Just recently, I finished his 2nd book, Violent Ends. A third book, Nice Bloody Work, is coming out soon.

With two entries read, I can now say that A Hot Dose of Hell wasn’t a fluke. Stark is a consistent author who can be relied upon to have his books written to a professional standard, while offering something different from what the traditional publishing industry is currently pushing, which has left many readers alienated.

Maybe I should say four entries read though, because Violent Ends is an anthology collection of one short story and two novellas.

Let’s break it down. Since this is a modern indie book, not a book that has been out for 30 years, I’m going to mostly avoid spoilers, except a few broad, obvious things.

The Cover:

Stark’s covers thus far have a consistent design theme of a skull on a dark background being subjected to some kind of massive damage, with big, bold red text for the title. He only uses his last name for an author credit.

These covers don’t show much about what the books are about, which is normally negative in my book, but they are undeniably visually striking and look good, whether at full size or shrunken to an Amazon thumbnail.

Simple but effective.

Stark’s Themes:

Stark has certain recurring themes in his books that make a Steve Stark book uniquely Stark-y. Much of the territory Stark covers is well trod horror ground: rage zombies, serial killers, man-eating demons, werewolves. What gives his stories a unique flavor is how he combines these things with the modernity of the mean streets of England and a hearty dose of ultraviolence.

Stark’s stories feature characters from a wide variety of walks of life, but there are always some street tough guys and gals in the mix: thugs, prostitutes, bouncers, drug addicts, etc. These types can be dispensers of violence just as often as the previously mentioned supernatural horrors. The wicked usually come to a sticky end, but the righteous can also be victimized. Even the actual monsters aren’t impervious to getting stomped to a pulp courtesy of a steel-toed boot.

This makes the violence in Stark’s stories delightfully tense. You’re never sure exactly which way things are going to go. A knife toting thug breaks into the home a feeble old man with a shotgun. Maybe the thug easily tricks and cuts down the old man. Maybe he gets his head blown off. Or maybe one of them turns out to be a demon in disguise. You won’t know till the scene plays out.

Note that Stark’s stories are hard-R rated. There’s some strong language and occasional sexual content (though neither feel excessive for the genre), but mostly there’s violence and gore. It never gets full into the realm of ‘extreme horror,’ but bodies do seem a bit more prone to exploding in a shower of blood than they probably do IRL. As such, Stark’s stories aren’t really appropriate for kids (though I could see a certain type of adolescent boy absolutely loving them anyway).

The Stories:

Spring-heeled Jim -

This is the shortest story of the lot, and starts out as a seemingly typical story of a serial killer stalking a woman, but turns into a delightfully clever deconstruction.

The story is told in 3rd person limited, but it’s obvious that most of it is the killer describing himself as wishes to be viewed: a highly skilled, even superhuman, badass, like the romanticized portrayal that’s so often shown in Hollywood. But as the story unfolds, as mishaps pile up and he has flashbacks to his past, it becomes more and more apparent how pathetic Jimmy actually is.

Bigmouth Strikes Again

The longest and largest in scope story in the collection, Bigmouth Strikes Again is about a sleazy business man renovating a medieval church into a nightculb, unaware that a monstrous demon is imprisoned in the wall behind the altar.

Bigmouth has a large cast of characters from different walks of life, from spoiled rich kids to construction workers and bouncers. Most of them are jerks of one kind or another (except Matt Windows, who is awesome) but in true Steve Stark fashion, even sleazy mogul Brian Fuchs gets a sympathetic scene. The buildup is slower than the other stories, but climax is probably the most gory of the 3. The ending was a bit underwhelming for me, but overall this was an enjoyable story with a bit more of a Stephen King vibe than Stark’s usual work, although the message is quite a bit different from Kings’.

Nowhere Fast

The final story in the collection follows a gang of psychopathic young thugs on a murder and robbery spree as they converge on the house of a couple having marital troubles. This one featured a group of villain protagonists who I loved to hate, and really wanted to see get their comeuppance. The ending was quite satisfying.

Pieces: An Afterward

This, as it says, is just the afterward, but I found it more interesting and entertaining than most afterwards. Stark shares his inspiration for his stories, which includes everything from the town he grew up in and people he knew, to Hollywood movies and TV, to headline news along with sharing some thanks to people who have promoted his work (yours truly even gets a mention!).

Conclusion:

I actually think I enjoyed Violent Ends even more than A Hot Dose of Hell. Three stories means more variety, and though they are naturally each a bit shorter, each feels complete and satisfying. If you liked A Hot Dose of Hell, check this one out for sure, and if you haven’t read anything by Stark, this is great place to start.

Next time: The Assassination of Richard Bachman by the Coward Stephen King: Or, the Hypocrisy of “Read Banned Books.”

Amelia: Counterrevolution is an independently published short-story collection by a circle of small-time indie authors who met on the off-brand-Twitter social media site Gab. The “Lemurverse” referred to on the cover isn’t actually a shared universe. It’s just the name of an anthology series by these authors, of which there are only 2 books so far.

The feature presentation of any book is the actual writing, but in this case there are several elephants stomping around the room I need to address before getting to that part.

Let’s start with the most obvious one.

A.I.

It’s probably already clear to you from looking at the front cover that this book uses AI art. If not from the front cover, then the back cover and the black-and-white images inside the book definitely give it away. The book is open and upfront about this.

While I’m by no means a fan of purely AI generated writing and images, I guess I’m a bit more moderate than a lot of people are. I think there is some possibility for these to be tools for creation, with a heavy human hand involved, of course. I also understand that some writers use these free tools for things like book covers because they lack funds to spend on their writing hobby, which is generally unprofitable, especially nowadays.

Some people accuse anyone who uses AI covers of also having AI do their writing for them. While there is a proliferation of AI slop by people looking to make a quick buck, I think claiming every writer who uses an AI cover also had AI write their book is an inaccurate accusation that’s often made in bad faith by amateur artists who see amateur writers using these free tools as “stealing” money out of their pockets. In reality, most of these writers who choose to not pay an artist for cover art would probably use edited stock photos if AI images weren’t available. So you’re not getting paid either way, my dudes.

That said, I’m certainly not going to award the book any ‘points’ for having pictures, when the pictures are just generic AI images. I kind of wish it didn’t have them. It feels sort of condescending. “You need some pictures in your book or you’ll get bored, won’t you big boy?” Unfortunately, this might be true for a lot of lower-skill readers. Literacy is declining horribly among Gen-Z and below.

I personally avoid AI images on or in any book I put out, for a pragmatic reason: it looks cheap, and therefore shows potential readers a lack of care and confidence in the contents of the book. Even though I have limited funds to spend on it, I care enough about my writing to want to dress it up somewhat nicely, even if I seek affordable options when it comes to art. I’ll share more thoughts about this when I talk about presentation in general.

I should note that the book IS cheap, with a physical copy selling for $5.99. That’s quite a bargain for a modern indie published book, and must have a very thin profit margin. So when this corner was cut, the savings were passed on to the reader. This and being open and upfront about the use of AI images do matter, I think.

I do not believe the writing in this book is AI. The writing styles of pieces by different authors are all distinct, and I’m mildly acquainted with one author, L. Jagi Lamplighter, who I know writes her own stuff.

Politics

People who say all art is political are technically correct, because at its most basic, politics is the power dynamics of social interaction, which every piece of art in every medium engages with. But what most people mean when they say they don’t want politics in their entertainment is explicit politics. Things that directly address or are obvious metaphors for current political controversies.

Amelia: Counterrevolution is explicitly political. This probably won’t be surprising if you’re at all familiar with the meme that inspired it. The collection itself contains an explanation of the meme at the beginning, but the short version is that the UK government made a cheap flash game called Pathways UK to warn their citizens about “extremist content.” Being the UK, this extremist content was criticism of immigration.

The game’s “villain” is Amelia, a purple haired college girl with a choker and mole, who would make complaints about immigrants in class, go to demonstrations, make online videos, and encourage the main character, Charlie, to participate with her. And that’s it. That’s all she’d does. No violence.

The game went viral, with a strong focus on the Amelia character. Not surprising, since she’s the most interesting, entertaining thing in the game.

Thus, a wave of Amelia memes were born. The character became a celebration of the exact nativist sentiment the British government had created the game to scare young people away from.

Amelia: Counterrevolution is a celebration of the memes, and the politics behind them. It’s anti-mass immigration, anti-Islamic, and pro-British and American nativist. It’s not ironic, and to the degree any of it is satire, it’s satire of the British government’s policies. If you’re the kind of person who uses the term “Islamophobic” as a pejorative, you’ll probably hate this book regardless of the actual writing quality. I’m far from a staunch leftie on immigration, so this isn’t an issue for me. However, I’m going to mostly be judging this book on artistic merit, not on politics. I generally try to neither brownnose something just because I agree with it or trash it just because I disagree with it.

Presentation

This last part before diving into the the book proper is somewhat related to the first. Fair or not, most people judge a book before starting, never mind finishing, it. Therefore, the cover is disproportionately important, as are the early parts of the book people will read.

The presentation of the physical copy of Amelia: Counterrevolution, is definitely not up to professional standards. It’s comparable in some ways to Inheritance of Ash by REL Cook, which I already reviewed. But Inheritance of Ash was self-published by one guy. It’s his first book. He’s very new to both writing and publishing. He read my review and asked me for advice afterwards on improving his formatting for a reprint and future books.

Amelia: Counterrevolution is the second book produced by a team of writers, some of whom have published in other collections. They even had help beyond the writers themselves.

So I’m a little less forgiving. Especially since they’re fighting le culture war, which means they immediately have enemies who, if this book comes to their attention, will look for any excuse to trash and dismiss it. The book looking sloppy and cheap at a glance helps them convince others to dismiss it. So by pointing this stuff out, I’m actually helping out. Really.

I’ve already mentioned that AI covers look cheap. Of course, a major part of their appeal is that they can be made relatively easily for free. So it’s surprising that Amelia: Counterrevolution has a credited cover artist. I presume “Labelschmiede” wasn’t paid very much. She (per her website, she’s a she) probably did some photoshopping of the front cover to get it to look neater. The back cover, on the other hand, has trademark wonky AI hands.

Then there’s a personal pet peeve of mine: the blank spine.

When I posted about this on X, it actually caused a disagreement between myself and contributor to Volume 2 of Phantom Whispers, MarQuese Liddle. He said that Amazon printing tends to not be very consistent in centering the text on the spine, so it’s best to just put nothing there. I firmly disagree. I shared a picture of a stack of other indie books I own from Amazon where the authors managed to have text on the spine that looks just fine.

Yes, a couple of them aren’t perfectly centered, but I doubt most people notice, let alone care. People who collect physical books usually keep them displayed on a shelf, with the spine out. Having the title there makes them much easier to identify and just looks better. I haven’t seen a professionally published book that goes for the blank spine. It makes the book look illegitimate in a way, like it’s a bootleg.

Finally, there’s the editing. Amelia: Counterrevolution actually had two editors. One was writer Clayton Barnett, who seems to be the leader of the Lemurverse writers. The other, Stephen Zimmer, only did copyediting. That means he made corrections for story flow, plot holes, etc, but not for spelling and grammar. Zimmer also offers spelling and grammar checking services, so presumably having him do copyediting only was to cut costs. This was maybe not such a good idea.

I get it. Robert Garron and I do all our own editing for Phantom Whispers, to keep costs low. It’s a tough task, especially since we have ESL contributors (Hermann Morr is Italian). I know mistakes get through. But WHERE those mistakes are, how quickly a readers sees them, can make a big difference. Again, first impressions. So it’s not great when you have an obvious typo on your book’s very short back cover blurb.

This isn’t the only typo that’s really prominent, but I’ll get to another very glaring one when I review the actual stories.

On the more positive side, it is quite cool and convenient that the book includes a page of QR scan links for each of the author’s chosen websites, if you want to check out more of their work. Also, the book does have page numbers, unlike my copy of Inheritance of Ash.

Alright, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

The Writing

The book starts with a brief introduction by editor-in-chief Clayton Barnett. He explains that the “Lemurverse” is a collection of writers who met on Gab (which is good, because I had no idea) and that originally the 2nd volume in their anthology series was going to be something completely different before the Amelia meme blew up, providing inspiration.

Barnett freely admits to wanting to exploit the meme, which I’m fine with. It’s one of the reasons I was interested in this volume. Meme culture is the one art form that the political right has dominated in the past decade, but by its nature it tends to be impermanent. Sort of like a Buddhist sand painting. There have been some interesting extrapolations, like PsyopAnime, or animated Pepe videos (see below) but these are really just trailers without a full story behind them. A story might give a meme more permanence.

After Barnett’s intro, the book has another intro by Cato Minor (obvious pseudonym) explaining the Amelia meme to readers who might not be familiar with it. I didn’t really need this explanation, but some readers might, especially since the Amelia meme is already dying down, so I suppose it’s good to have. Both these intros are competently written enough, but once again they’re not really the main attraction of the book.

After that, the first proper piece of creative writing appears, though not really the first story.

Catch the Light by Murray Eiland

Catch the Light is a free-verse poem, in which Amelia looks out the window of a pub and contemplates the meaning of freedom of speech. There’s not much of a plot beyond that. It has passion and wistfulness to it, and seems well-put together, but maybe I’m not enough of a free-verse poetry fan for it to really stick with me.

The Lion Awakens by L. Jagi Lamplighter

Finally, we’re to the first proper story of the book. The Lion Awakens stars Rachel Griffin, a character from Lamplighter’s Roanoke Academy (sorry, the technical name is Books of Unexpected Enlightenment) series. So this is sort of like crossover fanfiction, but written by the original author of one of the things it’s crossing over.

Roanoke Academy is a sort of Harry Potteresque setting where there’s a secret magic-user world hidden from non-magic users, people use wands, and our protagonist goes to a magic school in America. In this story, Rachel returns to Britain and encounters Amelia, who is also a witch. Amelia wants to rescue her non-magic using friend Charlie from a reeducation center, Rachel very quickly falls in with her, and Amelia explains what’s been going on in Britain and how dystopian it has gotten while they travel to stage the rescue.

This is the story that draws most heavily from the plot of the original Pathways UK game. Even minor characters like the hijab-wearing educator from the game get an appearance. It’s funny that the one where the author included her OC is also the one with the most “respect” for the source material. It actually works pretty well. Amelia having an English bulldog familiar named Churchill is a nice touch.

The story has a middle-grade feel to it. The vocabulary is pretty simple, Rachel falls in with Amelia and is willing to take huge risks for her pretty fast, etc. This is perfectly fine. It does make it a bit tonally jarring when Amelia starts telling Rachel about the Rotherham rape gangs in very blunt terms. I’m not going to knock the story for it though. This stuff happened. It was an atrocity. I’m not sure how one could bring a light touch to it without being more disrespectful than just stating it bluntly.

Towards the end of the story, when things are heating up in the streets as Rachel, Amelia, and Charlie are pursued, Aslan shows up and sets everything right. Almost literally. Lion Jesus (though not explicitly called that) actually says he appears in this form as a tribute to his servant, CS Lewis. He banishes the demons from everyone, which makes one woman both want to go back to Iran and stop being Muslim, which aren’t the smartest desires when paired together, since, like most Islamic countries, people who openly apostatize from Islam can face dire consequences in Iran.

The execution of this is ending is better than I’m making it sound, but it still gets a bit schmaltzy. The last sentence also has another glaring typo: “Her words ran true.” Like I said before, typos happen, but on something as prominent as the last line of a story, it’s kind of wince-inducing.

The Lion Awakens certainly isn’t perfect, but despite its flaws, I’d say it’s a highlight of the collection. At least it’s entertaining and memorable, and makes good use of the source material while telling a reasonably competent story.

Revolution Calling by Clayton Barnett

I’m pretty sure that Clayton Barnett is main organizer of the Lemurverse authors. He edited the volume and wrote the foreward, after all. He really brought this together, more than anyone else. This basically the same position I hold for Phantom Whispers. It’s a tough, relatively thankless job. So it’s unfortunate that his contribution is the worst in the collection.

The story opens with: Present Day; present time… (written exactly like that). Yeah, I like Serial Experiments Lain too.

Does this shoutout have any relevance to the plot or mood of this story though? Nope. It’s blatant key-jangling, and it takes me out of the story right at the start.

The first part of Revolution Calling is a phone call between Amelia and her friend in Hungary named… Amalia. The story seems to be drawing parallels between Amelia and Amalia in this section, like they’re both an archetype that’s all over Europe, being girlfriends to important nationalist political figures. Amelia has her purple hair, Amalia has pink fingernails. But absolutely nothing is done with this, because after this phone call, Amalia is out of the story and never mentioned again.

Cut to Amelia having a romantic picnic with Charli. That’s not a typo, he lost the “e” in this story for some reason. Through their conversation it’s revealed that there are riots going on all over Britain exactly right then. The revolution is happening, people are probably dying, definitely getting hurt, and Amelia is busy flashing Charli to show him that she’s not wearing panties. This is the biggest problem with the story. We’re told repeatedly that Amelia is this important revolutionary leader. Later she’s even being pushed to become prime minister, but she never acts like it. She seems immature and self-indulgent. We don’t see any responsibility or sacrifice, or any convincing leadership traits from her in this story. She and Charli don’t seem to be taking their revolution any more seriously than Hasan Piker and his orbiters take theirs.

So the titular revolution that was calling happens off-page and Amelia and Charli discuss their intent to focus on building their family for now while not ruling out Amelia becoming a right wing political girlboss in the future.

That’s it. The story is three conversations, which would be fine for a short story if there was some intrigue or character depth, but there isn’t. Amelia feels like nothing but adolescent wish fulfillment for remigration teens here, Amalia is basically the same, and Charli is a blank slate.

Backfire by Page Zaplendam

Page Zaplendam has two stories in this volume, and both of them make Amelia American.

They also both make her an android, which feels closer to the original character concept than making her American.

Anyway, this is the better of her two stories. Page’s prose isn’t great. It’s simple and she tends to use repetitive language. But it’s competent enough to tell a story, and this one is entertaining and memorable enough that I remembered it fairly well after a few weeks.

The story follows Steve and Evan, two “resistance” members who break into a government facility and reprogram an android built to infiltrate the resistance. “The resistance” is a radical left wing group, but the name is so generic that I was confused about this for a minute. Our two “heroes” reprogram the android into the ultra-nationalist Amelia, believing they’ll create on optics nightmare for the US government, only for her to immediately prove far more competent than they counted on, getting one of them caught and informing them that they and their organization are her enemies before escaping.

Where The Lion Awakens was a sort of translation of the original Pathways UK game’s story into Lamplighter’s existing universe, Backfire’s story is a sort of meta-narrative about what happened with the Amelia meme in real life. It’s interesting for that, and overall it’s fun.

Stop Staring by Murray Eiland

This story, by the same writer who wrote the free-verse poem at the beginning, takes aim at the UK’s surveillance state rather than immigration. It features Amelia, as a member of “The Underground,” being led into a a trap by the young man, “Duplicate-23” (not revealed to be Charlie, although he could be) in a sci-fi surveillance state dystopia where video cameras and drones are everywhere (so not that different from reality). She then has to use her own techno-know-how and wits to help them both escape.

I recall liking this one when I first read it, but I struggled to recall much about it later, so I’m going to have to relegate it to “mid” status. It’s reasonably well-written and entertaining though.

Twilight’s Last Gleaming by Page Zaplendam

The second story by Page Zaplendam features an American android Amelia again, this time in the midst of a civil war. This could actually be a sequel to Backfire, except the forces her side are opposing are referred to as “the caliphate” and that story didn’t mention anything about an Islam-ified America. Twilight’s Last Gleaming is buildup to a battle, and ends right before the actual battle begins.

I remembered almost nothing about this story after the first time I read it, which is generally a sign of a very middling story. There’s nothing glaringly wrong with it and it held my interest till the end, but it doesn’t have that meta-context of the first Page story that made it more interesting. It’s just okay.

The Girl in the Holograph by Joseph Isenberg

This story has the most advanced vocabulary and sophisticated grammar in the volume by a significant margin. While the rest of it is written at a 6th grade level (the average American’s reading level), this is written to at least several grades higher. It’s probably the most polished piece.

Unfortunately, it bored me immensely in its relatively short 20 pages.

The story takes place in the far flung year of 8040, on the planet Halcon, which is basically space Romania. Amelia was American a couple of times, now she’s space Romanian. Despite this story taking place 6000 years in the future, human society seems to have barely changed. There’s a holograph album instead of a photo album, and the family’s dog is a “Halconic War Poodle” (despite this sounding a bit silly, the story is not tongue-in-cheek or humorous at all), but aside from these few small details it could be set in post-communist Romania in the 1990’s and it would change nothing.

The story is mostly an upper-middle class family doing mundane upper-middle class things. Getting gelato, walking the dog, etc. The actual plot is that one of the kids finds a photo of someone who looks like their mother with purple hair, and eventually he’s taught that she was an actual relative of their mother, who was arrested for speech crimes by the then communist regime, resisted arrest, killed a police chief, and jumped off a building, inciting an insurrection that eventually toppled the regime.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this story-within-a-story doesn’t take up much of the actual story, and because it’s shared with us 3rd-hand through the other characters reading records, we don’t get any insight into Amelia as a character or much in the way of other details that might make it interesting and unique. The rest is this mundane family doing mundane things. I get that the point of all the scenes of the family enjoying their idyllic life is to show what the rebellion against the communists achieved, but… it’s just not interesting.

Amelia’s Traveloque, Part 1 by Melinda Gorman

This piece is extremely short. I hesitate to call it a story, because it doesn’t really have a plot. It’s just a single page of Amelia addressing Americans in first person, sharing her thoughts about America, on a trip she makes to Washington DC (presumably as a podcaster).

