I read a lot of RL Stine's Point Horror books, and because I knew he also wrote Goosebumps and Fear Street (even though I never read them), I had this impression of him as A Big Fucking Deal. Like it was probably really cool of him to come and write for Point Horror because, you know, he was RL Stine. Books like The Boyfriend and The Girlfriend, and the Babysitter trilogy (which I also never read) seemed...important to the Point Horror catalogue to me for some reason. I didn't know why at the time and after reading Halloween Night, I'm not the wiser because this book is a shit show.


Let's begin by meeting our heroine,  Brenda. She's your typical American teen, I guess. Just living her best life, dating a guy called Ted, hanging out with her friends and having to share her house temporarily with her cousin Halley, who's living with Brenda's family while her parents work out their horrendous divorce. Brenda is really sympathetic to her cousin during this difficult, traumatic time.


Wait, that's not a great example. Brenda is our heroine, after all. I know the book opens with her picking on Halley, but we're going to follow Brenda through this whole book, so surely Stine is going to show her more empathetic side, right? So we can relate to her when the horror starts. Right?


Right. Okay, well, sure. I mean, it's tough having to give up your room to family in need. I'd probably be angry too, but it's not like this is Halley's fault. She didn't ask her parents to get divorced and pack her off to live with her cousin. She didn't make Brenda's parents give her Brenda's room. This is a rough time for Halley, her life uprooted, her parents in a vicious custody battle, her entire world turned upside down! Surely, even if Brenda is resentful at losing her own space (temporarily), Brenda's friends will try to make her see reason?


Okay, well, never mind.

In any case, Halley is kind of a bitch, managing to steal both Brenda and Traci's boyfriends from them. I personally wouldn't count this as much of a loss, especially in the case of Ted, who's dull at best:


And a downright fucking moron at worst, which is all the rest of the time, to be honest.


Anyway, the crux of the plot is that Brenda, driven mad by Halley inconsiderately being the child of a broken home right under Brenda's goddamn nose, decides to write Halley into a murder mystery story which she and her friends Dina and Traci have to write for a school assignment (what?). Traci is all for it. Dina is more reluctant since, as the child of a broken home herself, she has actual empathy for Halley.

As the story unfolds, strange, threatening things begin happening to Brenda. Someone writes in actual blood on her bedroom wall. She finds a dead bird in her room. She finds maggots in her fucking bed omg. All these warnings seem to point to one thing - someone is coming for Brenda. On Halloween night. Brenda thinks Halley is the one behind it all. Brenda's parents don't really give a shit either way.


"Hey baby girl, sorry someone crept into your room and painted a threat on the wall in actual blood. I couldn't figure out how to fix it myself, so I hired someone, but they no-showed, so...eh. The couch is free, though."

Okay, I kind of understand Brenda a little better now.

Anyway! As tensions come to a head between Brenda and Halley, and Brenda's Halloween night costume party approaches, Brenda figures out who's really behind all the dead birds and whatnot and formulates a convoluted plan to out the creep.

Okay. Spoilers now. It was Dina. It was Dina, you guys, and you may not be surprised to learn it's because Brenda is an empathy vacuum who can't fathom other people being in pain and needing support in difficult times.


Ugh. So fucking inconsiderate of Dina to make Brenda feel uncomfortable with her traumatic experiences, amirite? Fuck Dina.

So yes, Dina stalks Brenda because she sees Brenda being a dick to Halley just the same way she was a dick to Dina, and she wants Brenda to finally understand what it's like to suffer so much. Which...you know, fair enough.



But here's the thing, and the reason why I'm giving away the plot of this twenty-four year old book. The resolution to the plot is so fucking overbooked it's ridiculous. Here's what happens:

1. Brenda figures out Dina is behind the threatening messages, etc.
2. Brenda and Traci agree between them to pretend they still think it's Halley and that they're going to actually murder Halley at their Halloween party like in their story.
3. They think this will force Dina to confess.
4. She doesn't confess.
5. So Brenda and Traci actually proceed as if they're actually going to murder Halley and set up a ludicrous plot involving costume swaps so that (in theory), they can stab Halley at the party and then have the "culprit" apparently disappear because everyone's in costume and therefore nobody can know who really stabbed Halley.
6. On the night of the party, Brenda convinces Halley to switch costumes with her.
7. Dina gets wind of this and stabs Brenda, but doesn't kill her because Brenda sewed extra fucking foam into the costume she borrowed from Halley at some point.
8. Everyone pulls off their masks and shouts AHA! And Dina confesses in a scene I imagine to be like this:


Now, here are the things that didn't happen on page during this sequence of events:

1. Brenda and Traci agreeing to set up Dina.
2. Brenda telling Halley about Dina.
3. Brenda convincing Halley to swap costumes with her.
4. Dina overhearing this conversation and thus knowing who to stab.

