The Three Best Villains from R.L. Stine’s Fear Street

by KelliKorducki

Admit it: you barely learned how to multiply fractions because you were up too late every school night reading Fear Street books. Yes, it’s absolutely shameful, but at least nobody can see how you just nodded solemnly at your screen.

While not targeted at a so-called female readership in the same way that, say, pulpy contemporaries like Sweet Valley High, R.L. Stine’s YA thrillers were mini-backpack-sized estrogen magnets in the Midwestern bubble of my ’90s youth. It’s not too hard to guess why. The protagonists were almost always female, for one. But more than that, Fear Street’s blend of teen melodrama and uncomfortable yet way-titillating PG-13 sexy bits and slasher-style gore fests acted like catnip to my generation. Angsty? Consumed by violent pubescent mood swings and, oh, like, a metric shit-ton of free-floating lust and longing that you’re too young to do anything about? We were all there. R.L. Stine had our backs.

Horror is the ideal genre for puberty. It’s the most unsatisfyingly horny time of your life and the period where you most feel like murdering a bunch of the people you know. Jokes! Ha! Ha? Fear Street gave pubescents of the ’90s and early ’00s improbably good-looking, under-supervised and car-possessing teenaged proxies for our pressure-contained preteen awfulness, as well as some pretty fantastic villains.

Each book in the series takes place in the vaguely New England-ish town of Shadyside, where high schoolers’ bodies casually drop like rotting apples off a sick tree. Grisly murders encroach on standard teen-movie plotlines, inevitably creeping closer and closer to the main character. Eventually Stine sets up a dupe who’s so obviously BAD that they of course couldn’t possibly be the actual villain, and then a plot twist reveals an unexpected menace.

Some people I’ve talked to (and folks behind blogs I’ve read) claim to have figured out the formula, boasting that they were reliably able to pick out the killer pre-reveal in almost every book. I definitely can’t make that claim. For me, each twist seemed like such a perfectly calibrated shocker that I considered writing R.L. Stine to beg him to tell me how he pulled it off. I also wondered whether he wasn’t just a bit deranged. I really hoped that he was.

Stine is revamping the series for a new generation of sexually frustrated Baby Bad Bitches with sinister inner monologues, which is a good thing. But I can’t help but look back fondly at the Fear Street I grew up with, the books that featured surprise villains who were extreme, deranged, and had their own landlines.

Here, dear readers, are three Fear Street with villains you just can’t help but respect.

The Book: The Prom Queen
The Plot: Lizzie McVay is up for Prom Queen, a designation that always means a whole hell of a lot more in the kinds of books you read when you’re 10 than it does in real life. There are five girls up for the Big Title: ex-boyfriend-obsessed drama queen Simone, poor wallflower Rachel, slutty jock Dawn, rich smartypants Elana, and Lizzie. The winner gets a $3000 scholarship. Exciting! But there’s this minor problem: someone’s killing them off, one by one.

The first to go is Simone, who doesn’t show up to play the lead in a big play on opening night. Meanwhile, that night, Lizzie notices Dawn acting awfully suspicious, with blood on her shirt and scratches on her face — -a tennis accident, she claims. Likely story. Anyway, Lizzie heads to Simone’s to find Simone missing and her room a bloodied mess. She notices someone running outside through the window, carrying a mysterious body-sized sack. A few weeks pass, and just as a murder suspect is arrested, Rachel is found stabbed to death. Elana soon follows; a swatch of fabric matching the signature jacket of a slightly creepy dude named Lucas is found in her corpse’s balled-up fist.

Will Lizzie be next?!?!

The Dupe: Any Fear Street reader would know that Lucas is too easy a choice, so Stine sets up a decoy: Simone’s ex-boyfriend Gideon, who has been dating his way through the prom queen contestants like it’s his job. What an asshole! But anyway, Gideon’s poor and could use the scholarship money. Could it be that he’s killing his way through the candidates so that he can end up with the winner and steal her loot?