It’s also the best piece in the collection. Because Amelia’s Travelogue, despite the lack of plot, is a masterfully executed character piece. This short piece gives us the most complex and interesting Amelia, by a country mile. She’s snarky and bitter, but also hopeful. She gives America a lot of backhanded complements, and a few front-handed ones, ultimately ending on a positive message that’s appropriate for America’s 250th 4th of July. This piece does an impressive amount in a very short space.

I just wish that this Amelia was in all the other stories. Or had a longer story of her own.

The Rose’s Thorns by Grathew

This one is a medieval fantasy setting. Amelia in a medieval fantasy setting definitely is a concept that has potential, but this story is pretty lowkey.

A young man named Vincent (should’ve been Charlie IMO, would have been a natural fit) comes home after a long time away to find his hometown has changed and been overrun by foreigners. Rather than bring up crimes like The Lion Awakens, this story mainly focuses on his feelings of alienation, which doesn’t make a revolution feel as justified. That there’s some issue with violent crime is hinted at but not made entirely clear.

After some wandering around, meeting an old acquaintance, and memories, Vincent goes into a church where he encounters a young woman in armor (Amelia) who informs him she’s the crown princess and needs his help to save the kingdom.

And then the story ends. It’s not bad for what it is, and I wasn’t bored, but it ended just as it was starting to get interesting, so I don’t have much to say about it.

Conclusion

There’s enough good or at least interesting here that I wasn’t disappointed that I bought Amelia: Counterrevolution for the low price of 6 dollars. That said, most of the collection is pretty mid, and the presentation is rough. As such, it feels more like curio than a strong contender for an entertainment counterculture, especially since the Amelia meme has already almost disappeared (internet culture moves insanely fast). The Lemurverse has potential, but they need to up their game a bit.

Next time: more indie, and more horror, less overtly political and less kid-friendly. It’s time for a little of the ol’ ultraviolence…

Our own books

:

Revenge of the Shadow People is the 9th book in the Ghosts of Fear Street series, following the lame, dumb 8th book, The Ooze. So it had a pretty easy act to follow.

When I announced on a Facebook group that I was reviewing the GoFS books, an online buddy of mine said this was his favorite one. I kept it on the backburner for a while because I wanted to read it when I was getting bored with the series.

Did it live up to the hype?

Writers:

Revenge of the Shadow People was written by Jahnna N. Malcolm, which is actually a pen name for a team of two authors: Jahanna Beecham and Malcolm Hillgartner. These two have a long list of books for teens and tweens to their names, both as a team AND individually.

These were the sort of human commercial-writer machines that have been rendered sadly irrelevent by actual machines. There was a time when cranking out pulp books was a skill worthy of praise, even if most of the books ended up mediocre or even bad. And occasionally one of these commercial-writer machines would pump out a gem amidst the slop. Now AI prompting has washed all that away, like tears in the rain. Jahnna N. Malcolm, Lisa Eisenberg, and RL Stine himself, none of these people could probably have a writing career in the current landscape (Stine started just like the others, after all).

There can only be one song to set the mood for this one.

Original Cover:

As the book that immediately followed The Ooze, Revenge of the Shadow People had the same artist, Mark Garro. While his artwork for The Ooze wasn’t terrible, he definitely stepped it up for this one. We’ve got a bird’s eye view of our protagonist screaming his head off in bed while a our villain, who looks like some sort of demonic dinosaur skeleton shadow, looms over him, grasping at him with long pointed claws (or are they coming out of him, cause it’s his shadow?

This looks cool and creepy. There’s more of a sense of danger to this one, and the colors are slightly more dark and muted than most GoFS covers, although still plenty eyecatching. Believe it or not, the book actually delivers on the promise of the cover. Even the tagline, “Terror is off the wall,” is great. A+.

New Cover:

Another, “Let’s take the original cover and make it more boring” cover. Our protagonist is sleeping obliviously in this one instead of screaming. Whether you like that better depends on personal taste. I guess the warm lighting effect from the lamp is kind of nice. Overall though, everything good about this cover is swiped from the original.

Some might prefer the more subtle approach to showing the danger here, but for me the original cover definitely wins.

Back Cover Blurb:

Afraid of Your Own Shadow?

Vinny Salvo is. Lately weird things have been happening to his shadow. It’s grown horns. And claws. And big sharp teeth! Now it’s coming after him!

Vinny needs someplace to hide—and quick!

But where can you hide from your own shadow?

Short and sweet. Gets the major conflict of the story across with minimal details. Want to know more? You’ll have to read!

I do kind of miss when the back cover blurbs had something on them about Fear Street. It made them stand out a bit from the other middle-grade horror books of the time. It being dropped does show how little effort was being put into tying these together, although this book DOES actually make some use of Fear Woods (spoiler).

Lies in Title, Cover, and Blurb

One, sort of. The limited motivation we get in the book for the shadow people has nothing to do with revenge. I guess “revenge” sounds cooler and was less overused than “attack.”

Characters:

Vinny Salvo - Our protagonist. Likes scary stories, is good at making shadow puppets, and is a little jealous of all the attention his baby brother is getting.

Sharon Lipp - Obligatory platonic best friend. Likes photography, is a know-it-all, and a bit of a jerk. More personality than most best friend characters in these.

Joey Salvo - Vinny’s baby brother whose parents fawn over him. Loves shadow puppets.

The Shadow Monster - The main antagonist, who starts stalking and attacking Vinny relentlessly about a quarter of the way through the book.

Mom and Dad Salvo - Mostly neglectful towards Vinny cause they’re so focused on Joey.

Bobby Beasley - Vinny’s other friend, who likes telling stories about monsters and claims to have a detective friend at the police station who investigates all the monsters he’s seen.

Plot:

The book opens with Bobby telling Vinny and his friend Sharon a story about getting chased around Fear Lake by a green snot monster while they walk home from school. Bobby tells stories like this all the time. Sharon thinks they’re ridiculous, but Vinny believes them, or at least he gaslights himself into believing them because it’s fun and exciting.

All three of these kids have more personality in this scene than the protagonist often does in an entire middle-grade horror book, so that’s a nice start.

Vinny and Sharon arrive at his house, where his parents are fixated on his baby brother Joey and barely notice him. Joey wants a shadow puppet, which Vinny is good at making, so Vinny and Sharon reluctantly take him upstairs. Vinny entertains him for a few minutes with a donkey shadow on the wall, but when he stops, the donkey shadow remains frozen in place.

They rush to tell his parents, but by the time everyone returns, the shadow is gone. Unusually for this genre, Vinny’s dad believes them and offers a strange explanation about a museum exhibit where a special light made shadows stick to walls (this is a real effect, but it’s actually the paint, not the light, that does the trick.) Vinny points out this explanation doesn’t fit (normal bulb, normal wall), but Dad shrugs it off.

Vinny tries again; this time the shadow disappears when he lowers his hand.

That night, while lying in bed, Vinny spots an unfamiliar shadow on the ceiling. It morphs into a horned, fanged, clawed monster that reaches for his throat. His mother walks in and flips on the light, making it disappear. Vinny stays up the rest of the night with his flashlight on.

The next day at school, he’s exhausted and keeps dozing off. During a school assembly, Vinny and Sharon’s garbage-photo collage wins an art award (I’m not insulting fictional middle-schoolers, they literally took photos of garbage for their project). As the five winners stand on stage, they cast six shadows. The extra one grows horns, fangs, and claws, and grabs Vinny’s leg, turning it cold and numb. He screams, jumps off the stage, and flees, ruining the ceremony.

Vinny runs into the nurse while running down the hall and starts telling her a monster is after him. She takes a student having an apparent psychotic break in front of her remarkably calmly, inviting him to tell her more about it in her office. You’d think this was a regular thing for her, but she IS a school nurse in Shadyside, so maybe it is.

The next chapter cuts to Vinny walking home with Bobby and Sharon, and we get this delightful conversation bit:

• “Ms. Grindly thinks I’m nuts.”

  “The human mind can snap at any moment.”

  “Thanks, Sharon. Thanks a lot.”

Vinny tries to tell Bobby and Sharon about the shadow monster (the book never uses “shadow people” or “shadow person,” much like how Pyramid Head is only called “that red pyramid thing” in Silent Hill 2). Sharon doesn’t believe him. Bobby claims he’s heard of them, but keeps giving wrong details like the monster having red eyes; he’s clearly just playing along.

At home, with his parents out shopping with Joey, Vinny goes full Home Alone: pigging out on junk food in the living room while watching TV. The shadow monster emerges from the couch’s shadow and attacks. Vinny spills a whole quart of milk while fleeing, then hides in the closet thinking the dark will keep him safe. Instead, the monster follows him in (the darkness just makes it invisible), smothers him, and leaves his whole body numb.

His parents arrive home just in time, once again causing the creature to vanish. His parents barely react to finding him sprawled on the floor, and there’s no mention of the spilled milk on the carpet… a glaring continuity error. It’s the strongest evidence I’ve seen for the common joke (or half-joke) that 90s middle-grade horror novellas often had little to no editing.

Vinny falls asleep face-first in his Chinese food during dinner, and his parents just laugh instead of showing any concern. The Salvos don’t even register on the bad-parent scale for middle-grade horror, which shows how low the bar is in this genre. He goes to bed with all the lights on and wakes up exhausted.

The next day, while walking home from school, Sharon expresses skepticism about the shadow monster again. Vinny says that if she doesn’t believe him, they can’t be friends.

Fortunately, the shadow monster immediately appears and chases them, rescuing the pair from a stressful moment that could’ve wrecked their friendship. Vinny and Sharon hide behind a car until it leaves.

Vinny then declares they need to track the monster down and figure out how to defeat it, or he’ll never have peace again. Sharon tries to bail since it’s not after her, but Vinny emotionally blackmails her into helping. They search random streets (which somehow works), follow the monster to Fear Street, then Fear Woods, and finally into a cave with a green glow inside. Deeper in, they find a boy from a neighboring town frozen like a statue. Freaked out, they run all the way back to Vinny’s house.

Once there, the kids do something rare in these books: they call the police. The cops take them seriously at first when they report finding a boy’s body in the Fear Street woods cave… until Vinny mentions the shadow monster. The officers then assume he’s Bobby Beasley, the kid who constantly reports monsters, and treat the call as a joke. The most scandalous part of this is how much time the Shadyside PD wastes on Bobby when they presumably have multiple active murder cases ongoing constantly, because this is Shadyside.

Realizing they’re on their own, Vinny and Sharon make a list of what they know about the monster. Key fact: it hates bright light. That night Vinny plugs in a hundred lights in his room, but they blow a fuse. The shadow monster instantly grabs him, turning him ice-cold, and he passes out.

Vinny wakes up deep in the cave next to a crater full of green slime, sees another frozen boy on the ground, and realizes the boy is him. He looks down and sees he now has shadow hands: he’s become a shadow person. He follows voices and finds a whole chamber full of other shadow people. So unlike Attack of the Aqua Apes, the plural in the title isn’t a lie.

Shadow Vinny confronts the main shadow monster, who he can now talk to, and demands to be returned to his body. The monster refuses and gives the book’s only explanation of anything: it targeted Vinny because he makes great shadow puppets.

The monster then announces it’s time to go feed on the energy of children. While the main monster has a personality, the rest act like droning zombies, subtly hinting at Vinny’s grim future if he stays this way. As the shadows all leave the cave, Vinny splits off from the rest and races home.

His parents are talking to the police about his disappearance, but they can’t hear him when he tries to get their attention. He heads to his room, where Sharon is taking pictures. The camera flash hits him like a sledgehammer (cause shadow people are weak to bright light). Vinny manages to get her attention through charades, making her realize it’s him and that they need to return to the cave.

Sharon doesn’t want to help again so Vinny throws a fit, which gets her to go with him. There are like two chapter cliffhangers that are just Sharon wanting to bail on Vinny, along with this gem:

• “The only reason I’m following you is because you are my friend—and what happened to you could happen to me. And boy, would I hate that!”

Then there are more fakeout cliffhanger chapters that are them not-finding Vinny’s body, but it’s just in another chamber along with five other paralyzed kids. All the bodies are encased in pods of green slime. Sharon peels the green slime off Vinny’s body (it’s not described that well, but it seems like the “green slime” is more like drying tree sap with a hard crust on the surface) and he jumps into it. This works.

Then the shadow monster returns, but Vinny grabs the camera and shoots it repeatedly with the flash till the shadow monster dissolves into black ash. This makes Revenge of the Shadow People a sort of western kiddie version of Fatal Frame, several years before Fatal Frame existed.

Vinny and Sharon try to leave the cave and get blocked by the other shadow people. They spend too many pages being scared and wondering what to do before Vinny realizes that these are the other kids in the cave and they should help them the same way Sharon helped Vinny. So they tear the slime off the other kids’ bodies and get the shadow people to jump back in through charades. The kids are all overjoyed to have their bodies back and everyone goes home. I guess some of the kids go for a long walk. Hopefully none of them get murdered, because this is Shadyside.

Vinny and Sharon go home, and Vinny gets grounded for two weeks because his parents don’t believe his story about getting abducted by shadow people. Wait a second.

What about all the other kids? The ones who were missing for a lot longer? Vinny was only gone for a day, so his parents thinking he just went off somewhere without telling them is understandable, but that doesn’t hold up for kids have been gone for days, weeks, or more. They’d all show up at the same time and all have the same story about being abducted by shadow people (unless some of them lied, but it’s hard to imagine a 12-year old coming up with a convincing lie for being away for so long). The missing children returning should probably be in the news, which lends at least some credence that Vinny’s story has something behind it. But the other kids aren’t mentioned again. That’s just lazy.

The Twist:

Speaking of lazy, before I give away the twist, I want you to think of the most predictable twist you can imagine for this story. Got it?

Bobby, Sharon, and Vinny are playing with Baby Joey in his crib when Joey starts yelling for shadows. Vinny tells him no shadow puppets ever again, but Joey laughs and points at the wall. The donkey shadow is there.

How many of you guessed that exact twist? Even with my small readership, I’ll bet it was more than zero.

Themes and Symbolism:

Don’t make good shadow puppets. Also, if your friend is a selfish jerk, don’t hesitate to guilt trip or scare them into helping you.

Okay, so there’s not much a moral to this one. The book does tap into some primal fears with its monsters though. Humanity has a deep-seated paranoia about things coming out of the dark to grab us. Probably why the “horror” part of this middle-grade horror book is more effective than most.

Review and Analysis:

Revenge of the Shadow People is a good example of how these stories are often more (or less) than the sum of their parts.

It’s more flawed, objectively, than the majority of Ghosts of Fear Street stories. It has plot holes, one of the most egregious continuity errors I’ve ever read in a book in this genre, and it doesn’t explain anything about the supernatural elements of the story (although that’s standard).

The last bit is kind of a shame because the shadow people are one of the few GoFS monsters I’d actually like to learn more about. Where did the original shadow monster come from? What about the green slime? I thought maybe the dad’s mention of a light that makes shadows stick to walls might come back up and be tied into the origins of these things, but nope.

Yet despite its flaws, Revenge of the Shadow People is one of the better GoFS books.

The kid characters are a lot more fun than most in the genre. Every time the trio of Vinny, Sharon, and Bobby were together there was some pretty good humor. Even the duo of Vinny and Sharon by themselves could be pretty funny. Sharon was more involved in the plot than most best friend characters, even saving the day a couple of times, but boy, she complained and tried to back out every step of the way. Some people might dislike her for that reason, but I found those bits funny, for some reason. Sometimes it practically feels like a kids’ version of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Vinny is the straight man of the group. He’s a more proactive protagonist, which I always find to be a plus in these books. Him being a bit jealous of all the attention his baby brother is getting is a character bit that has no payoff, but he works okay anyway.

Bobby was in the story less than I thought he’d be from the first scene, which is kind of a pity since having a trio instead of the normal protagonist-and-best-friend combo would be a nice change of pace. Still, he played his role and was entertaining. He could even have been brought back for his own story if Stine and his ghostwriters had been a little more ambitious about doing something with the shared Shadyside setting, but alas.

The other thing that really elevates this one is the threat. The shadow monster is relentless. He doesn’t mess around like so many other middle-grade horror monsters. Every time Vinny is alone, it’s on. The scenes of him emerging from various shadows are well done in terms of pacing and tension. His ultimate plan for Vinny is bad enough for a book in this age range, but these scenes are even more tense when his intent is still a mystery. I also think RotSP might have taken some inspiration from A Nightmare on Elm Street, since during this middle part of the plot, Vinny being too scared to go to sleep and getting more and more exhausted is a running theme. Few stories in the genre show the villain wearing down the protagonist like this.

So Revenge of the Shadow People is a stronger entry in Ghosts of Fear Street, the second scariest (for the age range) book I’ve read so far in the series, and the book I’d most like to have gotten a sequel. Alas, that last part will never happen.

Thanks Brandon, you didn’t steer me wrong.

Next time: something completely different, a lot more obscure and controversial.

Our own books:

Why? To put it simply, the majority of these books aren’t that interesting, which doesn’t make for great reviews.

90’s middle-grade horror was a vast landscape. Ghosts of Fear Street seemed like a good choice because it had brand recognition. I wanted to get a feeling for Stine’s formula without Stine, and I think I did get a pretty good feel for it, but I’ve also discovered that other copycat series that weren’t under the thumb of Stine or Scholastic, such as Spinetinglers, Shivers, and Bone Chillers, are more interesting, at least for most of their runs.

THIS is where I think GoFS went wrong. Stine’s ghostwriting practices are pretty opaque. He’s especially tight-lipped about Goosebumps. The Scholastic contract and lawsuit probably didn’t help. I don’t know if Stine and Parachute Press could still potentially open themselves up to legal trouble by coming clean about that. But not much has been shared about the writing process of GoFS either. It’s a shame that as far as I can tell, none of the authors have ever been interviewed about their experience, since this is the one series where the ghostwritten nature of it is out in the open.

Stine’s Ghostwriting Method

There’s a claim that Stine sent outlines to the authors to write the books, but as far as I can tell, this originates from a Goodreads reviewer, and doesn’t have a more reliable source. However, per the Scholastic lawsuit, this is what Stine did with the ghostwritten Goosebumps books, which is probably where this claim comes form. It’s pretty reasonable to assume the process with GoFS was the same.

After reading so many of these books, I believe that’s what he did… for the majority of the series. Around book 25 though, there’s a notable shift in tone. The books start getting less formulaic, more outside-the-box, more ambitious. Not coincidentally, this is right when the cover designs for the books went through their first change. I think there’s a strong possibility that at this point Stine started giving writers more creative freedom as the covers were revamped, probably both due to flagging sales. The covers got steadily worse, unfortunately, but the writing actually improved. There are good books before this, and bad or forgettable books afterwards, but the series as a whole gets notably stronger after this point. It starts feeling more like it has its own identity, and starts making more use of the Shadyside/Fear Street setting, which is what I was hoping would set this series apart from Goosebumps. Earlier books mostly feel like they could take place anywhere. There are some name drops from previous books, but nothing actually consequential to the plot.

The B-Team

Goosebumps was ongoing for the entire run of Ghosts of Fear Street. This means Stine was, at the very least, writing outlines for Goosebumps while also writing outlines for Ghosts of Fear Street, and the former was making roughly 30 times more money in sales. Goosebumps obviously had priority, so presumably what we got from Stine for GoFS were his b-tier ideas.

Hence, the mediocrity of the first 2/3rds of the series. It was only when he cut the ghostwriters loose and gave them freedom that we started to see a lot more interesting books. This hurt GoFS’s legacy significantly, because 24 books is a lot to wade through before the series gets interesting. That’s the entire run of Bone Chillers. To make matters worse, because the earlier books came out when the middle-grade horror craze was in its heyday and they had better covers, while the latter, more interesting books came out when the craze was dying, whenever there have been attempts to reprint the series and cash in on nostalgia, the older books get priority. Lame, derivative, The Ooze has received multiple reprints, while some of the best books in the series like Parents from the 13th Dimension and Attack of the Vampire Worms have never been reprinted. Less people have read them because there aren’t as many copies floating around and they sell for higher prices.

Comparison to Goosebumps

Of course, this is just guesswork from me, since the actual process of writing these books is still a mystery. But let’s compare the first 6 Goosebumps books and the first 6 books of Ghosts of Fear Street to show what I mean. According to Stine, Goosebumps was originally only planned to run for six books, and it was only because sales started to spike that it became the sprawling franchise we know today, so 6 books seems like a fair “test run” for any of these 90’s middle grade pulp book series.

Goosebumps:

1. Welcome to Dead House - While the pacing could be improved (the book is notoriously slow in the first 2/3rds), this book about a family that moves to a town with a dark secret where the townsfolk act strange is serious, atmospheric, darker than most of the series, and has quite a few memorable moments. Also some of the best prose in the series.

2. Stay Out of the Basement - One of the best stories Stine has ever come up with conceptually. Like most of his best work, Basement functions as an allegory for a struggle lots of kids actually have growing up. In this case, a family crises causing a parent to start acting drastically differently, and even becoming scary. The prose here is clunkier (Stine must have still been getting used to cranking ‘em out so fast) but it makes up for it with a fantastic plot, improved pacing, and unusually solid (for Stine) characters.

3. Monster Blood - The first “wacky” Goosebumps book, and the first series mascot (before Slappy, before Curly, there was Monster Blood), this book is kind of a mess, but it’s certainly not generic. I may do an in-depth review of it sometime.

4. Say Cheese and Die - Another of Stine’s best, this one about a cursed camera isn’t as strong conceptually as Basement, but has better prose. Once again we get a bit of an allegory: for kids engaging in risky behavior, like taking dares, maybe.

5. Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb - This one feels more like Young Indiana Jones book or something like that than Goosebumps. It’s not bad, but is probably the most forgettable of the first 6.

6. Let’s Get Invisible - Another best one, with some of Stine’s best prose, and another allegorical one. This one’s allegory is probably the most obvious, as many people have noticed that the plot about kids experimenting with a mirror that turns them invisible but makes them feel strange has parallels to kids experimenting with dangerous drugs.

Ghosts of Fear Street:

1. Hide and Shriek - Better written and more atmospheric than most in the series, or the genre as a whole, with a slightly unusually structured 3rd act for these sort of books. It’s pretty evident to me that Stine and Emily James collaborated more heavily than usual on this one, and wanted the first book to be special to draw in an audience. It doesn’t really have much of an underlying message, but if they’d all been similar level of quality, this article would be much more positive. Full review.

2. Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave? - A functional plot about an undead substitute teacher trying to drag the main character back to the grave with her on Halloween, held back by an annoying protagonist and lackluster prose/smaller plot details. Full review.

3. Attack of the Aqua Apes - Subpar creature feature story about a seamonkey that grows into a vicious chimpanzee creature, but actually spends most of the book the size of a gerbil committing mild vandalism. Full review.

4. Nightmare in 3-D - Better, but by no means amazing, creature feature about a giant praying mantis who climbs out of a 3D poster and is invisible to everyone but the protagonist. Full review.

5. Stay Away From the Tree House - This book about brothers discovering a burnt-out treehouse in the middle of the woods is carried by a better than average atmosphere and descriptive scenes, but hurt by a thinner than average plot where not much happens, and an anticlimactic ending. Full review.

6. Eye of the Fortune Teller - A relatively generic plot about an arrogant girl being tormented by a curse from a ghost of an evil gypsy is uplifted a bit by solid execution. Full review.

Both series follow the same Stine middle-grade formula. Very simple pros, every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, etc. If you’ve read some, you know it. But notice how the first 6 Goosebumps books include a lot of heavy hitters, and there’s a surprising amount of ambition to the storytelling in many of them. At least 3 of the 6 books contain allegories that are designed to either teach kids moral lessons or emotionally resonate with them in relation to difficult experiences they might be going through.

The first 6 Ghosts of Fear Street books, with the possible exception of Hide and Shriek, don’t have nearly that level of ambition. They’re all very surface level adventures, formulaic and forgettable. Goosebumps would slide into this a lot later in the series too, but even very late in the original 62 books there’d be shakeups like The Curse of Camp Cold Lake, a surprisingly dark book that’s kind-of-almost about youth suicide (it is a Scholastic book, so it had to pull its punches) or I Live in Your Basement, which gets quite surreal. Ghosts of Fear Street almost immediately settles into generic, unambitious territory, and stays there till much later in the series. This is one of the reasons I believe that Stine was micromanaging the series, but also was saving all his best ideas for Goosebumps.

So what now?

Am I still going to review all 35 books? I’m not sure. What I certainly don’t intend to do is keep reviewing them in order. Instead, I want to skip around to the books that I feel are more noteworthy and worth talking about. I also might branch out to other middle-grade and teen 90’s pulp horror series.

I will keep doing these whenever I feel like though. They’re relatively easy to write (there’s not a ton to analyze, since they’re mostly very surface level), and hopefully readers get some entertainment out of them.

The next one will be one of the better books from earlier in the series, and a Facebook buddy’s favorite. It’s also one of the few books that comes close to actually being scary, at least for the target age range.

Grab one of our own short story anthologies on Amazon.

#1: Hide and Shriek

#2: Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?

#8: The Ooze

#3: Attack of the Aqua Apes

#6: Eye of the Fortune Teller

#4: Nightmare in 3-D

Stay Away From the Treehouse was written by Lisa Eisenberg, and is her only outing as a Ghosts of Fear Street writer. She had a fairly prolific writing career outside of this, including a teen mystery series called Kate Clancy (is that a Tom Clancy reference?), a couple of Full House and Mary Kate and Ashley novellas, and some joke books and history books, all aimed at a middle-grade audience. Her career actually looks somewhat similar to Jovial Bob’s before he struck gold with Fear Street and Goosebumps, writing anything she could get paid for, none of it particularly prestigious.

Stay Away From the Treehouse is one of the most referenced books in GoFS, along with Hide and Shriek and Attack of the Aqua Apes. I guess that’s the advantage of being early to the series. Nightmare in 3-D and Eye of the Fortune Teller didn’t get as much love, but that’s not too surprising considering the former had an invisible monster (so most people didn’t realize what was going) and the latter didn’t take place in Shadyside.

Music to set the mood (IDK, not a lot of spooky songs about treehouses).

Original Cover:

Yep, it’s another Steadman piece. This one is… weird. A kid who actually matches the description of our protagonist more with his blond hair and green eyes than the ghost boy (spoiler alert) seems to be falling from a great height. Or maybe he’s flying? An orange glow behind him in the trees suggests that there might be a massive forest fire. There’s lightning, the kid is semitransparent and his eyes are glowing green, which suggests he’s a ghost, but he looks more scared than threatening. Finally, we have a dilapidated treehouse in the background, almost as an afterthought. The ghost kid who’s the main focal point is pretty far away from it.

In case you can’t tell, I’m not a big fan of this one, although if something like this had actually happened in the book, it would probably be a lot more interesting.

New Cover:

Our main character stands in the foreground looking scared, while an ominous treehouse looms in the background, with a mysterious silhouette of a person standing in the doorway.

This is the 2nd book in a row that I like the new cover better than the original one, but this one isn’t nearly as close a race. The kid cartoon art style does limit the menace, but this cover is just so much better in composition.

Twice Terrifying Tales Cover:

Very purple and kind of bland. The figure with glowing red eyes in the window isn’t a bad touch, but like most TTT reprints, it imitates elements of earlier covers while removing most of the color.

The new cover (non-TTT) wins pretty easily.

Back Cover Blurb:

• Nothing lives in the Fear Street Woods. No birds, no squirrels, nothing. Nothing—but ghosts. No one ever goes into the woods at night. Not if they want to come out again.

  But Dylan and Steve just found a cool tree house there—one that’s supposed to be haunted. Are the creepy stories true? Dylan and Steve are going to find out. They’re spending the night in the tree house—in the woods. Just the two of them.

  And one ghost.

Like Eye of the Fortune Teller, this one is a bit longer. This blurb has less spoilers though, although it is a bit repetitive and could be made more effective by trimming it down. The last line especially feels like it’s hammering the point home in an overly heavy-handed way.

It’s not a terrible teaser though.

Lies in the Cover Art, Blurb, and Title:

Dylan, the main character, never goes falling or flying through the air, and if that’s supposed to be the ghost, it doesn’t look like how the ghost in the story is described, so the original cover is pretty inaccurate. There’s no forest fire either. All that stuff sounds cooler than any scene in the book.

The later covers and the blurb are reasonably accurate, except the “And one ghost” part isn’t quite true, as we’ll see. Also, the treehouse is supposed to be two-story, which isn’t clear on any of the covers.

Characters:

Dylan Brown - The main character. Believes in ghosts and wants to prove they exist to his brother. A very common type of stock character in this series.

Steve Brown - Dylan’s slightly older brother who takes on the role usually filled by the best friend in these. Doesn’t believe in ghosts and is condescending to his brother about it.

Kate and Betsy Drennan - Two girls Dylan and Steve meet in the woods who are visiting from out of town, but seem to know a lot about local legends and the treehouse…

Dylan and Steve’s dad - Cuts down trees in the backyard and makes spaghetti.

Plot Synopsis:

Dylan is looking out the window for ghosts because it’s “perfect ghost weather.” His brother Steve comes in and mocks him, pointing out that he always thinks it’s “ghost weather.” Steve easily pranks Dylan with the ‘gasp, I see a ghost, just kidding’ trick, giving me Zack Pepper flashbacks. We’re supposed to be on Dylan’s side, but I’m with Steve so far. This kid is a total goober.

Speaking of Zack Pepper, Dylan gives him a shoutout (I guess birds of a dimwitted feather flock together), mentioning that he saw a ghost and asking if Steve thinks Zack Pepper is a liar. Steve replies that no, he’s just insane like Dylan. I would have gone with “so stupid he probably mistook a sheet hanging up to dry for a ghost” but I guess “insane” is more diplomatic.

The brothers’ reparte is interrupted by a loud crash outside, and when they run to check it out, they find their dad in the backyard, cutting down trees. Dylan looks through the trees and sees the titular tree house, which he immediately decides to not titularly stay away from. Dylan wants Steve to go with him, but he has to bribe him to do it. This is the other big thing these two have going for them in this book besides the usual believer/skeptic dynamic. They’re always making deals, mostly Dylan bribing Steve. So Dylan and Steve have slightly more personality than most characters in these books, due to their relationship with each other being a little more fleshed out. You appreciate little things like this after you’ve read over a dozen of these books in a short amount of time.

Anyway, Dylan and Steve walk for quite a while getting to the tree house, and to the book’s credit there’s some decent buildup with it getting abnormally colder the closer they get, till it feels like winter, despite it being spring. When they arrive, they discover that the oak the treehouse is in is blackened and the treehouse looks “like somebody dropped a bomb on it” per Steve. Dylan also sees a dark shadow near the base of the treehouse with eyes that look at him, but of course it disappears as soon as Steve comes to look, so he doesn’t believe it.

Dylan and Steve go home and have dinner, then go back out to the tree house when they see a light on in it in the darkness. There’s A LOT of going to the tree house, then back home, and back to the tree house in this book. The brothers hear something moving in the woods, but it turns out to just be two girls, which leads to a pretty funny chapter “cliffhanger” narrated by Dylan.

Girls. Two girls squinting in the light and giggling. Two totally alive girls.

I wanted a ghost. Or a werewolf. Or a vampire. Even a mummy. But no, I found girls.

Ah well, guess you haven’t quite hit puberty yet to view this as a win, Dylan.

These are Kate and Betsy Drennan. Kate is more friendly while Betsy is standoffish. They tell the boys they normally go to school in Vermont and are just home for spring break. When Dylan mentions the tree house, Betsy gets upset and tells them, you guessed it, “Don’t ever get sick at Granny’s." When the boys ask why, Betsy tells them that it’s a secret, which she refuses to tell them, but everyone knows. The girls tell them later anyway, but Dylan and Steve have to go home and come back to the tree house a couple of times first. Padding, much?

During those trips, some very mild “spooky” scares happen, like their tools getting strewn everywhere, and a hammer nearly falling on Dylan’s head from the treehouse. The hammer scene is the most dangerous thing in the entire book (spoiler alert).

Finally, the girls tell them a story about how some kids built the treehouse, it got struck by lightning with them inside, and they burned to death. Afterwards, some kids tried to rebuild the treehouse, but accidents kept happening, because the ghosts of those kids don’t want them to finish it. A few suspicious things about Betsy and Kate’s story:

• They claimed it was a secret they can’t talk about (no explanation or justification is ever given for this) but “everyone knows” about it.

• Dylan and Steve don’t know the story despite living in Shadyside their whole lives but the girls know it despite living far away most of the time.

• When they tell the story of the kids dying, they give details about how the kids reacted to the fire, that nobody but the kids could possibly know

This is either bad writing or it’s very, very obvious what the twist is going to be.

The boys ignore the girls’ warning, of course, and there’s more mild shenanigans. Boards they nailed into the treehouse get torn up. Someone burns “STAY AWAY” in the trunk of the tree. Finally, the boys spend the night, and wake up to boards flying out of the treehouse. They run away and get caught by their dad. Steve once again denies that anything weird is going on and the two agree to go back to the treehouse, so they go back and forth on the same night AGAIN. This time when they go into the treehouse, they find… Kate and Betsy!

The girls crack up and admit they were pranking the boys. This finally puts Steve and Dylan on the same page, where they both want to get back at the girls. But of course, they have to go home, talk about it, and come back to the treehouse first. They’re not even sure the girls will be there, they’re just sort of hoping they turn up.

But instead… there’s a real ghost! A see-through ghost boy with red eyes! Yeah, after all the ambiguity, he’s just chilling inside the treehouse and reveals himself to the boys for no apparent reason (enough pages filled that it’s time to kick off the finale). After the ghost boy scares and threatens them a bit, they find out that he’s not actually dangerous and make a deal with him to scare a couple girls for them. They lead him outside to Kate and Betsy (who conveniently show up) when…

The Twist:

When Kate and Betsy see the ghost boy, they start floating and turn translucent. They’re ghosts too!

Kate, Betsy, and the ghost boy were the three siblings who burned to death in the treehouse. Kate and Betsy tried to scare Dylan and Steve away from the treehouse because they were worried about the boys getting hurt or dying like they did. So why’d they reveal themselves and admit to pranking the boys? That really defeats everything they did up till then.

Whatever, the girls thank the boys for reuniting them with their brother, and all three move on to the afterlife.

The Ending Twist:

As Dylan and Steve walk home, they realize they’re lost. They stumble onto an old, abandoned slide (in the middle of the woods? this makes far less sense than the treehouse) with a ghost boy in an old-fashioned sailor-type school uniform sitting on it, who begs them for help. Steve groans and says, “Here we go again.”

Themes and Symbolism:

Something about siblings setting aside their rivalry to work together? There’s not much here below the surface.

Review and Analysis:

Stay Away From the Tree House is frustrating. It had potential. Some aspects of it are better than average (for the genre, as with everything in these reviews) but just as much is worse. The brothers have a bit more character thanks to their relationship being more fleshed out, and there is some good atmosphere around the treehouse, especially with the buildup the first time they walk to it. A creepy treehouse is a great concept for a kids’ horror story, and one that’s surprisingly underutilized, but very little time is actually spent inside the treehouse. Dylan and Steve spend most of their time outside on the ground.

SAFTTH is dragged down badly by a thin plot. All the back-and-forth between the treehouse and the boys’ house, the repeated negotiations by Dylan to get Steve to go back to the treehouse with him, discussions of everything they saw and did, whether ghosts exist, etc, get very repetitive. On top of that, the entire “conflict” (what little there is of it) being due to a misunderstanding, with no real threat, is anticlimactic.

Furthermore, some actions of the girls don’t make a lot of sense after the reveal. They’re actually ghosts who were trying to scare the boys away from building the treehouse because they were afraid the boys would get killed. So why did they reveal themselves and tell the boys they were just pranking them when the boys went back to the treehouse? They’re ghosts! Surely they could have done something else.

Also, how come they couldn’t see their brother and vice-versa till Dylan and Steve brought them together, despite both the girls and their brother hanging out at the treehouse so much?

Lastly, the ending twist feels like the book is making fun of itself. So on the off chance that the fate of the ghost kids emotionally impacted you at all, that will ruin it.

First six books complete!

With that, I’m going to write a more in-depth article, comparing Ghosts of Fear Street as a whole to Goosebumps, and some of the other Goosebumps copycats and discussing why I think this series is being forgotten, while similar series that were initially less popular (Spinetinglers, Shivers) seem to have grown more of a cult following.

Get our own story anthologies here.

Being a pulp zine in the classic tradition, the lines between fantasy, sci-fi, and horror are heavily blurred, if not ignored completely, in favor of telling an exciting tale.

The volume contains 5 short stories, an excerpt from an epic poem, a novella, and an essay.

This is the standard cover for the issue. This might be a character from The Sealed City short story in the collection, or this art may be just for vibes and not referring to any story within the volume.

The hardcover version I ordered off Lulu has an alternate cover.

As some of you might recognize, it’s a Princess of Mars homage, done in an anime-esque style. These characters bear some similarity to the characters from the Images of the Goddess novella in the volume, but some details aren’t quite right, so again, more vibes than an accurate reflection of one of the stories.

And just to be clear: neither of these covers are AI. AI images weren’t even a publicly available thing when this issue first came out. Cirsova doesn’t and never has used any AI in its magazine, AFAIK.

The hardcover version seems to be good quality. It’s not stitched, but held up well to multiple trips to and from work and time on metal grate shelving while I read it during breaks. There’s no sign of pages coming loose and very little wear.

Contents:

The Sealed City - The first story in the collection is a classic post-post-apocalypse far future tale, with people rebuilding a fairly primitive existence in a setting where technology and magic are blurred. It was written by Adrian Cole and is part of his setting for his larger novel series, the Dream Lords saga. I haven’t read any of Dream Lords, but it’s not necessary to understand this self-contained story.

A “witchfinder” named Voruum, who specializes in dealing with threats that may be of supernatural origin, answers a distress call from an outpost where people have started going missing. Accompanied partway by Kalden, a young man from the outpost, he follows a trail to a rock dome enclosing an ancient city where a sinister cult worships an eldritch being. Conveniently, he arrives just as they’re enacting a ritual to summon said being, and it’s up to Voruum to stop them, alone.

The Sealed City is well-written, but pretty typical for this kind of pulp “science fantasy” story. Voruum is either by himself or explaining the situation to noobie Kalden for most of the story, so there isn’t a whole lot of characterization. Kalden is the youth and Voruum is the seasoned veteran, and that’s the extent of it. The evil cult, with their human sacrifices and chants, will feel familiar to people who have read this sort of pulp story. Again, it’s all well-executed, there just wasn’t much to make this one stand out.

Hoskin’s War - The second story, by Brian K. Lowe, is set during the American Revolution. This era is more neglected in modern pulps, so it was neat to see it get some love. Of course, this being a pulp story, it isn’t straight up historical fiction. There’s something supernatural going on.

Daniel Hoskins, a captain in the Continental Army, is preparing an ambush of a column of British soldiers when the British are apparently attacked by their Iroquois allies, accompanied by large, wolf-like creatures. Despite them being loyalists, Hoskins decides to rescue the civilians who are accompanying the British troops. Once they repel the attackers and take the surviving British prisoner, Hoskins goes with one civilian on a rescue mission to save the man’s sister who has been carried off by the natives. He discovers that this group of natives are also an evil cult worshipping an ancient, eldritch evil.

So this story treads some of the same territory as the previous one, but I preferred it due to the more interesting (in my opinion) characters and setting. The reveal of the true identity of Hoskin’s companion and the woman he’s rescuing also leaves a nice plot hook for future adventures and I’m interested in checking out more of Lowe’s work in this setting.

This story also defies modern political correctness a bit: the natives aren’t romanticized. In fact, the narrative makes it clear that while the British and Americans both at least attempted to abide by some rules of war, including sparing women and children, the natives had no such qualms.

Square Errant - The term “low fantasy” is an often misused one. Lots of people seem to think it involves everyone being covered in dirt and dung or having “gray morality” where everyone is horrible or somesuch. I would very much like to get all those people to read Square Errant, because it’s a wonderful example of what low fantasy actually is: a fantasy where the magical or fantastical elements are used sparingly.

Written by Karl Gallagher, Squire Errant stars the titular Squire Ward as he accompanies his knight Yves on an ill-fated expedition to rid the town of Pelanon of a monster that has been ravaging its flocks. When the first attempt ends disastrously, Ward decides to finish the quest himself, by training the local peasants into a militia to slay the beast.

The only fantastical element in this story is the monster itself, which is less like a traditional dragon than a T-rex. Other than that, we’re treated to grounded take on medieval life and combat, with plenty of tension. A well-written and thoroughly enjoyable tale.

The Water Walks Tonight - A group of vikings who have committed various wicked acts have been sent on an expedition to a mystical island full of dangerous monsters, . One by one, the members of the expedition members are picked off until only two remain, one of whom has a grudge against the other…

This story was written by S.H. Mansouri and had a dark atmosphere and was entertaining. Both this story and the next were shorter than the others, so there wasn’t quite as much to them, but it was still enjoyable.

Shark Fighter - A diver wakes up in the middle of the ocean to find he has amnesia and a shark is moving in to attack. As he fights to save himself, his memories return in mixed up pieces: of his wife and a native guide who may be responsible for his current predicament.

This story by Michael Tierney was just okay for me. The only one set in the modern day, it had somewhat depressing plot twist near the end, and the villain’s motivation didn’t do much for me. Like all stories in the volume though, it’s competently written, and there is some decent action with a diver fighting for his life against a shark (as one would expect from a story with this title).

My Name is John Carter (Pt 2) - James Hutchings published an epic poem covering the events of A Princess of Mars in multiple installments in Cirsova. This section features Carter’s arrival on Mars, capture by Green Martians, up to his first encounter with a humanoid woman (I wonder who that could be…) who survives her craft wrecking. It’s more of a novelty than anything, but if you’re a fan of either John Carter or epic poetry, you might find it enjoyable.

Images of the Goddess - This novella by Schuyler Hernstrom takes up nearly half the issue, so it was really important that this one landed. Fortunately it does, even if some aspects of the setting could have used a bit more explanation.

Plom, a novice in a monastery of cloistered monks isolated on a mountain side who worship “The Goddess” gets a chance to leave the monestary and explore the world when an elder monk has an astral vision of a holy book located far away in a wrecked spacecraft. Plom ends up being the initiate chosen for the quest… due to cheating his way through the trials. On his journey, he falls in with a fast-talking wizard Drur with a magic glass eye, a nomadic warrior woman named Sihma, and several other intriguing characters who face off against various perils as they help Plom with his quest for different motives (but mostly the promise of money). The story ends with an opening for future adventures.

Drur was my favorite character in the entirety if issue 2. The roguish wizard is lots of fun, and just a bit admirable, even if his more heroic moments are compelled by a hastily made oath which his magic eye holds him to by threatening to fry his brain if he doesn’t fulfill it. The end reveal about the holy book was a bit silly for me, but the journey getting there (and afterwards) was so much fun that I gave it a pass. I’d love to read any continuations in the future.