And here are some extra things that happened for no fucking reason whatsoever:

1. Brenda convinced Ted to come to her party in a Frankenstein costume because her plan (as she relates it to Dina) is to stab Halley whilst wearing a Frankenstein costume, then get changed to provide herself an alibi. So now anyone who sees the stabbing think Ted did it.
2. Brenda comes up with this side-plot and enacts it without telling anyone else she's manipulated Ted to getting involved, because obviously she isn't really going to stab anyone but she still decides it would be fun if her ex-boyfriend potentially got framed for murder, even a fake murder, even her own fake murder because she's planning to swap costumes with Halley, even a fake murder she can't actually guarantee is going to go down because she has no way of knowing that Dina knows she's planning to swap costumes with Halley and she has no reason to believe Dina would actually stab either her or Halley in the first fucking place.

I can't. I can't even, you guys. Brenda's entire plan is contingent on...what? WHAT? WHAT WAS THE PLAN? Dina refuses to A) go along with "murdering" Halley and B) confess to being Brenda's stalker, so Brenda and Traci are just like, "well, shall we go along with the fake murder anyway? Cool!" AND THEN Brenda decides to costume-swap with Halley even though she has no way of knowing Dina would know about the swap. So what's her thinking here? That Dina, who refused to get involved with the fake murder would decide at the last minute to stab Halley anyway even though Dina has been specifically doing all this shit to Brenda because SHE FEELS SORRY FOR HALLEY?

WHAT?

WHAT?

I just want to spell this out again because it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Brenda does not know that Dina knows they switched costumes. It's revealed AFTER the stabbing that Dina overheard them agree to swap. As far as Brenda knows, Dina thinks she's stabbing Halley. Brenda, for some reason, knew Dina would stab whoever was in Halley's costume even though Dina has been on Halley's side throughout this whole fucking mess.


THIS MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE.

Does Brenda just hate Halley so much she assumes everyone else does too, and that Dina just won't be able to pass up the opportunity to stab her once it's presented? One of the reasons it's taken me a week to write up this post is that I keep hoping I'll suddenly understand Brenda's plan, and I can't because there is no fucking plan. It's just everyone hoping the right person will get fake-stabbed. I don't even know if there's that much thought behind it, to be honest.

And even if everything else did make sense, why the fuck did Brenda get Ted involved? Like, I know he cheated on her and I'm not condoning that, BUT BRENDA WAS PREPARED TO FRAME HIM FOR A FAKE MURDER IN REVENGE AND THAT IS NOT A PROPORTIONATE RESPONSE OKAY.

Even Vince McMahon might have refused to book this story line.

So one of the things I didn't get around to mentioning in my The Cemetery post is the use of the urban legend commonly known as The Hook. It comes up twice - once when Rick is telling ghost stories at the Halloween party* and again when Dorian is killed by the Ripper. Just before his death, Cyndi finds a hook attached to Dorian's car:


If you're not familiar with the story, The Hook dates back to roughly the 1950s, and like most urban legends, serves as a morality tale for hormonal teens, much the same way fairy tales like Red Riding Hood warned young women against predatory men of court back in the day. The quick and dirty version of the story is thus:

A young couple are parked up down some lovers' lane. The radio plays while they make out. A breaking news story announces that a serial killer has escaped from a local mental institution and can be identified by the hook on his hand. The couple decide to leave, with various spins on the end of the story following. Either they get home to find a bloody hook dangling from the car door, or for some reason the man has to leave the car, and the woman later finds him dead. Some variations see her hearing strange thumping on the roof of the car, only to discover said serial killer up there with her boyfriend's severed head. One version sees her finding the boyfriend hung from a tree over the car, his nails scraping the roof as his body swings back and forth.

However the story ends, the message is clear: keep it in your pants, kids!





Now, clearly this is a warning against loose morals and sexual experimentation, and we could even link to back to the real-life Phantom Killer case of 1946, but I'm not here to talk about horny teens and the fates they richly deserve. I'm here to ask questions. Two questions, specifically.

First - why is the killer an escaped mental patient?

And second - why the blazing hell would someone who'd been instutionalised be allowed to keep a hook on their hand?