The Villain: Ha, Gideon. As if. Obviously Simone faked her own death and went off on a hacking spree, offing all of the girls who screwed around with her squeeze. She’s revealed backstage at the school play’s dress rehearsal, where she’s showed up to stab Dawn (who is now replacing her as lead in the show, that no-loyalty bitch) to death. A few wrestles ensue, and Lizzie eventually traps Simone with a sandbag. Victory for the protag, fine, but it’s hard not to root for Simone here. Her friends were all dating her ex! Hats off for moxie.

The Book: Broken Hearts
The Plot: Erica is the plain, timid younger sister of gorgeous boy-magnets Josie and Rachel (twins, natch). One day the three sisters, along with their friend Melissa, go horseback riding. Erica’s too scared to ride and Josie teases her for it (not nice!), and Rachel’s too vain to wear her riding helmet. Rachel, of course, falls off of her horse and suffers brain damage that renders her some kind of gorgeous overgrown toddler.

Fast forward a few months to February. Erica is Rachel’s primary caretaker and Josie’s self-soothing her guilt over Rachel’s injury by dating her way around the entire high school. Around this time, Josie starts getting threatening valentines (“Roses are black/ Violets are gray/ On Valentine’s day/ You’ll start to decay”) and, really, they could be from any of the dudes whose hearts she’s recently broken. Eventually Josie is killed with an ice skate; Erica gets stabbed at home shortly thereafter, but survives. A year later, Melissa starts dating Rachel’s old boyfriend, Luke, and begins getting the valentines herself.

The Dupe: One of Josie’s exes, Dave, gets caught wielding a blood-covered letter opener and confesses to having written the mean valentines but denies having anything to do with the murders. How convenient. Except now that he’s been so obviously put out there as a possible killer, he can’t possibly be. Maybe Luke? Yes, Luke seems like a good choice.

The Villain: Luke and Melissa are off skating on a frozen lake when a hooded skater with long red hair approaches them, brandishing a giant knife. Could it be…Rachel? Nope: It’s Erica in a red wig! Guess someone got tired of being her dependant sister’s primary caretaker and getting no dates. We feel you, Erica. We feel you.

The Book: Bad Moonlight
The Plot: First — -best cover EVER, right? Our main character, Danielle, is an orphan living with her younger brother and Aunt Margaret. She’s the co-lead singer in a band called Bad Moonlight with Dee (the other lead singer who does NOT enjoy sharing the spotlight), Caroline, and Mary Beth. And, well, to put it bluntly: Danielle has been doing some werewolfy-ass shit. Like one day she’s off at the grocery store when she starts eating raw meat straight from the cellophane wrapping without even realizing what she’s doing. Another time, she bites her hot roadie’s lip during a make-out session and, oh, just casually drinks his blood like some Cosmo tip gone wrong. Later, she kills a rabbit with her teeth. All the while she’s having these awful hallucinations of people being ripped to shreds, which she’s seeing a shrink named Dr. Moore to suss out.

But then Bad Moonlight’s soundguy, Joey, turns up dead — -legit ripped to shreds. LIKE IN HER VISIONS. And then she finds out that her parents didn’t die in an accident like she’d been told, but were ripped apart by animals. Noticing a trend here? Oh, and then Danielle finds Dee all mangled and stuffed into a trunk.

The Dupe: This Fear Street is unique in that the dupe is the main character. It’s actually a genius setup — -we’re left wondering not necessarily who the killer is, but how Danielle got to where she is. Dastardly, Stiney!

The Villain: Turns out Aunt Margaret isn’t really Danielle’s real Aunt Margaret but an evil werewolf who, along with Dr. Moore, have been priming her to be the bride for the alpha male of their pack…who just happens to be Kit, that babely roadie whose lip she mauled. The twists! How they turn! Anyway, Danielle gets dragged to the altar and allows herself to be “taken” by the moonlight one last time — -and turns completely into a werewolf, at which point she proceeds to rip out Kit’s throat. Aunt Margaret and Dr. Moore literally fall apart — -like, their limbs drop and their heads topple off of their bodies — -and everyone who isn’t a psycho werewolf lives happily ever after, making Danielle possibly the fiercest protagonist of the entire Fear Street oeuvre. Safe to say Bad Moonlight is R.L. Stine’s Citizen Kane. We bow down respectfully.

Kelli Korducki has written for The New Inquiry, Rookie Mag, Hazlitt, and other places on the Internet and in Canada.