Rescuing Women - This essay by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is about the history of women in pulp fiction, both writers and characters. Rusch is coming at things from the perspective of someone who is fundamentally feminist and liberal (in a moderate way) but is bothered by modern attitudes toward the history of genre fiction and the erasure of female writers and characters from the past in honor of glorifying those of the present.

What I think Rusch underestimated when she wrote this years ago, was the degree to which this erasure is being pushed by active malice, insecurity, and good old fashioned corruption, rather than mere ignorance. Claims of historical oppression in publishing are simply justification by a mean-girl clique to control the modern legacy publishing industry.

Regardless of how much you align with Rusch’s views, this short article is useful and informative for refuting some myths about the past pushed by modern publishers, and references a website of Rusch’s that provides more refutations, along with some references to female sci-fi and fantasy authors from earlier eras, for those who are interested.

Overall Thoughts

This is a really strong collection. Cirsova is worth checking out if you’re a big fan of classic adventure stories in the fantasy and sci-fi milieus and are sad by the apparent lack of such works getting published in the modern day. Just cause the big publishing houses aren’t giving them love doesn’t mean they’re not out there! You just have to be willing to go a bit off the beaten path to find them.

Cirsova’s website.

Our own anthology series.

Hide and Shriek

Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?

The Ooze

Attack of the Aqua Apes

Eye of the Fortune Teller

Nightmare in 3-D is the 4th book in the Ghosts of Fear Street series. It was written by Gloria Hatrick, who also wrote Creature from Club Lagoona. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of works outside of Ghosts of Fear Street to her name. Mostly just a YA book called Masks that was published in 1992.

This book is another creature feature, like Attack of the Aqua Apes, so that means the mood music will be Mommy’s Little Monsters again.

Original Cover:

A praying mantis coming out of a poster with some books in the way. Lots of yellow and green, with a bit of blue, yellow, and orange for contrast. It’s okay, but definitely not my favorite. At least the title stands out from the background nicely. They seem to have gotten the color contrast right now.

New Cover:

This might be the first one where I actually like the new cover better. The “it’s coming right at you!” gimmick of the original cover was cool, but the overhead view here with our protagonist in his bed is also effective, and the color scheme is nicer. Also, the mantis is colored with gradient dots, to make it look more magic-eye poster-y. The dark colors contrasted with the glow really pop. Neither is my favorite, but this one edges out ahead.

Characters:

Wes Parker - Our protagonist. Wears glasses, not good at magic-eye puzzles. There’s not a whole lot to him, but at least he feels a sense of responsibility when a rampaging monster gets loose in the school and does some actively heroic stuff.

Lauren - Wes’s obligatory platonic best-friend. Actually a supportive friend, which makes her one of the better “best friend” characters.

Corny and Gabby Phillips - The obligatory bully characters. Twin girls who live next door to Wes and like to harass him.

Clawd - Wes’s cat. Get the pun?

Fluffums - The Phillips twins’ dog, who chases Clawd a lot.

Sal - Weird, grumpy guy who owns the Five-and-Ten shop.

Wes’s Mom, Dad, and Little Sister Vicky - Just there.

Plot Synopsis:

Wes is in the school cafeteria trying to see one of those 3D hidden image posters that were a hot fad for a few minutes in the 90’s. He can’t, and says he’s never able to, despite a pep talk from his friend Lauren.

The Phillips twins sit down next to them and start talking about the cow eye that they dissected in science class, before saying they’re bored and leaving. Wes sees an eyeball in his food and screams, but it’s a plastic eye the twins put there. The whole cafeteria laughs and applauds him, and he vows to get payback on the twins.

On the way home, Wes and Lauren stop at Sal’s Five-and-Ten store, where Wes notices a magic eye poster that the Phillips twins had is on display with a sign saying it’s part of a contest. Someone who sees the image can send a letter to the company saying what it is, and win a prize. Wes figures if he can beat the twins at the contest, it will be a decent revenge. He takes the poster to Sal at the register, who from his physical description and name, might actually be based on Salvador Dali

Sal complains a bit about people these days only wanting to shop at the mall before getting a bit weird on Wes about buying the poster, telling Wes that his eyes might have the ability to see things that others can’t, and that some things are better left in 2D. He still sells Wes the poster, even though he seems to know what’s up with it, because this story needs a plot.

Wes goes home and tries to look at the poster, but once again he can’t see the image. Wes shows his mom and his younger sister Vicky, who tells him that there’s another magic-eye poster on the back of their serial box that she was able to see. It was the mid-90’s, so these posters being everywhere is slightly more plausible than it is now. She tries to give him some tips on seeing it, but once again, he can’t. Her and their mom can though, and even the cat, Clawd, can see it. When they try to see the image in Wes’s poster though, they can’t. When they show Clawd the poster though, he freaks out and runs away. Also, the poster smells bad.

Wes goes into his room before dinner and stares at the poster till finally he sees a praying mantis in it. Then the mantis reaches out of the poster and eats a real moth that was flying around his room. When Wes looks again though, the mantis is just dots. Wes gets called to dinner, where he spends his time freaking out about seeing the mantis move. He tries to tell his parents, who tell him his eyes must be playing tricks on him. Then Clawd runs through the flap on the front door, chased by the Phillips twins’ dog, Fluffums. Clawd and Fluffums run up to Wes’s room. Wes goes in to find Clawd freaking out and Fluffums is cowering in the corner, missing a chunk of fur, which the Phillips sisters threaten to sue his family over (yeah, they’re those kind of people). When they take their dog and leave though, Wes finds out that the 3D poster has a chunk of dog fur coming out of it. Wes freaks out, takes the poster off his wall, and puts it in his closet. Then he mails out a letter to the poster company for the prize.

That night, Wes gets swarmed by red dots from the closet that buzz around him like flies. Then the closet door starts to buckle and crack, and he sees a giant feeler coming out. Wes screams cause the mantis is coming for him, but when his mom comes into the room, his closet door is fixed and everything is back to normal. This is totally inconsistent with everything we see about how the mantis works later, btw. Wes’s mom tells him he had a nightmare and he thinks maybe she’s right.

Wes decides to take the poster to school the next day to show Mr. Gosling, his science teacher, figuring out that maybe he’ll know what’s up with it. He tells Lauren about what happened on the way to school, and while she’s skeptical of a giant praying mantis coming out of a poster, she also knows it’s not like him to make stuff up, so maybe something weird is going on.

At school, the Phillips sisters steal Wes’s glasses, and then when he looks at the poster again, the mantis monster comes out of it completely. Lauren can’t see it, and accuses him of playing a prank, but she can feel it when it bites her wrist, so she believes him after that. The mantis grabs Mr. Gosling’s ankle, but since he can’t see it, he thinks somebody tripped him. Wes and Lauren throw books and do other weird things to try to distract the mantis, baffling Mr. Gosling, before finally convincing him that they all need to get to class. The mantis comes into class, and starts lurking over the animal cages. Wes and Lauren figure it’s goign to eat the animals, so they freak out and start letting all the animals out of their cages, starting what’s basically a riot in the classroom. Mr. Gosling leaves the room to chase after the animals. Then the lunch bell rings and everyone bolts, including the mantis.

Wes and Lauren chase the mantis to the cafeteria, where it starts flipping trays and throwing things around, but since no one can see it, everyone thinks it’s other kids doing it, and it starts a massive food fight. The mantis pins Corny down and is going to eat her, when Wes makes her give his glasses back and stares at the mantis till it breaks into dots and goes back into the poster. Wes staring at the poster without glasses makes the mantis coming out, staring at the mantis with glasses makes it go back in.

Wes and Lauren go home to Wes’s house where they cut the poster in pieces. Then Wes pulls down his glasses, puts his face real close to the poster, and stares at it to make sure the mantis is destroyed.

A little mantis arm knocks Wes’s glasses to the ground and hundreds of tiny mantises come out of the poster and start flying around. They all start clumping up in a ball and reform the giant mantis. Meanwhile, Wes accidentally steps on his glasses and breaks both lenses. Getting the extra durable lenses could have prevented this, but so could not being stupid.

Luckily, Vicky, Wes’s sister, comes in just then, so Wes swipes her glasses and stares at the mantis. The mantis lifts him in the air, which causes Vicky to freak out cause she sees him floating. Wes thinks Vicky’s glasses don’t work, but fortunately it just takes longer cause they’re a weaker prescription. Wes and Lauren go outside and burn the poster. They see a mantis shaped cloud of smoke rise up and disperse.

The Twist:

Wes and Lauren are hanging out weeks later. There’s no mention of them getting suspended from school for releasing all the lab animals, so I guess the school admins decided that day was so chaotic that all the students got a mulligan. Wes gets his package in the mail and finds out it’s another magic-eye poster, with a tarantula in it. But since Wes knows how they work now, he just puts his glasses back on when it starts crawling.

Then Wes and Lauren see the Phillips sisters playing outside, and they’re running a toy cat on wheels around while encouraging their dog to chase and attack it. Yep, they’re training Fluffums to attack Clawd. If you’re thinking that Wes should have let the mantis eat them, I have good news. He heads outside with Lauren and tells the twins he has something to show them while holding up the new poster and handing Lauren his glasses.

Themes and Symbolism:

Eyes are mentioned throughout. They’re learning about eyes in science class, and of course there’s Sal’s little speech to Wes about his eyes. It doesn’t really seem to mean anything deep though.

Review and Analysis:

Nightmare in 3-D isn’t anything special, but it understood the assignment where Attack of the Aqua Apes (and many others) didn’t. If you’re going to give us a creature feature, give us plenty of the creature rampaging around being scary and/or cool. The latter half of this book is almost nonstop, 7-foot tall, invisible, praying mantis monster action, and it’s better for it. The first half setting everything up is a bit bland, but at least it’s not too padded.

I also liked the ending, with the implied comeuppance coming to the bully characters, who we’re given just enough nastiness from for it to be enjoyable. It reminds me a bit of the twist ending in Calling All Creeps.

There’s a bit of inconsistency between the two halves though. Why does the broken closet door fix itself instantly when Wes’s mom comes in? The mantis monster never displays this power again, or any concern with hiding itself, beyond its natural invisibility. Why does the mantis take so long to come out of the poster after Wes sees it the first time, only to go back inside on its own, for that matter? This doesn’t match the “glasses off, mantis comes out-glasses on, mantis goes back in” mechanic we see in the latter half of the book.

Also, as is a common standard throughout these books, explanations of why any of this stuff is happening are almost totally absent. Sal seems to know or at least suspect something about the poster and Wes’s eyes, but he makes it clear that he doesn’t have anything to do with this contest. It’s all being handled by the unnamed poster company. We learn how the mantis works, but nothing about why this nameless company is making bug monster magic-eye posters, or why Wes has some kind of special sight that can bring them to life, or why it reverses when he’s wearing glasses… you get the idea.

Oh well. It’s a novella for children about a giant invisible praying mantis that comes out of a 3D magic-eye poster. It’s not deep.

I give Nightmare in 3-D (don’t forget the dash) a passing grade, but with 6 billion kids’ horror novellas out there, the only real reason to read this one is if you think praying mantises are particularly awesome.

Next time: I’m gonna take a little break from these and review Cirsova, Volume 2. Then I’ll finish the first half dozen with book 5, Stay Away From the Treehouse, and write a first impressions article.

Our books:

Hide and Shriek

Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?

The Ooze

Attack of the Aqua Apes

Eye of the Fortune Teller is the 6th book in the Ghosts of Fear Street series. It was written by AG Cascone (aka, the Cascone sisters) who I talked about in the previous review.

Music to set the mood.

Original Cover:

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but Steadman really cooked both times he did cover art for the Cascone sisters. A sinister fortune teller with a crystal ball isn’t exactly unknown to the genre. Jovial Bob himself had 4 covers across 2 books with the same subject matter. But this might be my favorite out of any of them.

Steadman has done his usual realistic human figure, with a lot of detail on the clothing and jewelry, but it’s the little features that make this one. The subtle smirk. The red-eyed Kubrick stare. The bolts of electricity shooting from the fingertips. And of course, that monstrous, reptilian eye looking out from the crystal ball. Even the color scheme of the text and border are pretty spot on, complimenting the colors of he picture while standing out enough to be clearly visible.

Similar cover to the original, but the monster eye and electricity are replaced with our protagonist Kelsey and some tarot cards. Instead of Kubrick-staring at the reader, the fortune teller is looking at her crystal ball. It’s not bad as far as these new covers go, and references the plot more than the old one, but I still prefer the original for the sinister vibe.

Back Cover Blurb:

• Who’s afraid of the Ghosts of Fear Street?

  Not Kelsey Moore. She’s lived on Fear Street her whole life, and she’s not afraid of anything.

  Until she meets Madame Valda—a strange old woman who says she can see into the future. She tells Kelsey that only fools are fearless. Kelsey just laughs.

  But she isn’t laughing when she climbs into bed—and finds it full of disgusting sand crabs. Or when she goes for a swim—and finds the ocean swarming with slimy jellyfish! All of Kelsey’s worst fears are coming to life!

  Has Madame Valda doomed Kelsey to live in fear forever?

So first off, this is a much longer and more detailed plot summary than we’ve gotten from any of the other covers. The generic intro to the series has been removed and replaced with more book-specific plot summary. I’m not the biggest fan of this. It means more spoilers. Also, the descriptions of Kelsey’s fears sound kind of lame. Some scares don’t work without proper buildup, and these are two of them. At least the three opening sentences are strong.

Lies in Cover Art, Title, and Blurb:

Well first of all, there’s no monster reptile eye. That makes me a bit sad. Second, neither cover’s fortune teller looks like how Madame Valda is described, although the first one has something interesting about it I’ll mention in the plot synopsis. Lastly, the exchange between Kelsey and Madame Valda and the reason Madame Valda curses her in the blurb isn’t quite right.

A Note on Gypsies:

The Cascone sisters don’t give any background to what they mean by “gypsies” when they come up in the book, they just assume everyone already broadly understands the term.

Gypsies used to be a stock fantasy archetype, but the younger generation might be less familiar with them, sense we had a moral panic that resulted in things like gypsy cards being banned from Magic:The Gathering a few years back.

“Gypsy” is English language slang term for the Roma people, a nomadic group that migrated from northern India to Europe over a thousand years ago and interbred with various European populations while maintaining their nomadic lifestyle for an abnormally long time.

Like many cultural elements of Europe, the Roma got a medieval fantasy parallel in fantasy gypsy: a bohemian group of sorcerers, entertainers, and con-artists. “Fortune teller” and “gypsy” were practically synonymous for a long time. The complication, of course, is the fantasy gypsy being based on a real group of people, although the fantasy version is overall kind of a positive or at least ambiguous portrayal, at least in America. I’ve never read anything where fantasy gypsies were kidnapping children, for instance, a common and controversial accusation leveled at the Roma IRL. But because gypsy was often used derogatorily in Europe, and associated with scamming (“gyp” meaning to cheat someone) the entire fantasy gypsy archetype had a media purge a few years back.

Eye of the Fortune Teller features gypsies as they used to be portrayed and were widely recognized in American pop culture: as a distinct ethnic group of traveling entertainers and magicians with odd customs, who originated in some vague foreign European land.

Alright, on with the review.

Characters:

Kelsey Moore - Our protagonist. She starts out arrogant, bossy, and rude, but quickly starts learning humility when bad things start happening to her. Probably one of the best Ghosts of Fear Street protagonists, although that’s not a category with a lot of competition.

Drew - Kelsey’s cousin and best friend. A bit whipped by her.

Madame Valda - An ancient crone of a fortune teller who gets VERY mad when Kelsey insults her powers.

The Amazing Zandra - A younger fortune teller who sells her services for cash and might be a fraud.

Gregor - Zandra’s uncle.

Plot Synopsis:

Kelsey and Drew are at a carnival by the beach, arguing over which of them was scared of the roller coaster they just rode. Kelsey tells Drew she’s not afraid of anything because she lives on Fear Street, the scariest street in the world. From his annoyed reaction, it seems like he gets this a lot from her.

This is the only relevance of Fear Street or Shadyside to the plot, by the way. The story takes place at an unnamed beach town. This happens quite a bit in the series. To be fair, Jovial Bob himself didn’t do a whole lot with the “all in the same town” concept in the original Fear Street run aside from having characters name drop characters from other books.

Our two protagonists are about to head home when they stumble onto a decaying wooden shack with a sign that says The Amazing Zandra. Kelsey bullies Drew into going inside, despite agreeing with him that fortune tellers are fake and lame. They encounter an old crone with one blue and one dark eye who tells them her name is Madame Valda (not Zandra) and she’s going to read them their fortunes for free. She also calls them by their full names before they introduce themselves, which freaks them out for a moment, before Kelsey notices their beach passes with their names are stuck to their shirts.

Kelsey then immediately decides to be a prick to the woman who is giving them her services for free by calling her a fake and mocking her accent. What Madame Valda does in retaliation is extremely disproportionate, but Kelsey really did deserve some kind of comeuppance for this.

Madame Valda absolutely flips out, screaming at Kelsey that she’s going to curse her while pulling a “fool” card from her tarot deck. When Kelsey keeps giving her sass, she tells the girl that only fools aren’t afraid and starts shrieking “Fear! Fear! Fear!” Kelsey finally catches on that they should leave, and her and Drew flee the fortune teller shop. Then Madame Valda chases after them, grabbing Kelsey by the shoulder and shocking her while screaming “Fool! Fool! Fool!” in her ear over and over. The gypsy lady throws the fool card up in the air and it flies up till it disappears. Then she vanishes.

The two kids walk home, but get lost in an abandoned part of town that seems to change every time Kelsey tries to lead them home. They get chased by a big yellow dog, but just as it’s about to corner them, Drew leads them away and they instantly come across a familiar street. Kelsey thinks for a second that this is because she was cursed and Drew wasn’t, before shrugging it off, but when she’s about to go inside, the fool card drops out of the sky in front of her.

Kelsey rips the card into pieces and throws it in the trash, but gets attacked in her bed by a swarm of hermit crabs. They disappear when she runs to look in the mirror, but she finds the fool card intact under her bed despite ripping it up.

The next day, basically the same thing happens again, but this time it’s down at the beach with a swarm of jellyfish stinging her (okay, that is a little scary). It’s another hallucination, but since Drew sees her rip up the card and throw it into the ocean before it washes up at their feet intact again, they both finally believe that the curse is real.

Not sure what else to do, the two return to the fortune teller shack to beg Madame Valda for forgiveness, only to encounter a much younger fortune teller who tells them there’s no old lady fortune teller who works there. This is The Amazing Zandra, and she has purple fingernails like the fortune teller on the book cover does, which made me wonder if she was going to be a twist villain (spoiler, she isn’t).

When Zandra hears that Kelsey is cursed, she offers to break it… for ten dollars. Kelsey agrees, because again, she doesn’t know what else to do. Zandra does some chanting, takes the fool card and locks it in a box, and gives Kelsey a “magic amulet” (bead on a string). She tells Kelsey to wear it for three days to break the curse.

Surprisingly, this seems to work for a couple of days. Then Kelsey gets swarmed on the beach again, by horseflies this time, and the fool card drops down from the sky. Kelsey’s fears seem to mostly revolve around getting swarmed by mildly unpleasant animals.

Kelsey and Drew go back to Zandra to complain that her cure didn’t work. Zandra thinks they’re trying to kid a kidder, since she has the fool card locked in a box, but when she opens the box, instead of the card, there’s a picture of Kelsey with a red X through it. Zandra starts to actually take the curse seriously now, and when Kelsey and Drew tell her the fortune teller who cursed Kelsey was named Madame Valda, she tells them that Valda was the evil gypsy who ever lived and has been dead for over a hundred years. So she’s a real RL Stine’s Ghost of Fear Street now! Well, not of Fear Street, but close enough.

Zandra says that Valda is way too powerful for her, but maybe her uncle Gregor can help. She gets him out of the back room. Gregor is wearing a blue glass eye on a string as a necklace. Madame Valda has a blue eye. I thought this was going to be important, but it isn’t.

He tells the kids a little more about Madame Valda, including how a couple of kids killed her and then went crazy because of a curse (hinting this will be Kelsey’s fate if she doesn’t do something). He also goes off a bit more about how Valda was the evilest gypsy who ever lived. While the curse she put on Kelsey is pretty messed up, I find it funny that this ghost gypsy who’s so evil was first introduced reading the kids’ fortunes for free, with no apparent ill intent. She even gave Drew some good advice! I like to think she was genuinely trying to turn over a new leaf and Kelsey ruined it by being a jerk.

Gregor tells Kelsey that there’s a way to break the curse, but it might be worse than the curse itself. This is BS though. Breaking the curse is difficult and a bit dangerous, but not as bad as having a lifetime of hallucinations until you go insane. Kelsey has to collect physical representations of all her fears: a map, a hermit crab, a horsefly, and a jellyfish. She collects most pretty easily, but nearly drowns getting the jellyfish. Then her and Drew sneak out to meet the gypsies under the boardwalk at midnight, since that’s when they need to do the ritual to break the curse.

Gregor has Kelsey eat a piece of each of her “fears” as part of breaking the curse. So she has to eat a piece of map, a hermit crab leg, a horsefly wing, and a piece of raw jellyfish, which are ripped or cut from the still-living animals. Animal cruelty AND gross eating. Glorious! After this, she needs to burn something that belongs to Madame Valda. Kelsey panics over not having anything until she remembers that, duh, she has the fool card.

But as she’s about to throw it in the fire, Madame Valda appears and blasts it away with a gust of wind. Valda starts flying around Kelsey, blowing the card around just out of reach to mock her while casting Fireball at her. All the gypsies run away. Kelsey and Valda float and dodge around with fire shooting everywhere all the way out to the edge of the sea, but just when she’s about to get fried, Kelsey manages to grab the card and burn it, which causes Madame Valda to disappear in a puff of smoke. The curse is broken.

