operator for information, which made me wonder if operators still exist. Probably not. I’m sure they have been replaced by automated systems.

Here is another one for the old-school file: Lindsay laments that though she has been at the club for over two weeks, she “hadn’t received a single phone call or a single letter” (p. 134). Letters! It is crazy to think about going two weeks without any long-distance communications by phone or through some type of writing.

Beer is mentioned. One character asks if there is any beer in the fridge at the lifeguard dorm, but the head lifeguard bemoans the fact that it is not allowed. Again, the characters are teens and not of-age yet, so I wonder if Stine never realized the drinking age increased to 21 in the eighties.

I really liked this paragraph on page 152, when Lindsay is driving:

I lowered all the windows and let the hot breeze blow over me. It was a sultry, steamy night. One of those wet summer nights when everything sticks to everything and your whole body feels soggy and heavy.

It reminded me of driving around IC in my Jetta on hot summer nights with all the windows down—or probably just the front two since the windows were operated by cranks. (I did not own a car with power windows until 2009.)

My kids were very interested in the cover. They especially wanted to know if the girl is dead. “Have you found out if she’s dead?” they would ask. “Not yet,” I would say, but I also warned them that I may never find out: “Sometimes the cover art does not match what happens in the book.” Unfortunately, that is the case with The Dead Lifeguard: the scene on the cover never happens in the story.