The Twist:

Months later, Kelsey and Drew are at another carnival. They hear a girl talk about getting her fortune told and Drew freaks out, but Kelsey tells him to relax, it’s just one of those mechanical fortune teller booths. The girl complains that the booth took her money without reading her fortune and leaves.

As Kelsey and Drew walk away, the mechanical fortune teller starts laughing and shrieking, “Fool! Fool! Fool!” over and over.

Once again, a pretty typical sort of twist ending by the Cascone sisters.

Themes and Symbolism:

“Don’t be a jerk to strangers or you might regret it” is the main moral here. Very simple and practical. It’s kind of like an old school Grimm fairy tale that way. There’s also a bit about actually facing your fears vs just pretending to be brave.

Review and Analysis:

I’m not writing these reviews in the order I read the books. I had already read 13 of them by the time I got to this one, and was getting a bit burnt out. So that this one held my attention the entire time and I actually enjoyed reading it is a sign it did something right.

Eye of the Fortune Teller is a straightforward story. It’s also one of the shortest Ghosts of Fear Street stories. It might actually be the shortest. It’s shorter than The Ooze. But it packs a descent amount of characterization and atmosphere into just over 100 pages.

Kelsey is one of the best GoFS protagonists. That’s not saying a lot, since most of them range from generic to annoying, but she has a distinct personality that’s not too grating and a full-blown character arc, a rarity in these. She also isn’t a complete moron. Once she realizes the curse is real, she does things that make sense with the limited knowledge she has.

I also liked that even “good” gypsy magic was kind of dark and violent. It basically involves animal sacrifice, along with being generally unpleasant. The difficulty of collecting all the animals and eating a piece of each of them also makes Kelsey breaking the curse feel earned. It’s a good thing she wasn’t afraid of serial killers!

The “is she or isn’t she” play on Zandra being a fraud was kind of fun too.

That said, the book is straightforward to a fault. How Kelsey finally defeats Madame Valda, just grabbing the card cause Valda got careless while toying with her, feels anticlimactic and bland compared to everything that came before it. Therefore, I’m going to introduce a new section that I’ll only include occasionally:

If I Could Change 1 Thing:

This section won’t be in most reviews, but for books that I think could be greatly improved by a minor change, I’m going to include it.

I would change how the climactic scene between Kelsey and Madame Valda plays out, and I’d use a detail that I thought was going to be important but ended up being superfluous in the book: that blue glass eye Gregor was wearing.

• Kelsey never manages to grab the card. Madame Valda blows it out to sea. As she’s about to destroy Kelsey, she suddenly is shocked and vanishes in a puff of smoke, just like in the book, but this time apparently for no reason.

• Kelsey returns to the bonfire under the boardwalk and sees too figures crouched there. It’s Gregor and Zandra, who returned when Valda chased her outside. She sees a small orange glob in the fire, and that Gregor is no longer wearing the glass eye around his neck. She realizes he melted the eye in the fire. He tells her that his grandfather gave him the glass eye, and told him it belonged to Madame Valda, but he wasn’t sure if he believed it. Kelsey thanks Zandra and Gregor before leaving, and the rest of the ending is the same as before.

This turns the glass eye into a Chekov’s gun that defeats Madame Valda in a more clever way. It also gives significance to an early line Gregor says where he’s not sure if the fool card will work to break the curse since people usually use “a piece of clothing or jewelry.” A glass eye being worn as a necklace is kind of both. This line serves no purpose in the actual story, but here would serve as another hint. Also, of course, it gives significance to the title: Eye of the Fortune Teller.

It’s weird how much stuff is in this book that’s completely superfluous, but with this one change would all click. I almost think it was planned, but not used, for some reason.

Coming Up:

I want to cover the first six books in the series and then write a “first impressions” article comparing it to Goosebumps. I only have 2 books left to do that, Nightmare in 3-D and Stay Away from the Treehouse.

I’ll probably take a break in between these to review the sci-fi and fantasy anthology, Cirsova: Volume 2.

Stay tuned!

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Book #2: Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave

Book #8: The Ooze

Attack of the Aqua Apes is the third book in the Ghosts of Fear Street series. It’s also the first book that doesn’t live up to the series’s name, since it’s the first one where the supernatural threat isn’t a ghost.

The Authors:

Attack of the Aqua Apes was written by A.G. Cascone, which is actually two people: sisters Annette and Gina Cascone. The Cascone sisters are primarily known for working together on the Goosebumps copycat series Deadtime Stories, which retained enough of a cult following to get a TV series adaptation starting late in 2012, long after the books came out (1996-1997).

Gina had a more varied and successful career outside of that, writing numerous other books and TV scripts, but Annette seems to have primarily written Deadtime Stories.

The Cascone sisters wrote two Ghosts of Fear Street books, both early in the series’s run. Fun fact: they started the Deadtime Stories series after they ghostwrote for Ghosts of Fear Street, so it’s highly likely that writing for GoFS is what inspired them to create Deadtime Stories.

Music to set the mood.

Original Cover:

Aw yeah, now we’re talking! A maniacally grinning chimp who shouldn’t possibly fit in the fishbowl he’s in, clawed hand gripping the edge to pull himself out, lightning under his chin lighting up his face bright orange, while he has a stare-down with a terrified goldfish. The title and series name stand out better too. I really like this one, except that I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of the green border. I know this was done to emulate Goosebumps’s goo border, but it makes an already busy cover a little too busy. The aqua ape and goldfish are beautifully drawn and colored though, and considering the bland minimalism that dominates modern book covers, this 90’s oversaturated hyperrealistic maximalism is quite the breath of fresh air. Broeck Steadman is so good at drawing animals, it’s a shame he didn’t do it for more covers.

By the way, finding a good, high quality image of this original cover was distressingly difficult. Most of the ones online are very low resolution or tilted at an angle.

New Cover:

Toilet ape! Like the cover for The Ooze, this one feels more like a comic panel to me than a book cover, and the kiddie style doesn’t have the creepy atmosphere that the 90’s cover had. At least there’s more happening in this one than The Ooze’s.

Twice Terrifying Tales Cover:

Some of the GoFS books got re-released in double or triple combos. Since this one’s cover is Aqua Apes art, I figured I’d mention it too. Clearly referencing the original 90’s cover, but more cartoony, with the ape bursting out of the fishbowl and the goldfish flying through the air. Despite the more cartoony style, the colors are much more muted, which is standard for these 2-book combos and makes them all look a little bland.

Of these 3, the original wins out as the best for me, easily.

Back Cover Blurb:

Since we’ve moved back to book 3, the original series intro with “Do you believe in ghosts?” is back. The next part reads:

• And be sure to say hello to Scott and Glen. They decided to use water from Fear Street lake to grow their Aqua Apes. The creatures started out tiny and cute. But one kept growing, and growing… And its teeth kept getting sharper, and sharper, and sharper…

Not capitalizing the “lake” part of “Fear Street lake” is the book’s mistake, not mine. Also, it’s Fear Lake, not Fear Street Lake. Other than that, this is a decent intro to the story.

Lies in the Cover Art, Title, and Blurb:

Aside from getting the name of Fear Lake wrong, the title of the book, Attack of the Aqua Apes, is a lie. Only one aqua ape does anything close to attacking. Of course the back cover blurb basically admits this, so maybe that cancels it out. There’s also no goldfish in this book, so I guess you could technically count that as a lie, although I don’t think most people would be particularly invested in that particular aspect of two of the covers.

The new cover, however, has its own lie. The black kid pictured isn’t in the book. Protagonist Scott is blond haired and blue eyed with freckles, while his friend Glen has curly brown hair.

A Note on Sea Monkeys:

This book was inspired by a real life thing, which mostly isn’t around anymore, so here’s a crash course, for younger readers who may be unfamiliar.

“Sea Monkeys” were sold in advertisements inside old comic books. They were actually brine shrimp: tiny shrimp that are usually sold as food for other aquatic animals like fish. Brine shrimp eggs and nutrient packets that helped the shrimp grow were sent to customers in the mail. Due to clever market and a lot of ad money, Sea Monkeys were a big success.

The man who “invented” Sea Monkeys, Harold von Braunhut, was big supporter of the Aryan Nations and the KKK, despite being born and raised Jewish.

The actual history of Sea Monkeys is probably a lot more interesting than Attack of the Aqua Apes. Nonetheless…

Characters:

Scott Adams -

Dilbert became a nationally syndicated comic strip in 1989, so there’s a good chance our protagonist’s name is a deliberate reference. On the other hand, “Scott” and "Adams” are both fairly common names, so it could be a coincidence.

Unfortunately, aside from having the same name as a cartoonist who became controversial later in his life, Scott isn’t that interesting of a character. He’s one of many GoFS protagonists who wants something scary to happen to him because he’s bored.

Glen - Scott’s best friend. Aside from being initially skeptical about the Aqua Apes thing, he’s pretty interchangeable with Scott.

Kelly - Scott’s sister, who picks on him.

Mac - the Aqua Ape who isn’t like the other Aqua Apes

Scott’s parents, an arcade owner - minor characters

Plot Synopsis:

Scott is talking to his friend Glen about an ad in his comic book for Aqua Apes. Scott wants to finally experience something scary on Fear Street, after living there his whole life with nothing interesting happening (this is a very common stock GoFS protagonist archetype), and for some reason thinks off-brand Sea Monkeys are the way to do it instead of sneaking into Fear Manor or visiting one of the many other allegedly haunted places on the street, camping in Fear Street Woods, etc. Glen isn’t into it, but he owes Scott money, so he helps pay to order the apes.

A week later, Scott’s Aqua Apes arrive in the mail, but he has to grab them from his older sister, Kelly, who mocks him for getting “imaginary friends.” Kelly also has a dress Scott’s mom made for an upcoming dance that gets mentioned multiple times. BOY, I SURE HOPE NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO IT.

Scott shows Glen the little crystal and powder packets he got in his Aqua Apes order, and they go down to Fear Lake to get water, instead of the distilled water the instructions call for. Scott thinks this will make the Aqua Apes grow into something cool and scary, but in real life this would probably just result in them dying. Regardless, Scott gets his water from the lake, and when he adds the Aqua Ape mix to it in the little fishbowl it came in, the whole thing surges with electricity, shocking him.

Scott brushes this off, and when he gets home, he sees that his brine shrimp are already swimming around as tiny little specks. Then he notices that a large black chunk of crystal at the bottom of the bowl is leaking air bubbles, even though he thought all the crystals he poured in were white.

When Scott goes to bed that night, the light on the lid of the fishbowl starts blinking on and off before the bowl surges with electricity again and launches it into the air. Scott writes this off as something wrong with the battery, and until the book’s finale, a defective battery turning a cheap light on a sketchy mail-order fishbowl into an explosive is the scariest concept in it.

The next morning, Scott checks out his fishbowl to discover that the black crystal has grown into a tiny (but much larger than the brine shrimp) monkey-like creature. Scott tells Glen about it at school, but when they go to look after school, the monkey is hiding. Eventually Scott gets it to come out with some food and Glen finally believes him, but the monkey eats not just the food but all the other “Aqua Apes” (brine shrimp). Scott names the monkey Aqua Ape Mac.

The next lengthy bit of the book consists of Mac growing in water, Scott realizing he can escape the aquarium he’s keeping him in, Mac biting Scott, etc. The Cascones try to make Mac seem sinister, but occasionally you get reminded that Mac is only between an inch tall and the size of a hamster for all of this, and any fear factor he might have goes out the window.

Eventually Scott and Glen take Mac to the arcade, where he wreaks minor critter havoc by doing things like diving into a coin return and causing all the coins to fall out, and getting chased by the arcade owner. After running around and causing some mild havoc, Mac shrivels up and Scott and Glen figure he’s been out of the water too long. When they put him back in, he grows to the size of a rabbit. Terrifying!

Scott also has a nightmare where he walks down to the lake and is grabbed by a giant Aqua Ape.

Mac escapes the aquarium again, ties Kelly’s hair in knots while she’s sleeping (so she conveniently doesn’t see him), and escapes into the ducts. Scott goes to school as normal and doesn’t tell his parents anything, despite a weird rabid monkey being loose in his house. When he gets back, Mac has wrecked the kitchen. Scott and Glen run around trying to catch him, but fail, and Mac wrecks more stuff, including KELLY’S DRESS FOR THE DANCE, WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED IT.

Kelly and Scott’s mom happen to get home just as Mac conveniently disappears again, and of course they’re both furious with Scott. Scott finally tries to tell them about the Aqua Ape, but of course, they don’t believe him. They then immediately leave to buy Kelly another dress (which Scott is told he’ll have to pay off with his allowance), so they conveniently don’t see Mac reappear.

Scott and Glen chase Mac out to the garage, where he drops a can of paint on Scott’s dad’s car. Finally they chase him outside, but when they try to shut the garage door he runs back in and gets caught in the garage door. This apparently kills him and cuts his leg off (bloodless, but still gruesome for these books!). However, it starts to rain and Mac not only revives but grows his leg back. Then he starts chasing Scott and Glen, throwing a screwdriver at them. Mac seems to be actively trying to murder them after they nearly crush him with the garage door, so that makes things a bit more tense and interesting.

Scott, Glen, and Mac chase each other around the house some more, Scott tries to flush Mac down the toilet, but he explodes out of it. While the book states that Mac HAS grown some, he never seems to get much bigger than a regular monkey, despite this being teased earlier with the nightmare and Scott imagining a six foot tall Aqua Ape.

Finally, Scott knocks Mac out with a frying pan and traps him in a cookie jar. A cookie jar. I guess it’s a pretty big cookie jar.

Trapping Mac in the jar works (despite Mac smashing out of a toilet earlier), as he dries out and shrinks till he turns back into a black crystal. Scott puts the jar with the crystal in his closet, because he doesn’t want to risk it getting wet.

A couple weeks later, Scott finds the jar missing and goes to ask his mom about it. The story seems to completely gloss over Mac vandalizing Mr. Adams’s car. I know that Scott’s mom said he’d be paying for his sister’s dress out of his allowance, but between the car and broken toilet, it seems like this kid should be grounded for life, considering none of his family believes him about the Aqua Ape.

The Twist:

Scott’s mom tells him she put the cookie jar in the dishwasher to clean it.

Just as she leaves the room, Mac’s clawed hand bursts through the dishwasher door.

A very standard and predictable cliffhanger ending for these sort of stories.

Themes and Symbolism:

Attack of the Aqua Apes has a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster thing going with Scott worrying that he created an unstoppable monster in Mac and the Aqua Apes slogan “You have the power to create life!” which is repeated during his nightmare later in the book. However, not a lot of time is spent on this theme.

Review and Analysis:

I’m not expecting a ton from a book called Attack of the Aqua Apes, but it would be nice if it delivered on its title and cover by having plenty of rampaging Aqua Ape action. Unfortunately, Attack of the Aqua Apes falls short.

I glossed over a lot of the book where Scott finds blue pebbles from his aquarium on the ground, finds some of his stuff in the aquarium, and just takes entirely too long to figure out that Mac can leave it, plus his futile efforts to keep Mac trapped in said aquarium. For most of the book, Mac is too small to be threatening, and we’re left with a lot of “kid tries to keep wild animal as a pet” antics that feel overdone and dull. I was reminded of a book I had to read in elementary school where a girl rescued an owl and it made a mess in her house.

Attack of the Aqua Apes has a lot of the same structural problems as The Ooze, but it IS better than The Ooze, because at least it has a slightly more interesting premise, and a longer, more satisfying climax. Everything after the dress destruction is entertaining, if far from groundbreaking. Probably the most memorable scene is the dream sequence. Not a great sign.

This book got the most references in other GoFS books after Hide and Shriek and maybe Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?, which shows how early books set the tone for the series. One writer who referenced it may not have actually read it, because that writer refers to Scott telling other kids about “monsters in Fear Lake” which doesn’t happen in this book, unless you count the dream sequence. One kind of tragic thing as that Fear Lake, a location with a lot of potential, was barely used in GoFS after this book.

Even though Aqua Apes was subpar, you’ll notice I’m not being as hard on the Cascone sisters as I was on Stephen Roos. That’s because, while I haven’t read any of Deadtime Stories (yet), I have read their other Ghosts of Fear Street book.

Next time: something a bit better.

Book #2: Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?

The Ooze is the 8th book in the Ghosts of Fear Street series. It was written by Steven Roos, who I wrote about in the previous review.

Music to set the mood. If you haven’t read the book, you might think something like Beware of the Blob seems more fitting, but trust me, this song is perfect for this book.

Original Cover:

A black cat playing in some glowing orange sludge, with vials of chemicals in the background. This cover was drawn by Mark Garro, and is actually the first cover in the series that wasn’t drawn by Broeck Steadman. Conceptually it’s fine, and I like the simple color scheme, but the cat looks a little deformed, and I don’t think it’s cause of the toxic sludge. Not Garro’s best work. This is also the first cover I’ve reviewed where the title and series font uses a color that’s not taken from elsewhere in the cover art: a bright neon green. I think it pairs well with the other cover colors and is easier to read than the ones that took colors from the background without trying to contrast with the art behind them.

New Cover:

This one has us looking up at our main characters from the POV of the ooze, which is in a cooler. This does happen in the book. In fact, this is where the ooze is for most of the book. This cover feels a lot more like the panel in a comic than a cover to me. It’s not very exciting, but I guess that’s truth in advertising. Also, this is the first time the title on the new cover has had worse color-contrast with the background than on the original cover.

Neither of these covers are top tier, but I prefer the original.

Back Cover Blurb:

Al’s stink bomb doesn’t explode…

And it doesn’t smell. It just sits there.

Some chemistry set, Al thinks. Big deal.

And then it starts to ooze. It oozes all over the cat. It oozes all over Al’s best friend.

Everything the ooze touches changes… forever. And now the ooze is coming right at Al!

The intro to Fear Street(r) is completely gone now. You’ll notice this blurb doesn’t say what the ooze actually does and tries to sell you on the book by making it a mystery. That was probably a smart choice. It worked on me, to my great annoyance. I read this thing just to find out what the ooze did.

Lies in the Cover, Tile, or Blurb:

2 lies, both on the back blurb. The ooze doesn’t ooze all over Al’s best friend. It oozes all over Al. Also, it does not change everything it touches forever. Spoiler alert.

Characters:

Al Stirner - Our protagonist. Smart, but kind of a slacker, in contrast to the rest of his family.

Michelle Stirner - Al’s arrogant striver sister.

Colin - Al’s best friend.

Mom and Dad Stirner - Al’s striver parents.

Chester - Michelle’s absurdly smart cat.

Tubby - Al’s dumb dog.

Various classmates whose names I can’t be bothered to remember - friends, the bully, etc

Plot:

If you’ve ever wanted to read an awful mashup of Monster Blood and a reverse Brain Juice (or Flowers for Algernon, if you’re in a slightly more elitist mood), I have great news: this is it! Also, what’s wrong with you?

Al Stirner is trying to teach his dog, Tubby, to fetch, but Tubby just sits and drools. Al’s sister, Michelle, comes in to mock him and brag about how smart her cat, Chester, is. He can open his own food with the can opener, do math, and she’s planning to teach him how to use the toilet. So that’s the level of realism this book is at.

It’s Al’s birthday, and he’s hoping his parents got him some skates, but they got him a chemistry set instead. Then they take they take him to the opera.

The next day, Al’s friend Colin comes over and wants to use the chemistry set to make a stink bomb and embarrass Al’s sister while her chess club is visiting. Chess club. The opera. Get it? They’re smart. Presumably before chess Michelle and her pals unwind by debating Austrian vs Keynesian economics and competing to see who can calculate Pi to the furthest decimal, but those references are a bit too cerebral for the Roos Cruise.

Colin starts randomly mixing chemicals when Al screams that if he mixes two particular ones, they’ll blow up the house. If a children’s chemistry set is that dangerous, I don’t think the company selling it will survive the inevitable lawsuits. They’re about to pack up the chemistry set and give up when Colin finds a handwritten recipe in it for making a stink bomb. They follow the recipe and, to the surprise of no one who read the back of the book or has basic pattern recognition, instead of a stink bomb they get a bunch of orange goop. Chester, the world’s smartest cat, isn’t smart enough to not tip over the vial of toxic chemical and get it on him. Al and Colin scoop it up using paper towels and put it in a cooler.

When Al’s mom comes down and Al realizes there’s a glob of ooze they missed, so he covers it with his hand. He feels the ooze crawling up between his fingers before his mom goes back upstairs. Colin helps him clean his hand off.

The next day, Al’s head hurts and he puts his shoes on the wrong feet, which causes his whole family to laugh at him. At school he can’t focus or answer questions correctly, and tells the class bully a wrong answer, so he has to run from the bully after school. Then he can’t find his way home. Al realizes the ooze made him dumber. The depiction of getting dumber in this book is quite similar to Alzheimer’s, which could make for pretty dark material if the book delved into Al’s psyche or angst about this, but it doesn’t.

Instead the book has a lot of Al blundering around not being able to answer questions and being clumsy, then going, “Oh no! I’m getting dumber!”, then accidentally getting more ooze on him and worrying that he’ll get dumber still. The ooze is growing and bubbling up inside the cooler (ah yes, I’ve read Monster Blood too).

Meanwhile, much like in Hide and Shriek, there’s a big event other characters keep mentioning that the plot is building up to. In Hide and Shriek, that event was a game of hide and seek with a ghost. In The Ooze, the big event is… the middle school science bowl. This book has almost as many thrills and chills as watching a real middle school science bowl, except Al’s classmates play with some of the ooze after he brings it to school to show to his science teacher (which he never actually does), so nobody can answer any of the questions. So there isn’t even any tension over who’s going to win this competition that doesn’t effect their grades anyway. Al manages to get one question right though, because his sister told him the answer that morning, so he wins by sheer dumb luck. Thank goodness, the stakes were pretty high!

Finally, mercifully, Al and Colin go to look at the monster blo- I mean the ooze one more time, and see that it has grown a heart, brain, and veins. The ooze rises up, takes a humanoid shape, and starts villain monologuing to them. It explains that it’s part of an alien species that planted the stink bomb recipe in that chemistry set so they could… be made. Don’t think about this too much. It’s a Lovecraftian fractal plot hole that will drive you mad if you try to apply logic to it.

The ooze monster absorbs other creatures’ intelligence, or their “brains” as everyone in the book calls it, even though it obviously isn’t literally their brains or they’d be dead. Absorbing these metaphorical brains makes its literal brain grow. So the ooze monster sucks up the rest of Chester’s metaphorical brain, rendering the cat catatonic. It then tries to do the same to Al, but Tubby jumps in the way, so the ooze sucks up Tubby’s metaphorical brain and renders him catatonic too. Al is about to meet the same fate when the ooze monster shrinks away, barking once before turning into a puddle of goop again.

Al figures out that the ooze monster could only eat smart brains, and eating brain of Tubby the dumb dog caused it to self-destruct. His intelligence conveniently comes back, and so does everyone else’s. The conflict resolved itself without our “heroes” doing a single thing (except causing the problem).

The Twist:

Al and Colin bury the ooze under a tree outside. Months later, Al’s family is having a picnic when they notice glowing orange globs are rising up out of the ground. Al tells them not to touch the globs because they might be toxic. Al’s parents listen, but his sister insults him before touching the ooze, and Al ends the story by telling the reader that his sister is too smart for her own good. THAT’S NOT HOW BEING SMART WORKS, AL. TOUCHING UNKNOWN CHEMICALS BECAUSE SOMEONE TOLD YOU THEY MIGHT BE TOXIC IS NOT A SMART THING TO DO, IT MIGHT BE THE DUMBEST THING SOMEONE DOES IN THIS BOOK, AND THAT’S REALLY SAYING SOMETHING.

Themes and Symbolism:

I guess the book is trying to make a point that it’s less about how smart you are than how you use it (Michelle’s arrogance makes her do something stupid), and even morons (Tubby) have something to contribute, but the point is made in such a mind-numbingly stupid way that no reasonably intelligent person could take it seriously (ironically).

Review and Analysis:

The Ooze is a very dumb book (about intelligence, ironically), but that’s far from its biggest problem. Its biggest problem is that it’s boring.

The ooze turning into a rampaging, monologuing monster, getting defeated, and the conclusion are only about 15 pages at the end of this book. A huge portion of the book is Al not knowing the answers to questions and buildup to the school science bowl, which has no stakes and an anticlimactic resolution. It’s not scary or exciting, even for the target age group. I’d assume it was supposed to be funny, but there aren’t really any jokes either, unless you find Al saying the capitol of Brazil is Cleveland and equivalent things for 50 pages to be hilarious. This is one of the shorter Ghosts of Fear Street books, at just over a hundred pages, and it still managed to feel like a slog to read.

The concept could probably have worked in the hands of a more competent author who gave the story a more psychological bent, but Stephen Roos is far too surface-level to pull this off. Since the psychological angle isn’t his wheelhouse, he could have at least made the story mediocre but entertaining slop by filling it with ooze monster action, but there’s hardly any ooze monster.

The book also has a few of my most hated adolescent horror novella cliches. There are multiple vague nothing cliffhanger chapter endings that say something like, “If I’d only known what was going to happen, I never would’ve [_]!” There’s a drawn-out scene of the protagonist trying to explain what’s happening to his parents while they ignore him. And of course, the conflict resolves itself without the protagonist doing anything.

I’m not sure if I’d call The Ooze the worst Ghosts of Fear Street book (there are some strong contenders for that title) but it’s down there. It’s the worst Stephen Roos GoFS book by a mile, and I say that with complete confidence despite not having read Fright Christmas yet.

Next time: a new author. Or should I say, authors. Some Ghosts of Fear Street books were written by multiple people. Are two heads better than one?

Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave is the second book in the Ghosts of Fear Street series. It was written by Stephen Roos.

The Author:

Stephen Roos is the most prolific Ghosts of Fear Street author, which sounds impressive, but he only wrote 4 out of 36 books. Multiple authors wrote 3 out of 36 books, so Roos only wins this title on a technicality. Ghosts of Fear Street had a pretty broad spread of authors.

Does the Roos Cruise hit different then Emily James though? Hoo boy, he does.

Mood music.

Original Cover:

Another Broek Steadman piece. This is actually more typical of Steadman’s work than the Skeleton cover of the last book. He tends to favor realistic human figures and complex backgrounds. Here we have an old lady with a big floppy hat and veil, semitransparent and colored in grayscale, with glowing green eyes, pointing at the reader while smirking (our villain, Miss Gaunt). Below her is a bed and teddy bear in a cemetery, which is a bit silly, but gets the point across. The title font colors work a bit better here. It’s taken from the art’s color scheme again, but the contrasta with the background is a bit better, although the green font being something a bit darker, like the purple up top, probably would have been better. At least the border is visible this time. Definitely not my favorite, but not bad.

New Cover:

Mostly bland, with the odd detail of the stone path turning into what I guess is supposed to be a giant worm wrapped around Miss Gaunt. Otherwise it’s a basic old lady ghost standing in a cemetery. I definitely prefer the original.

Back Cover Blurb:

First it has the same intro to Fear Street(r) as the previous book, followed by:

• Zack Pepper thinks there is something very wrong with his substitute teacher. Not only does she seem far too interested in him, she’s also super creepy. But no one else seems to notice anything odd. Zack is going to have to get rid of her all by himself—but how can he destroy someone who is already dead?

Pretty good, once again. Short and to-the-point.

Lies in the Cover Art, Title, and Blurb:

1 lie, but it’s a doozy. No one sleeps in anyone’s grave in this book. A couple of characters fall into a grave, but that’s not the same thing at all. The resident of the grave doesn’t spend any time trying to figure out who was in it either. I guess Ghost Substitute Teacher wasn’t a cool enough title.

There’s also a new-cover-exclusive lie: no giant worms appear in this book. There’s a normal-sized worm briefly, but it’s such a minor incident that it’s a weird thing to turn into a major element of the cover art.

Characters:

Zack Pepper - Our protagonist. Easily scared and kind of an idiot.

Miss Gaunt - Zack’s elderly substitute teacher, who likes him a little too much. He starts to think she’s a ghost.

Chris Hassler - Zack’s chubby friend, who likes to scare him.

Marcy - Zack’s best friend, who doesn’t like to scare him.

Mr. Sangfwad - A friend of Miss Gaunt’s who runs a Halloween supply store.

Zack’s parents and brother - Do typical parent and sibling things you’d expect from these books (being negligent).

Plot:

Zack Pepper is walking to school reading a copy of Power Kids!, a self-help book for kids. He’s reading it because he’s easily scared and his older brother and friends are always picking on him. Gee, that sounds a little familiar. Well if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, as they say, right?

One time his friends convincing him the shoe section at the local department store was haunted, so he spent the entire winter wearing shoes full of holes and freezing his feet instead of buying new ones. What kind of neglectful parents does this kid have that they never dragged him to a shoe store, bought him new shoes themselves, or even noticed he was still wearing the same wrecked pair?

As I mentioned last time, Emily James keeps things grounded. Stephen Roos does not. His characters are exaggerated and silly, flat-out cartoony, which leads to absurd setups like this one.

Zack’s prank-happy friend Chris Hassler (cause he hassles Zack, get it?) approaches him, swearing this time something seriously scary happened to him. His hand is shaking, so Zack buys it instantly.

Chris tells a story about him and his dad being attacked by a ghost dog. A white dog appears, Zack nearly wets himself, and Chris cracks up. It’s just his cousin’s dog. Zack storms off, but Chris follows. They run into Marcy, the one friend who never pranks or mocks Zack, which is why he likes her. Why Marcy likes him is a mystery for the ages.

On their way to class, another student tells Zack there’s a sub today who looks like a ghost. He brushes it off as yet another prank, until he walks in, spots her, and freaks out because he thinks she’s floating and faceless. She’s actually just wearing a long white dress and a veil.

This is Miss Gaunt. During roll call, she’s way too into Zack’s full name and insists on calling him “Zachariah.” Embarrassed, Zack tries to salvage some cool points by being snarky when she asks a question, which gets him threatened with detention. Then Miss Gaunt says she knows he didn’t mean to be rude, and they’ll get along just fine, while lifting his chin with her hand. Her fingers are ice-cold, but that’s hardly the creepiest thing about this moment.

The next portion of the book consists of Miss Gaunt being creepily, inappropriately affectionate towards Zack while he notices strange things about her. The class hamster turns white. Zack sees a worm on Miss Gaunt’s neck, which she throws in the trash. She calls on him to answer a board problem he doesn’t know, and he finds his arm moving uncontrollably to write the correct answer. Miss Gaunt winks at him afterwards.

Zack tells his friends about this and insists Miss Gaunt is a ghost. Chris laughs and Marcy tells him there’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s Zack “I Can’t Buy Shoes Because of the Ghost Salesman in the Department Store” Pepper, so these are understandable reactions.

Zack has to go back to the classroom alone because he forgot his lunch, and when he looks into his desk, he finds one of Miss Gaunt’s gloves. After lunch, Miss Gaunt starts making a list on the board of supplies they need for a Friday Halloween party, but her hand keeps shaking, making the writing very messy. She blames arthritis, but Zack notices that she’s keeping the other hand, which she usually uses to write, hidden in her dress.

Miss Gaunt orders Zack to stay after class.

Miss Gaunt demands Zack “give it back.” Zack is confused by this (he’s Zack) but after a little prompting, he realizes she means her glove and hands it over. She reveals the hand she’d been hiding, and it’s nothing but bones. No twist villain here. Miss Gaunt is undead (the books call her a ghost, but she’s got more of a zombie vibe; in Fear Street, that line’s pretty blurry anyway). From now on, she openly flaunts her true nature to Zack while denying it to everyone else.

Zack and his still-skeptical friends head to the party supply store where Miss Gaunt sent them to get decorations for the Halloween party. Chris pulls another prank, and they meet the store’s owner: a creepy, Uncle Fester–looking guy named Mr. Sangfwad.

I ragged on “Pete Jones” as a boring villain name in the last book, and I owe Emily James a formal apology, because now we’ve got “Mr. Sangfwad.”

Mr. Sangfwad says he’s a friend of Miss Gaunt’s, and we learn her first name, Evangeline. Zack tries to tell his friends afterwards that she’s a ghost again, because having a weird fat bald friend is proof, I guess. Marcy agrees to follow Miss Gaunt home with him the next day, to prove he’s wrong.

Zack and Marcy trail Miss Gaunt, and she leads them to the Fear Street Cemetery. They lose her in the mist, then promptly fall into an open grave. They scramble out, brush off the dirt, and see the headstone reads: EVANGELINE GAUNT, and is dated to the 1800s. Dun dun dun!

After some aimless wandering lost in the graveyard (filler), they ger out and Marcy finally admits Zack was right. Miss Gaunt is definitely a ghost. They decide to tell the other kids tomorrow. But when Zack gets to school, Marcy’s absent. At lunch, he bikes to her house and finds the place empty and the front window smashed. A window repairman says the family had to leave town for a few days.

Back at school, Zack decides the only logical move is to pass Chris a note in the middle of class: “Miss Gaunt is a ghost.” Because obviously a secret mid-lesson note will be way more convincing than all the times he’s tried telling Chris face-to-face and gotten laughed at.

Miss Gaunt catches Chris with the note, and Zack is terrified she’ll trace it back to him. You could literally have just talked to Chris after school, dude.

The bell rings, seemingly saving Zack, but Miss Gaunt just orders him to stay after class anyway. She knows he wrote the note, knows he followed her to the cemetery, and knows he found her grave. (How she knows any of this is never explained).

She ominously mentions that Marcy could have “ruined everything,” but they don’t have to worry about her anymore. Then she slips a wrapped present into Zack’s backpack for being her favorite student. She explains that she can only leave her grave during Halloween week, and on Halloween night, she takes her favorite student back to the grave with her.

Apparently, the Shadyside school administrators never notice that a student goes missing every time they hire this one substitute whose credentials are 200 years old. Tbf, it’s Shadyside, they have like 50 murders at the high school every year, so I guess it makes sense that this is less of a priority than it would normally be.

Zack tries to pawn off one of the other students, innocent minor character Debbie, in his place, just in case you still had any sympathy for him.

Back home, he opens Miss Gaunt’s gift: The Book of the Dead. On Halloween morning, he fakes being sick to dodge her. Normally in these stories, playing sick backfires hard, parents call the bluff, the villain shows up at the door, or it spirals into something worse. So I was genuinely surprised when it… just works. No consequences. He skips the party and has a quiet day at home.

That night he’s handing out candy when he spots what looks like Miss Gaunt on the porch and nearly loses it… only to realize it’s Chris, who somehow found an exact copy of her outfit. Apparently a short, chubby, redheaded 12-year-old boy can pass for her perfectly. Zack loses his temper and yells at him. Chris bails. Then, conveniently, Zack’s mom has to leave for a few minutes.

Zack sees “Chris” at the door again, and opens it to yell at him some more, but predictably it’s the real Miss Gaunt. Zack’s brother shows up, but he just laughs when Miss Gaunt starts hauling Zack off. She claims she’s taking him to a Halloween party. I know it’s Zack, but I still think your younger brother’s substitute teacher physically dragging him out of your house while your parents are gone and he’s screaming that he doesn’t want to go is something you should probably not be cool with, regardless of if he’s babbling about ghosts.

Miss Gaunt hauls Zack straight to the graveyard. He screams at every passerby that she’s kidnapping him, but it’s Halloween, so they all just smile and wave. Inside the cemetery, Zack spots Mr. Sangfwad and yells for help, but shockingly the guy who introduced himself as Miss Gaunt’s friend is on her side. Mr. Sangfwad is undead too. and has no eyes.

Miss Gaunt drags Zack to her open grave, now with a coffin in it. She tosses him in. As he scrambles to climb out, he grabs her veil and yanks it off. Underneath is a skull face with worms squirming in the eye sockets. She shrieks in panic. Zack uses a handy tree root to pull himself free. Now-veil-less Miss Gaunt lunges to grab him, but freezes when she sees… another Miss Gaunt standing there. Of course it’s Chris again. His outfit is so convincing it fooled the real Miss Gaunt. Zack takes advantage of the distraction to shove her back into the coffin. He and Chris throw all their weight on the lid as the clock ticks down to midnight. Miss Gaunt thrashes, but when the hour strikes, she shrivels up and goes still.

Chris explains he heard someone (sounding suspiciously like Zack) screaming for help from the graveyard and, for once, took it seriously enough to investigate. He admits Zack was right.

The next morning, Zack’s mom casually mentions she’s not thrilled Miss Gaunt kept him out so late and is thinking of calling her (parental negligence, which will be a running theme in this series, yay!). Zack quickly says Miss Gaunt’s gone, no need. He heads to Marcy’s place. She’s back home. Their family got a late-night call saying her grandmother was gravely ill, presumably a fake-out staged by Miss Gaunt to get Marcy out of the way. When Chris shows up to join them, he has zero memory of the previous night, because of Miss Gaunt’s magic or something. It’s really just a contrived way to give Zack slightly more motivation for…

The Twist:

On Monday, Zack takes out the rubber snake Chris scared him with and recites some magic words from The Book of the Dead, which bring the snake to life. Zack heads to class, plotting to scare Chris, and thinks that Miss Gaunt really was a good teacher.

That’s it, not many twists in this one. I thought maybe Marcy would end up being a ghost at the end, but nope.

Themes and Symbolism:

I swear, the villain being some kind of sexual predator allegory will NOT be a running theme for most of these books, but it’s weird that it happened twice in a row at the very beginning of the series. Evangeline Gaunt has some pretty heavy child predator vibes, what with her overly affectionate attitude toward Zack, spying on him and looking through his things, and her plot to kidnap him so he can be her “favorite student” forever. Also, there’s the whole “Nobody’s gonna believe you” aspect, where she openly flaunts her plans to him but denies them to everyone else.

In Hide and Shriek, this aspect was intertwined with other themes and messages of the story. Here, there’s not much to it except that it makes Miss Gaunt a bit creepier.

Beyond that, there’s not much here. I guess that in the end Zack learns to stick up for himself, but taking revenge on the guy who saved his life really undermines any potential satisfaction from his character growth. Much like The Haunted Mask, most of the story isn’t about the main character facing his fears or getting braver either, and unlike The Haunted Mask, Zack doesn’t have Carly Beth’s self-image or anger issues to make him more complex and interesting. Also, he’s pretty stupid, if you didn’t get that from the plot synopsis.

Review and Analysis:

Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave? isn’t completely horrible, but it’s not particularly good either. The atmosphere of Hide and Shriek is all gone here. Instead, the prose is quick, breezy, and surface level. Tension is built not by descriptive language, but by simple descriptions of events. The main character is unusually unlikable for this sort of story (though I’ve read worse) and the main villain is has an unusual creeper vibe, but we get no deeper insight into their psychologies. Beyond that, it’s pretty forgettable. Ironically, the most likable character for me was Chris Hassler. The plot synopsis ended up being longer than the last one, because only the small details really had any joke fodder or observations to be made about them.

There was a lot of dumb stuff, but nothing infuriatingly dumb. I never wanted to throw the book across the room (I read it digitally, so I couldn’t do that anyway).

“Not completely horrible, but not particularly good either” describes Roos’s whole tenure on Ghosts of Fear Street. He’s an exemplar of mediocre kid-horror slop. As I said, Stephen Roos wrote 4 out of 36 Ghosts of Fear Street books, which isn’t a lot, but his books are disproportionately towards the beginning of the series. I think a lot of mediocre books early on is a reason GoFS hasn’t seen as much renewed interest recently as some Goosebumps copycats, like Shivers, Spinetinglers, or Strange Matter, despite having more brand recognition back in the day. Being good is preferable, but even being weird or awful would likely be better for the series’s legacy than being forgettable. I’m pretty sure I would have completely forgotten almost everything about Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave? if I didn’t have to remember it to write a review.

A definite step down from Hide and Shriek. Even the young target audience had to notice the change in tone, although they probably didn’t understand it was because of different authors.

But maybe I’m being unfair. I wrote these first 2 reviews in book release date order, because I think how kids experienced the series in 1995 tells us something about the franchise. But I read the books in a different order. The 2nd book I actually read after Hide and Shriek was a different Stephen Roos book… and it gave me a grudge against the man. So next time I’m going to skip ahead a bit and grind my proverbial axe…

Next time- Roos Cruise 2: Ooze Control

The Author:

Hide and Shriek was written by Emily James. She wrote 2 more Ghosts of Fear Street books, including a sequel, but not until much later in the series, after ownership of the franchise changed hands.

Have some music to set the mood.

Original Cover:

Pretty good. A skeleton with eyeballs, wearing a teal baseball cap with “FS” (for Fear Street) on it, peaking between his fingers at the reader. Simple and memorable. Gets the main theme of the book (a ghostly game of Hide and Seek) across. This cover was iconic enough that it was probably the inspiration for the dancing skeleton in the opening of the rejected Ghosts of Fear Street TV pilot. That skeleton wasn’t orange like this one though. I guess bone white was too drab to capture the bright, oversaturated aesthetic they wanted to remind readers of Goosebumps. My biggest criticism is the title and border colors. It seems like both were chosen to blend into the picture behind them instead of stand out. At least the title has a white outline, but the border is especially bad, being so similar to the bluish-purple background that it almost blends in completely. The cover artist is Broek Steadman, definitely the most prolific GoFS cover artist. He drew 19 of the 36 original covers.

New Cover:

When I first saw this cover, I was NOT a fan. The ghost boy reminded me of a baby, and I thought it was just him and a birthday cake. However, it has grown on me a lot, at least in concept. The face of our villain, ghost boy Pete, looms up in the background over a rock plateau covered with candles meant to look like a birthday cake. Three kids are trying to hide behind the candles or escape from him, a detail I didn’t notice the first time I saw it. This gets across not only the message of the ghostly hide and seek game, but of the birthday, another major plot element, and does it in a pretty clever way. My main issue with it is that despite its best efforts, this cartoon art style just isn’t scary. It’s a little too “kiddie.” Also, the new logo is pretty bland and generic compared to the old one. Still, this is actually one of the better new GoFS covers.

Back Cover Blurb

For the Zoomers and younger, this used to be really important because book reviews and plot synopsis weren’t all over the internet, so the back of the book was often the only place where people learned what a book is about before deciding to buy and read it.

• Do you believe in ghosts? Don’t say you don’t until you visit Fear Street(r). Past the woods—where no birds sing. Past the lake—where something lurks beneath the water. Past the cemetery—where everyone is dying to meet you.

This portion was in all the GoFS books, or at least all the early ones. This is the only time I’m going to talk about it. It’s pretty great, except that the registered trademark logo really ruins the vibe. Was that necessary? Also, note the pre-AI use of the emdash.

• The cemetery. That’s where Randy Clay has been invited for a game of hide-and-seek—with a ghost. If the ghost tags her, Randy will lose more than the game. She’ll become the newest ghost on Fear Street.

Once again, really strong teaser. Short, and to the point, but does a great job setting up the plot and building tension. However…

Lies in the Cover Art, Title, or Blurb:

This may seem like a funny section to have, but trust me, it’s a good one for this series.

2 lies. Randy’s fate if she gets tagged will NOT be to become the newest ghost on Fear Street, but I guess that was much easier and spookier than explaining what will actually happen to her.

Also, the game of hide-and-seek is played in Fear Street Woods, not the cemetery. This one seems totally unnecessary, since Fear Street Woods is already a spooky location. I wonder if some of these lies happen because the blurbs were written based on an outline, before the books were completed, and details changed.

Characters:

Randy Clay - Our protagonist, who just moved to Shadyside. After learning about a traditional game of hide-and-seek with a ghost named Pete that all the middle schoolers play once a year based on an urban legend, she becomes convinced that Pete has set his sights on her as the one he wants to tag. Not the deepest character, as is standard for these books, but she’s a bit more paranoid and proactive than the majority of GoFS protagonists.

Pete - A ghost boy who died in Fear Street Woods. The middle schoolers play a yearly game of hide-and-seek with him on his birthday, because of an urban legend.

Lucas - A weird boy in her class who Randy becomes convinced is possessed by Pete from last year’s game when he keeps trying to hang out with her.

Sara - A girl at school, who Randy becomes friends with.

Megan - A girl in Randy’s class, who she becomes friends with.

David - Another boy in Randy’s class, who she becomes friends with.

Anita - A friend of Sara’s, who tells Randy about Pete.

Laura and Maggie - Two girls in Randy’s class who dislike her for no apparent reason and mock her about Pete getting her.

Randy’s family members and her teacher are also in the book, but they’re not really important.

Plot:

Randy gets ready for her first day at Shadyside Middle School. She’s late because she has trouble picking an outfit (women, amirite, fellas?). When she gets to school she sees a calendar on the wall marking down days until Pete’s birthday, which is on June Tenth.

A boy covered in blood rushes towards her in the hall and falls down, but he’s just acting out his role of a guy who gets killed in the school play. Apparently the school uses realistic fake blood for its plays, which is pretty based for a middle school. This boy is Lucas, who Randy later sits with and talks to at lunch.

After this, Randy meets a girl named Sara and befriends a boy and a girl in her class named David and Megan. Two girls named Laura and Maggie whisper about her and tell her to watch out. She sees a signup sheet for baking Pete’s birthday cake, and asks her new friends who Pete is, assuming he must be pretty popular. Of course they act a bit dramatic and get interrupted before they can tell her. Laura and Maggie also threaten her to “wait until June tenth” which Randy remembers is Pete’s birthday. The book does a nice job teasing that there’s something sinister going on with Pete before revealing the truth.

Randy gets lost on the way home and wanders into Fear Street Cemetery, where she hears a boy laughing and footsteps before she runs away.

The next day, Randy asks Sara what Laura and Maggie are talking about when they keep threatening her. Sara says she’ll tell her at a sleepover on Saturday that Randy agreed to come to. She goes to the party and finally gets told the story of Pete by a girl named Anita after some dramatic tension and vague statements.

Pete was a boy who died mysteriously in Fear Street Woods on his twelfth birthday. He was found “shriveled up,” a description that’s vague and strange enough to get the imagination flowing. A year later, a group of kids were playing hide-and-seek in Fear Street Woods when one of the girls started screaming that she saw Pete. After the game, one of the boys started doing bizarre things like howling at night and running into the woods alone. A year after that, the boy’s hair turned white and he started hiding in his room, terrified. The boy told them that he had been possessed by Pete for a year, who had made him do “gross, disgusting things” in the cemetery.

This happened again the next year, so kids stopped playing in Fear Street Woods on Pete’s birthday, but then Pete started haunting and tormenting kids, so finally they started playing hide-and-seek in the woods on his birthday again. It becomes a town tradition.

After telling the story, some of the girls reassure Randy it’s just an urban legend, while others believe it. That one middle schooler seems to have a mental breakdown every year is brushed off as coincidence, I guess. The girls also tell Randy that Pete likes new kids, which is why Laura and Maggie have been making vague threats. They believe Pete will choose her.

The next day at school, Lucas is waiting for Randy at her locker. He looks tired and is weirdly excited about her playing the hide-and-seek game on Pete’s birthday. This is enough to get Randy to think that Lucas is Pete (this is why I called her a bit paranoid).

Randy tells Sara and David that she thinks Lucas is Pete and wants to spy on him. Sara refuses to join her, but David agrees. That night, Randy sneaks out and joins David. They go to Lucas’s house to spy on him, and see him leave the house and head into Fear Street Woods, whistling a funeral march. The two try to follow him, but get lost and hear the voices of children playing hide-and-seek. They run away, then laugh about getting scared by a bunch of little kids.

The next portion of the book is a bunch of similar stuff. Randy sees Lucas go into Fear Street cemetery and catch a worm, which she believes he’s going to eat because he’s Pete. Randy runs away from square dancing in the gym because Lucas wants to dance with her. Randy sees Lucas looking through her window while she and her sister are home alone. She’s full convinced that Lucas is Pete and has picked her as his target. I’d like to point out that all the evidence for this is pretty circumstantial. Lucas has done some weird stuff, but nothing supernatural, and a lot of it could be explained by him having a crush on Randy. At this point I had a strong suspicion that Lucas was not going to end up being Pete. That’s usually the case when these books have these sort of ambiguous situations.

When June tenth arrives, Randy goes to the woods to play the game with all the other Shadyside Middle Schoolers. I guess she figures it’s easier to avoid Lucas during the game than risk Pete tormenting her later. There’s a nice atmospheric scene were the kids light the candles on Pete’s birthday cake and sing Happy Birthday to him. The candles blow out, seemingly on their own, which signals that the game is beginning. They also drop the cake on the ground, wasting it. Sad!

Randy runs away from Lucas, and after running away from various noises and fakeout scares, she climbs a tree to find David.

The Twist:

Randy and David hide in the tree for a while. Randy starts to notice a really bad smell, and realizes it’s coming from David. David starts monologuing about how Pete isn’t actually so bad. His voice sounds funny. Finally, when he says “I” while talking about Pete, Randy finally realizes David is the one who’s possessed by Pete.

David rots into a zombie-like person, which is actually pretty graphic by these books’ standards. He even drips blood on Randy. Randy jumps ten feet out of the tree to get away from him (the distance is explicitly stated) and amazingly is perfectly fine afterwards and runs away.

I’d like to point out that Pete had Randy dead-to-rights in that tree for a good long while, but didn’t tag her. The book even explicitly said he was close enough to touch her, but he decided to spend a long time revealing himself first. Pete isn’t a very competent villain. This becomes even more apparent when Randy trips and he has her dead-to-rights again, then Lucas runs up and makes fun of him, so he runs off after Lucas, allowing Randy to get to the tree that’s home base, so she’s safe.

The next day Randy talks with the girls from the sleepover about what happened. David had to go to the hospital (another victim of Pete). Randy walks home with Lucas and apologizes for suspecting he was Pete. Lucas gives her the mundane explanations for his apparent weird behavior and they laugh about it. But then Lucas starts laughing a little to long.

The SECOND Twist:

Lucas transforms into Pete telling Randy that he wanted her, not Lucas, and grabs her arm.

This was really freaking obvious, because she never saw Lucas touch the tree, or saw him again that night after Pete chased him.

What’s a lot more unusual though, is that the story doesn’t end here on a cliffhanger. Randy pulls free of Pete and runs, while Pete pursues her. Pete wants Randy so badly that he’s decided to screw the rules of the hide-and-seek game and just possess her anyway. Randy runs from Pete and finds herself running through Fear Street Cemetery, where she runs into a bunch of ghost children playing their own game of hide-and-seek. The ghost children torment Randy a bit, but when Pete shows up, they start mocking him for only playing games with humans and never them. Tbh, Pete is a pretty terrible player from what we’ve seen, so they have a point.

Randy starts encouraging the other ghosts and mocking Pete herself. Finally, the ghosts surround Pete and form a whirlwind to suck him out of Lucas’s body, before stuffing him back into his grave like a nerdy kid into a locker. BULLYING SAVES THE DAY! HURRAH!

Pete’s last name is revealed to be Jones, btw. A bit lazy and generic, Emily.

The book ends with Lucas and Randy pledging to never play hide-and-seek again, since they’re too old for it now.

Themes and Symbolism:

Compared to most of these books, Hide and Shriek has unusually strong themes and symbolism. There’s a message about jumping to conclusions and judging by appearances regarding Lucas. Randy keeps insisting on looking at the facts, but it’s obvious her judgement is clouded by bias, since she starts suspecting him of being Pete with very little evidence.

A weirder theme is the psycho-sexual undertones of this book. It’s a bit awkward to mention, since these are 12 year old characters written for 12 year old readers, but it’s definitely there, and a thorough analysis wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging it.

The characters are 12. They’re going through puberty. They’re noticing the opposite sex, and this is incorporated into the story quite a bit more than in a typical GoFS, Goosebumps, or similar middle-grade horror book. Randy mentions at different points in the book that she finds David and Lucas cute. Lucas clearly has a crush on her.

And the story is about a villain who threatens to posses these characters, go inside their bodies, and make them do “gross, disgusting things” at night (this is how it’s described in the book), which leave the ones who experience them traumatized. This villain goes after boys and girls, but in the course of the story we see him become obsessed with one particular girl, and so fixated on taking her body that he’s willing to cast aside the body of the boy he was able to catch to get her. The reason why he’s so fixated on her in particular is never explained beyond “Pete likes new kids,” and at a couple of points “new kids” is interchanged with “new girls.” It’s simply his preference. And it’s very easy to see this as a sexual preference. In fact, I’d say it’s a simpler and more obvious explanation than any other that could be thought of.

All of this will go over most of the target audience’s heads, but Emily James wrote a PG, kid-friendly story aimed at 10-14 year olds where the villain is a direct parallel to a sexual predator, down to the fine details. I kneel. I’m not sure if she did this consciously or not. Maybe it started unconscious and then she noticed and started leaning into it.

We could even take this a step further, looking at the whole story as a metaphor for relationships. Randy is off-put by the weird nice-guy Lucas, suspecting him of being a creep despite her friends saying he’s a good guy, so she goes after David, who seems perfect, but is actually the abusive one. Finally, she and Lucas vow to stop playing “hide-and-seek” (dating/sleeping around), as they’re “too old” for it, and settle down together.

Well, it may be a bit awkward, but I’ll tell you this: all this stuff is much less creepy and handled with much more class and delicacy than Stephen King’s underage gangbang in IT.

Review and Analysis:

Hide and Shriek is one of the best entries in the GoFS series, a rare one that holds up even for an adult reader as something a bit more than mindless entertainment. Comparing it to Goosebumps, it’s only outclassed by some of the very best stories, like The Haunted Mask, Stay Out of the Basement, and The Ghost Next Door. It’s also possibly the most iconic GoFS, which is ironic because Hide and Shriek isn’t a typical Ghosts of Fear Street book. It’s one of the more unusual ones.

Emily James might be the writer out of all GoFS ghostwriters who has a style least like Stine’s. It’s kind of difficult to describe, but her prose feels more grounded. I recall youtuber saying that the GoFS stories have more prose and less dialogue than Goosebumps, and that might be true to a small degree for most of the series, but it’s far more true for Hide and Shriek. James loves her descriptive prose, and she’s good at it. The book as atmospheric but never feels like it devolves into purple prose.

The book also has a slightly unusual plot structure. In most of these, the reveal that Lucas was possessed by Pete near the end would be a cliffhanger ending, but here the story continues and Pete is defeated. Because of this, Hide and Shriek sort of has two climaxes. The first is the game, which most of the story builds up to, where it’s revealed that David is Pete, and the second is the final confrontation with Pete.

Speaking of those reveals, I found them pretty predictable, but the story around them was strong enough that I didn’t care too much. As I said, I suspected that Lucas wasn’t Pete early on, and I also suspected David, but there are enough other characters that it could have been Sara, Anita, etc, too. Once Randy was in the tree with David though, it was obvious.

Randy is unfortunately as dense of a main character as most in these books, although it’s nice that she's a bit more proactive, even getting a hero moment at the end when she can run away but stays to provoke the ghosts more, hoping to save Lucas from Pete. What really makes the story is the atmosphere. There are a lot of haunting scenes of kids telling spooky stories and playing hide-and-seek late at night peppered throughout. It makes good use of the setting too, depicting Shadyside as a place with its own history, legends, and cultural practices.

Overall, a strong start. Unfortunately, the series didn’t quite keep up this level of quality.

Next time: enter Stephen Roos, GoFS’s most prolific writer, with Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?

Who is RL Stine? This might sound like a silly question. If you grew up in the 90’s, or if you were into adolescent horror stories at any point, you probably know exactly who RL Stine is. He’s the Goosebumps guy. The Fear Street guy. Glasses, very balding, forehead mole, monotone voice, dresses in black.

He also wrote an autobiography, It Came From Ohio: My Life as a Writer. So it’s not like he’s mysterious.

Except actually he kind of is. For starters, we don’t even know how many books he has written.

At the peak of “Stinemania,” R.L. Stine was producing a Goosebumps and Give Yourself Goosebumps book every month, a Fear Street title every two months, and still juggling numerous spinoffs and independent projects. Even considering that a majority of his books are novella-length, many consider the pace impossible for one person. And there’s evidence it was.

Stine’s use of ghostwriters has long been an open secret, though details remain scarce. His lawsuit with Scholastic, which sidelined the Goosebumps franchise for nearly a decade, alleged that he began hiring ghostwriters after book 16 of the original series, providing them with outlines to follow. Stine didn’t deny paying other writers, but insisted they were merely “assistants” who helped with outlining, while he wrote the books himself, which would conveniently fit his contract, unlike Scholastic’s version.

Since then, several writers have publicly claimed they ghostwrote for Stine on Fear Street, Give Yourself Goosebumps, and some of the Tales to Give You Goosbumps stories, but none have taken credit for any mainline Goosebumps titles. Unlike other prolific 1990s YA authors like K.A. Applegate, Stine has never openly acknowledged the practice. When asked about ghostwriters in a Reddit Q&A, he quipped, “I wrote all the GB books myself, believe it or not.” Most adult fans find that difficult to believe. Even if he was telling the truth, it’s likely only “true in a certain sense,” referring to mainline books only, and not taking into account the contributions of “assistants.” His autobiography, aimed at younger readers, also sidesteps the issue, keeping things light and upbeat.

All of this complicates any serious analysis of Stine’s writing style. A significant portion of his vast library carries an asterisk: we simply don’t know for certain which books are truly his.

If you’re a fan, there’s a decent chance your favorite RL Stine book wasn’t written by RL Stine.

Revisiting Stine

Revisiting RL Stine’s work, especially Goosebumps, has recently become a bit of a fad, but I want to approach his work differently: by taking it seriously and dissecting the craft behind it. Surprisingly little serious analysis exists, despite Stine’s enormous cultural impact. Goosebumps became one of the most iconic brands of the 1990s and got an entire generation of kids reading during the height of television’s dominance. Yet intellectual critics don’t take Stine’s work seriously. It’s too childish. Too low-brow. Too crassly commercial. But they really should. Reader engagement in an age of declining literacy and distractions is strikingly relevant.

While researching, I kept returning to the question of ghostwriters. The more I looked, the clearer it became: “RL Stine” is as much a brand and a reliable formula as it is an individual author. Understanding the role of his ghostwriters is essential to grasping that brand. Which brings us to the topic this series of articles will be about…

Enter Ghosts of Fear Street

Ghosts of Fear Street is a 1996–1998 spinoff of R.L. Stine’s popular Fear Street horror series, running for 36 books. While the original Fear Street targeted teens and often centered on murder, Ghosts of Fear Street aimed at younger readers (ages 10–14) and leaned into kid-friendly supernatural scares: ghosts, monsters, aliens, and the like. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s essentially Goosebumps transplanted to the Fear Street town of Shadyside.

I initially wondered if it was Stine’s way of building a series he fully owned (away from Scholastic, amid the looming lawsuit), but the timing doesn’t quite fit, Ghosts of Fear Street launched two years before the legal drama began. So maybe he was simply double-dipping.

What makes the series stand out in Stine’s bibliography is its unusually transparent ghostwriting setup. Stine didn’t write a single book himself, and we know exactly who did: the actual authors are credited on the copyright page. Look closely at the covers and you’ll see they read RL Stine’s Ghosts of Fear Street rather than Ghosts of Fear Street by RL Stine. Stine is the brand, not the author, though the packaging was clearly designed to make casual readers (especially kids) assume he wrote them. Few children check the fine print.

This makes Ghosts of Fear Street a fascinating case study: multiple authors applying the classic Stine formula, all under the same recognizable name. And unlike Goosebumps, which has detailed plot summaries and spoiler sites everywhere, the series remains relatively under-covered online. Even the RL Stine wiki’s entries are frustratingly incomplete.

So I’m stepping up: I’ll be reviewing every book in depth, spoilers and all. They’re not too long, and it’s a heck of a lot easier than reviewing all 6 million Goosebumps books, right?

The Cover Art

Any review of middle-grade pulp novellas from their golden age in the 90’s is incomplete without talking about the cover art. Covers were an extremely important part of a successful book brand back then. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Stine owes as much of his success to Tim Jacobus’s iconic cover art as to the stories he wrote. Jacobus pioneered a look that was quite unique: cartoony, exaggerated proportions, oversaturated “neon” colors, fisheye lens distortions, and a shiny, almost metallic sheen.

Fear Street, on the other hand, featured covers that were inspired by classic pulp covers, had much more realistic proportions, and were drawn by several different artists.

Fittingly for a series that combined elements of both the previous series, Ghosts of Fear Street had covers that contained a mashup of design elements from both. It had the more realistic proportions of Fear Street, and even used some of the same cover artists, but also included design elements that are unmistakably cribbed from Goosebumps: mainly bright oversaturated colors. Also note the “jagged edge” borders, clearly another nod to the original Goosebumps run featured covers that were bordered in dripping goo. That design element has since been dropped from Goosebumps, but these came out during that era of the series. As for the series title, it’s in the iconic Fear Street “scar” font that it shared with the main series.

This is only what Ghosts of Fear Street looked like for most of its run though. Later on there was a drastic redesign. The logo changed (multiple times), and the covers started experimenting with wonky late 90’s CGI art.

I’ll write more about these covers and the overall change in creative direction of the series when I get to that era of GoFs.

Finally, there are the modern reprints, which have a more modern kids’ comic look.

I generally prefer that early run of realistic pulp style with Goosebumps-like aesthetics. But once again, I’ll get more into that as I compare different covers for the same books.

For this series, I’ll break down the reviews into categories: cover art, characters, plot, twist, and themes (if there are any).

Next time: Ghosts of Fear Street #1: Hide and Shriek

Finding indie books to read is tricky, which is why the market is still fairly niche, despite the tradpub competition being extremely lackluster for at least a decade. The problem isn’t a lack of options, but too many. Anyone can slap their name on a book they crapped out with little effort, or worse, had a computer do it for them, and publish it to Kindle Direct, and people do. Hundreds of thousands of times. Without reliable curation networks for large audiences, the only real place to turn while searching for info on new books is social media.

That’s how I learned about Inheritance of Ash. Disclosure: the author of this book is a friendly acquaintance, who goes by “Manlet King” on the website formerly known as Twitter. Manlet King is primarily a humor and cultural commentary account, with a particular fondness for what he calls “edgekino,” the schlocky but fun action movies from the late 90’s and ealy to mid 00’s, as well as the nu metal that often played on their soundtracks.

When he announced he’d written a book, I was curious. The physical copy was also relatively cheap as new books go, so I decided to snag a copy and check it out.

Firstly let’s address the elephant in the room: I’m pretty sure this cover art is AI generated. Both the look of the art and the lack of credits to an artist inside the book leads me to suspect this. The title font and color scheme do blend well together and make it relatively aesthetically pleasant, but there are many people who boycott any book that uses AI art. I also understand why authors who self-publish and can’t guarantee that they’ll sell more than a few copies don’t shell out hundreds of dollars on cover art and use the tools that are readily available to them. In the end, it’s your decision how you feel about this and how it effects your purchasing decisions.

Using AI art for covers often leads to accusations of books being AI written. Well, there are programs to check that, and the one I used shows that Inheritance of Ash is 100% human written. I also believe it is due to some of the roughness and quirks of the writing.

With that all out of the way, let’s finally get into the story itself. Inheritance of Ash takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting where a nuclear war wiped out most of humanity 20 years prior to the events of the book. This apocalypse might also have happened in the early 00’s, considering that no pre-apocalypse cultural references are later than that (no i-pods, smartphones, etc), making the setting alternate history.

The book follows Leon, a teenage boy who completes his coming-of-age ceremony hunting feral hogs in the ruins of the northeastern United States. A man named Red visits his village and warns them that a massive number of Firewalkers, irradiated zombie creatures, are heading down from the north. Unfortunately the warning comes too late and the entire village is wiped out, with only Leon and Red escaping. The two head south towards the largest and most technologically advanced human settlement in the area, hoping to warn them in time to stop the horde. Unfortunately, they meet resistance from the queen of the settlement, and get enmeshed in a plot against her by a rival family. And the entire time the horde of Firewalkers is getting closer. Can they rally the people in time to stop them?

Cook wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here. The setting and plot are pretty simple and familiar, with just enough touches to give them some flavor. There’s definitely some Fallout influence here, which one Amazon reviewer noted. The most overt reference is a character called “The Wastelander,” who I thought was going to be a more major character than she was (although she does end up being important).

Cook’s love of “edgekino” 90’s and early 2000’s culture gets some nods, with the music on Red’s walkman, for instance, but the references don’t feel out-of-place and aren’t so present they become obnoxious. Red actually seems to be an author self-insert, although if you don’t know Cook personally and aren’t familiar with his “Manlet King” twitter account, you’d probably never guess. Red is actually a pretty good example of doing a self-insert well. He’s not portrayed as vastly superior to the other characters, always correct, etc. There’s an interesting contrast between him and Leon, where Leon is the more serious and bitter character, but also the more idealistic, while Red is more cynical and snarky.

The book has plenty of gun slinging and melee combat action in its short length. Amazon lists it as being 104 pages long, although since the font is smaller and the pages larger than a typical middle-grade book like a Goosebumps book, it’s probably a comparable length to those or slightly longer. I’d call this an ideal book for 10-14 year old boys, but Red does drop the f-bomb in it multiple times, which I know some parents will definitely object to, so be warned.

There are some unanswered questions at the end of the book, most importantly about the “Blue Devils” mentioned multiple times but never properly explained, who might be the masterminds behind the Firewalker horde. This is clearly meant to be setup for a sequel.

I referenced Amazon for the page count, because the book itself has no page numbers. This is a minor gripe I have with Inheritance of Ash. It lacks polish. Page numbers might not be a big deal for a lot of people in such a short book, but for younger readers, or someone like me who read it over work breaks to fit it into my busy schedule, it’s a bit annoying to have that extra difficulty finding your place again when you’re interrupted.

The book also has no opening acknowledgements, disclaimer, title page, table of contents, publishing info, no author blurb at the end, etc. It’s just the story, nothing else. You know you’re definitely reading an indie book when it’s like that. There are also some typos and mistakes that aren’t so plentiful they impair reading, but would probably have been caught by a more professional editor. The word descending being used instead of ascending is an example I remember.

Overall not a bad first effort for an author who clearly didn’t have a lot of guidance or experience with writing his first book. Cook seems to be aiming for a target audience of adolescent boys, and I think he hits the marks to please them pretty well. Hopefully he’s able to continue this series and improve on it.

I believe that one thing we’re sorely missing in the indie sphere is trusted reviewers. Writers want to support each other, but this can lead to being overly concerned about hurt feelings and create toxic positivity. On the other hand, there are a lot of bad faith actors who just want to hate on and tear down a group they can tell is socially weak (sometimes with a political motive). Therefore I think it’s important to thread the needle of being frank, honest, but constructive.

With that in mind, I’m going to give an in-depth review breaking down aspects of the writing of Star Wanderers that stood out to me, for good and ill, in order from my favorite to least favorite. In the process, you’ll get good insight into what the book is about and can decide for yourself if you want to give it a try, despite my criticisms.

The Setting

Star Wanderers is a “Science Fantasy” in the truest sense of the term. It takes place across a sprawling universe where spaceships and mechs mingle with black magic. The sorcerers who pop up in Star Wanderers are never explained or hinted to be really using some sort of sufficiently advanced technology. They’re just… sorcerers. Magic exists in this universe, and is generally sinister, although there are exceptions.

Each story takes place on a different world, often at drastically different levels of technological progress, from futuristic dystopian cities to medieval kingdoms with castles or pyramids. but there’s still a feeling of continuity due to the way tech and magic is blended carrying over on each world. The most common stock enemies that kept popping up in stories were cyborg zombies. There are ancient green alien cyborg zombies, space polar bear cyborg zombies, and regular human cyborg zombies, but it all feels like a continuation of the same basic principles.

If you’re a consumer of modern media who hasn’t consumed much older media like the classic pulps, you may notice some commonalities with Warhammer 40K, which is the big setting most people are familiar with nowadays that combines sci-fi with black magic. But Star Wanderer’s setting feels like it has its own identity distinct from 40K. It’s much more space opera, with a hearty dash of sword & sorcery, compared to 40K’s grimdark military sci-fi focus. It’s an interesting setting that feels vast and full of variety while still feeling cohesive.

The Plots

Star Wanderers follows 2 separate protagonists as they travel to various planets across the galaxy and thwart evildoers. The first is Ronan Renfield, a Galactic Enforcer, aka, a space cop. A space plainclothes detective, to be specific.

The second is “The Agent,” a mysterious assassin figure with a high tech suit and flaming sword who is single-mindedly dedicated to his missions.

Ronan goes to various planets investigating leads and The Agent goes to other planets assigned targets to eliminate. They encounter various villainous individuals and factions who they have to deal with by gun, sword, wits, and occasional allies to save the day. Simple enough premise, and for the most part the execution is perfectly functional. However, there are some problems.

In the story The Cold Heart of Ouranos, The Agent is sent to a frozen world to assassinate a criminal scientist named Rajneesh. While pursuing Rajneesh he discovers that a mysterious group is up to something sinister involving eldritch alien brains in jars. Rajneesh was working for this group, but it’s revealed that they’ve squeezed him out and he’s now basically sitting in corner, fuming that he’s been made redundant. Then The Agent kills him and… that’s it. The story just ends, despite the real threat remaining undealt with. Did The Agent stop the alien brain people or bail immediately after killing Rajneesh? We don’t know. Ouranos is never revisited in later stories. It’s an abrupt, anticlimactic, unsatisfying ending. At least the scene with the zombie cyborg polar bears and the orbital laser is pretty cool.

Slow Death on Sans Sebastian is the final story in the anthology, and it’s special. Whereas every other story till this one is told as a self-contained, serialized one-shot, San Sebastian is what’s known as an arc welder story. That means that it takes a bunch of the seemingly disconnected one-shot stories from the collection and connects them. Ronan and The Agent finally meet, several other characters return (something that never happens in any other story in the anthology) and the villain of Sans Sebastian is revealed to be behind a bunch of the other villains from other stories. It’s not a bad idea conceptually, but the execution gave me flashbacks to the Daniel Craig Bond movie Spectre, where the villain Blofeld gives a rather cringe-inducing speech about how he’s “the author of all [Bond’s] pain.”

The villain isn’t a hero’s long lost adopted brother with daddy issues, thank goodness (the reveal in Spectre, for those who haven’t seen it), but there are still major problems. The villain of Sebastion has no connection to Ronan (he’s connected to The Agent), so when he rants about how he was the one behind multiple villains Ronan fought in other stories, this means Ronan kept encountering and foiling groups this guy was backing during his regular investigation duties across dozens of planets in a massive galaxy only to end up face-to-face with the man at the end by sheer chance. It strains believability, to say the least.

San Sebastian also reveals that The Agent is actually a figure called “The Pyre Knight” and the villain of the story is “The Ocean Knight,” two of three legendary space knights. This is technically a spoiler, but not much of one because these guys are barely teased before their importance to the story is revealed. The Agent mentions that he’s glad The Ocean Knight isn’t behind the events in The Cold Heart of Ouranos, and in Cold Finger Girl the titular character mentions her father telling her stories of 3 knights who went around the galaxy fighting evil. I actually forgot about both mentions, because they’re so brief and inconsequential to the stories they appear in. And that wasn’t the only reveal I had to look up due to not remembering what it was referencing. Not a great sign. I’ll get to the other issues I have with San Sebastion when I get to the book’s characters.

The Editing and Prose

I generally cut indie books more slack in the typos department than traditionally published works. After all, indies are usually self-edited, or edited by a friend, often for free and with limited dedicated time, because indie writers are usually balancing their writing with a 9/5 job and limited funds.

That said, Star Wanderers is a bit rough around the edges. There are quite a few instances of missing or extra words, plural words that should be singular, singular words that should be plural, etc, and I noticed more of these mistakes as I got further in the book. However, at no point was the grammar or spelling so bad that I had to reread a section because I didn’t understand it, which I consider to be a very important minimal standard for book editing. So that’s one good thing.

The prose was mostly straightforward and painted a decent picture of the scenes and action, although it was a bit clunky and larger structural problems occasionally cropped up. One I still remember is a portion of Midnight Machineguns where the main characters have an expository conversation about the antagonists, the Guns of Midnight, that goes backwards. What I mean by this is that first the Guns are mentioned by one character with no context or explanation, like it’s a name both of them are familiar with. Then they’re brought up again with a brief explanation that they’re illegal arms dealers. Then the final time they’re mentioned, a detailed explanation of who they are and their history is given. This is not how people talk. If both characters were already familiar with the Guns, no explanation would be given. If one character wasn’t familiar or was less familiar, the explanation should have come at the beginning of the conversation, the first time the Guns were mentioned, otherwise that person would be confused.

So the grammar and prose isn’t story-ruining, but it is a bit sub-par and could definitely use more refinement.

The Characters

Here we have the major area Star Wanderers is lacking in, and I know I’m not the only one who thinks so, because a middling review for the book on Amazon mentioned underdeveloped characters. The lack of recurring characters, relationships, and breathing room between action sequences don’t do a lot of favors. Let’s go over the important characters in Star Wanderers. This will not include the revolving door of one-shot villains the heroes overcome, or the more minor one-shot allies.

This portion is going to be more spoiler-loaded than any previous portion of the review, so be warned.

Ronan Renfield: Ronan is the most prominent character in the anthology, appearing in 5 stories, while The Agent only appears in 4. As mentioned before, Ronan is a space cop. His personality is comparatively more laid back than most of the other characters, so I guess and he could be described as a sort of rogueish wisecracker archetype, except… he doesn’t really make any wisecracks. He’s dedicated to his job and doing the right thing. He has an internal monologue at one point about how he wears old fashioned clothes to remind him that civilization is fragile and can easily slip back into barbarism, but the implications of this aren’t elaborated on. Beyond that it’s difficult to say much about him, even after reading stories in first person from his perspective. There’s also mention of his background growing up on a rural backwater planet in the first story, Dead Planet Drifter, but this never comes up again.

Catalina: The character Catalina is in Dead Planet Drifter and no other stories. I’m counting her as important, however, because of her connection to Ronan. Catalina was friends with Ronan on his home planet when they were children. Then she got abducted by space elves and turned into some kind of space witch, while the memories of everyone who knew her were wiped. She speaks telepathically to Ronan in Dead Planet Drifter, guiding him to defeat the villain (some sort of alien vampire sorcerer), and by the end his memories of her return. And then she never comes back. This is a big wasted opportunity, with her connection to Ronan and his past. Her interacting more with him could have helped flesh him out into a more developed character and served as an interesting foil, but it never happens. She didn’t even return in San Sebastian, when other characters started crawling out of the woodwork.

The Agent: If Ronan is underdeveloped, The Agent is a straight up void for most of the book. As little insight is given to him as possible aside from his single-minded devotion to his missions. I guess this is supposed to make him enigmatic until the reveal in Sans Sebastion that he’s some sort of legendary intergalactic knight, but he just comes across as a walking plot device, and when his backstory is finally revealed (without enough details to really fully understand it anyway) it doesn’t really mesh that well with the hyper-focused mentally-conditioned assassin we were shown in previous stories. Only in the last couple pages is he given any sort of development when it suggests that he might be lonely in his solitude and (spoiler alert) another character decides to return to his home planet with him. But there was no hint that he was lonely earlier in the book, so this doesn’t feel like the conclusion to an arc or a satisfying development.

Dana: Dana is the protagonist of Cold Finger Girl, a poor girl from a sci-fi ghetto who was subject to some sort of mad science experiment by some sort of communist cult (I think, The People aren’t fleshed out beyond a couple of slogans) that gave her psychic powers. Ronan saves her and she goes on a bloody rampage of revenge after The People try to hunt her down again. In Cold Finger Girl she’s a sort of traumatized ingenue, and Ronan offers to take her offworld at the end, as she no longer has a home.

Then she returns in San Sebastian as Ronan’s assistant who communicates to him psychically from space while he takes care of business on the planet. This is so similar to the role Catalina played in Dead Planet Drifter that I wonder if this role was originally supposed to be her. Dana is basically a different character in San Sebastion than in Cold Finger Girl. She and Ronan banter back and forth like they have a well developed relationship, and she’s generally much more casual and comfortable. This could be chocked up to character development but we never see this development, which leaves the Dana of this story and her previous one feeling disconnected. This is made even more egregious because there’s another Ronan story in-between Cold Finger Girl and San Sebastian (Midnight Machineguns) where Dana isn’t mentioned or alluded to whatsoever. She really, really should have been in that story and her and Ronan’s relationship should have developed in it so that her presence in San Sebastian would feel less jarring. Her identity being a twist reveal (like every identity reveal in San Sebastian, since everyone starts the story with amnesia) was not worth the lost character development opportunities.

Dana’s absence in Midnight Machineguns makes me wonder if all the arc welding in San Sebastian wasn’t planned in advance.

Metaniera: Metaniera is the protagonist of Armageddon Spring, and, it turns out, one of the villains. She’s been brainwashed by another villain, Bran, into believing she’s leading a righteous revolution against evil rulers of a feudal world who killed her family and village, when in reality she was plucked from a different world by Bran and brainwashed to conquer this one for him. She has a ring that’s helping to brainwash her, and apparently gives her magical powers. The Agent helps her break free of her brainwashing and seemingly kill Bran.

Metaniera returns in San Sebastian as a subject of the schemes of the planet’s villain. She’s really the only character in the entire book with a full, coherent story arc, as she faces and helps kill Bran (for real this time) before joining The Agent/Pyre Knight in returning to his home planet with the suggestion she’ll join him on his missions or become a knight of her own. She’s fine, although I didn’t find anything uniquely appealing about her. Standard revenge arc.

Bran/The Ocean Knight: The villain from Armageddon Spring turns out to be the villain behind several other stories and the ultimate villain in Slow Death on San Sebastian. Bran is a member of the same order of “knights” as The Agent, even though The Agent’s abilities seem to mostly be technology-related while Bran’s seem to be mostly magic (ice powers and the ability to regenerate and heal himself using said ice powers). Bran got upset about seeing people dying all the time, apparently, so he decided to start experimenting to stop people from dying/make them immortal. For reasons that are unclear, his experimenting involved taking another member of their order, butchering him, and implanting parts in women like Metaneira and Dana to give them psychic power (I think, the way this is explained is a bit unclear). His plan also involves raising an eldritch abomonation from the dead, and maybe other eldritch abominations on other planets. Again, it’s not clear why. He seems to have regrets when he’s killed for real, due to paradoxically killing a bunch of people in his quest to make people not die.

Bran isn’t exactly a compelling villain. His motives and plan are kind of a jumbled mess and most of his dialogue is either exposition or vague, grandiose statements, but he’s functional enough for the story’s purposes.

Conclusion

While grammar mistakes and some plot missteps make the book feel unpolished, what really holds it back is how underdeveloped most of the characters are. I don’t want to pass any judgements on Cowan’s other books, since I haven’t read them, but in this one it seemed kind of like he was averse to writing character development. This is especially noticeable in the mishandling of the characters of Catalina and Dana, one of whom vanishes, precluding the possibility of character development for our major protagonist through her, and the other for whom character development with that protagonist is skipped to give us a post-character development relationship that’s unsatisfying because it feels unearned. If this was due to a fear of handling it badly, I have to say, practice and git gud! If it was out of a desire to put action front and center, this is also a misstep. Characters the reader cares about are what make action matter. Without them, even a book with good action can’t rise above the level of filler. You can still have plenty of action, but there need to be those character interactions, and they need to utilize characters’ unique traits and backstories, to give everything weight.

I’ll leave it at that. I bear JD no ill will. In fact, I wish him the best and hope this provided some constructive criticism for future projects.

That’s all for now.

“Countess! We have to get out of here. Now,” Radnyk shouted, before gasping to regain the breath he’d lost on the way up.

The countess barely bothered to glance in his direction before looking back up at the lightning-streaked sky.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice quavering with a hundred barely restrained emotions, “Strangely beautiful. Who’d have thought the end of the world would be so beautiful.” -The Angry Blue Planet Part 1: Genesis (excerpt)

Over a year and a half ago, maybe two, a Twitter user shared a drawing by Mark Schulz and asked what sort of setting we would make for a tabletop RPG or story based on it. This was the inspiration for Angry Blue Planet.

One thing I really love about pulp illustrations is that there’s so much story content to them. Some would say they “tell a story” but really they give a visually interesting setting, characters, and some action and leave you to fill in the rest with your imagination. What I filled in wasn’t EXACTLY true to the image, but it did draw heavily from the ingredients: flying saucers, dinosaurs, retro-futuristic humans with guns, and an attractive woman with short, dark hair in black leather.

Like many children, I went through a dinosaur-phase growing up, so the idea of technologically advanced humans dealing with dinos seemed like a lot of fun. The designs of the clothing, guns, and gear of the people in the picture suggested a bit of a retro-sci-fi flavor, although what I ultimately went with is probably more 60’s in feel than the more 80’s flavor of Schulz’s drawing.

When you have humans interacting with dinosaurs in a story, you have basically two choices: a fictionalized version of ancient pre-recorded history, or an alien planet that just so happens to be populated by creatures who resemble the ones that went extinct on Earth millions of years ago. Both are suitably pulpy in tone, but I found the former to be more interesting in my mind, so I went with that one. It used to be a staple of sci-fi, but that era is long over. I don’t know why. Finding out that the story you’re reading actually took place in ancient Atlantis or whatnot is always good fun in my opinion.

The flying saucers suggest another classic pulp trope: Martians and little green men. But obviously there are no little green in men in the image. Rather, the prone figure in the foreground seems to be a human pilot of one of the downed saucers. Well, what if the Martians were human? I’m not exactly treading new ground with this one. Martians being the ancient precursors of humanity is a pretty popular sci-fi trope, but usually the stories from this angle are told from modern (or future) humanity’s perspective as they uncover this lost connection. The perspective of the ancient Martian precursors is rarely explored, but in this case it just makes sense.

So I broadly had my setting. Ancient Earth in the time of dinosaurs, with humanity’s Martian precursors settling and struggling to survive in this hostile wilderness. But why? Rather than give them some loftier goal, I made it a matter of survival and tied it into why Mars isn’t inhabited now. Clearly some disaster destroyed their planet and they had to flee! What disaster? I went with an ecological one.

Doubtlessly some people will see a connection between the catastrophic consequences of energyn production in ABP and fears in the modern day about greenhouse gasses, global warming, etc. However, that wasn’t really the thing on my mind. Ecological destruction is a serious matter, but when it comes to climate change, we’ve been told the sky is imminently going to fall since the 1970’s. At some point it starts to feel like a bit of a grift. But a message I did want to emphasize in the first part of the story is how scientific consensus is under the thumb of political power and big money. Many people treat scientific consensus as though it were passed down by some objective, incorruptible gods. This is very far from the truth. History is full of examples of scientific communities being under the thumb of government or just ideologues, including recent history.

Science is always working downwind of politics. The respected scientist takes care not to upset the politically powerful or the current cultural climate. -The Angry Blue Planet, pt 1

Making the MC an outsider scientist was a way to address all this while not pushing a stance that some might label anti-intellectual or anti-science (well, let’s not kid ourselves, some would label it that anyway). But this is getting a little too into politics, and I have another blog for that. This message is only really prevalent in part 1 anyway. After that, the “scientific consensus” gets left behind in apocalyptic fire.

Another element that became prominent as I began writing the story was a romance subplot. I guess that’s not too out-of-left-field when there’s a pretty girl front-and-center in the artwork that inspired it. Doctor Radnik and Countess Hakkady are a classic odd couple in many ways: the serious, analytical doctor and the free-spirited, impulsive rich girl. Their relationship as well as their personalities and roles in the story all formed together, as cohesive parts of a whole. I haven’t really done much romance writing, but it’s always good to expand try something new, especially in such a popular genre that’s so relatable for so many people. This one won’t get TOO spicy, as this story has more of a clean 50’s/60’s sci-fi flavor. I guess it’s a good way to dip my toes in.

That’s all I really have to say for now. I hope readers will enjoy the continued adventures of Radnyk, Hakkady, Minnel and the rest as they deal with dinosaurs and worse perils on… The Angry Blue Planet!

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Thanks to Amazon and other online services, it’s never been easier for the average person to self-publish. This is both a blessing and a curse. In a time when traditional publishing is gatekeeping more than ever, catering to a certain niche, and has struggling sales for all but a few big names, the indie publishing scene offers a chance for forgotten demographics and genres to thrive.

Yet we’ve seen fairly little of that so far. Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) is in full effect. Without any proper curation the search for independent fiction of quality is like finding a needle in a haystack, where you have to spend far too long examining each piece of hay before you move on to the next one.

As I dipped my toes into this world, it was clear to me that what was REALLY lacking and needed was a community of readers and writers/reviewers they trusted who could point them to other writers of quality.

With that in mind, and knowing that one man with a limited reach wouldn’t be enough for the task, I switched from my initial plan of writing novels to a much older concept that had seen success in the pre-internet days: short story anthology collections with multiple writers. This is where literally legends like HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard published most of their work. While older zine names still exist today, they’ve unfortunately largely become cesspools of nepotism and identity politics.

By making a new zine, I could start to gather and build a community dedicated to the craft, and hopefully pool some fans along the way. Thus, Phantom Whispers began. A zine dedicated to passionate and inventive stories in science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in-between. In short, the classic pulp fiction of exploration, wonder, and plot twists.

Getting interested and interesting amateur writers proved to be the easy part. Editing has certainly been more challenging and time consuming. But with the creativity of all involved and the dedicated services of myself and co-author/artist Robert Garron, we have put out two volumes that I’m proud to have my nom de plume on. And a third is on its way!

So that’s where we are now. We’ve seen some modest success, but we want far more. For this reason, we’re starting this substack as a hub for all things Phantom Whispers. Excerpts, announcements, microfictions, concept art, and much more will be shared here.

So welcome aboard! Heed the voice from beyond and take a journey into the strange, frightening, and wonderful.

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