I mean, look, I know mental health care in 1950s America wasn't the best, but we were seeing a move towards more community-based care and less underfunded, understaffed, brutally poorly-run institutions. In any case, I have to assume that even the worst asylum going wouldn't let someone with a hook for a hand just keep that hook. Especially if that patient was also a serial killer and also certifiable insane as the story implies. That's just...really bad practice, you guys.**

Also, for the record, I think a hook is probably a really inefficient way to serial-kill people.

But let's circle back to question one. Why does the story conflate mental illness with murder? Why is a mental patient automatically dangerous, or a killer?

I noted with Help Wanted and The Mummy that there is a tendency in Point Horror books to make the villains "crazy." I guess it's an easy literary shortcut - they're doing bad things because they're mentally ill! Case closed. And of course nowadays you don't have to wait long to hear "was he mentally ill?" whenever a lone white male goes on a mass shooting spree. This clearly completely ignores the fact that many of us with mental health problems never bloody kill anyone***.

We can blame it on the era. Like I say, mental health care in the 1950s was undergoing a change, but the change in treatment options wasn't necessarily followed by a change in understanding. The stigma surrounding mental health continues to this day, and the understanding of conditions evolves slowly, with social understanding tending to lag behind medical understanding, because let's face it - "sociopath" is just such a cool term to throw around.****

You would think, for a 1950s warning against whipping your dick out in public places, you wouldn't need the added "scare" of the killer being a crazy guy. We can talk about the abnormal psychology that might lead someone to become a serial killer, for sure, but there are always exceptions to the generally accepted "signs." I'm not here to say serial killers are not mentally ill, though. I'm here to say mentally ill people are not destined to become serial killers, and that the conflation of "mentally ill" with "dangerous" is itself a damaging stereotype. And it's so prevalent in the news, in literature, and even in old spoopy urban legends, that it feels worth reiterating as often as possible. Psychotic is not psychopathic. Depressed is not dangerous. Hooks are not good murder weapons.

*Even though this is categorically not a ghost story, Rick, you moron. I'm glad someone knocked you out.

**And don't tell me he could have got the hook after escaping. Where's an escaped asylum inmate going to find a hook? Like, how much effort is that kind of person going to put into find a hook they can attached to their wrist and use to kill people? There are easier ways to kill people, that's all I'm saying. 

***Even if Karen is super annoying.

****That was sarcasm, by the way.

Well, t'is the season, right? I figured October was a good excuse to ramp up the retro reading with some Halloweeny pulp horror, starting with one of my top five Point Horror books, The Cemetery!


Also known as The Ripper, apparently? I guess that was the American edition.


Also also known as Le Griffes Meurtrieres, which is French for "The Griffes Murders," which is admittedly not as catchy as The Ripper or the Cemetery, and also has nothing to do with the plot barring murder.



Anyway! The short version of the plot is that a bunch of edgy teens have a party in a cemetery on Halloween, raise the dead or a demon or a vampire or possibly Jack the Ripper, and murder ensues. There's more to it than that, with sibling rivalry, class warfare, broken hearts, and old whaling journals all featuring, but that's the quick and dirty take, which I could have given you from heart, because I must have re-read this book hundreds of times. I remember it as being really sharp and witty, and there are lines that have stuck with me all my life, like this one:






Teenage me thought that comeback was the height of sophistication. Every character always has something clever or pithy to say no matter how terrifying things are getting. I suppose it's sort of Whedon-esque, which normally I'm not keen on, but I read this book long before I ever heard of Joss Whedon, so it passes.

I want to get to the characters, though, because I kinda love them all? Except Foy, I guess. Here's a quick breakdown of our players:

Cyndi: the rich bitch hostess of the Halloween party. Cyndi is a bad girl with an abrasive personality, tons of money, and bags of attitude. She organises the party at Point Cemetery that kicks off our slasheriffic story. Cyndi is great.

Dade: Cyndi's sort-of-boyfriend, although he's not really that into her:





Dade likes to party and possibly owns a gun. He owns an old Chevy, which isn't important at all, but for some reason I developed the impression from this book that Chevys are ultra-hip cars and I still believe that to this day even though I know nothing about cars at all.

Wills: Cyndi's ex, now dating her best friend, Lara. Wills thinks Jack the Ripper is an admirable sort of guy. Apparently his break-up with Cyndi was brutal, which leads many to suspect she set up the Halloween party to murder him in revenge. (Oh yeah, Wills gets murdered).

Lara: Lara's family owns a garden centre. She nopes out of the book after Wills dies, to be honest, because she thinks she saw the killer and sensibly decides to hide in her room until the whole thing blows over.

Jane: Jane is rich and a good girl. She's embarrassed by how nice she is, but comes out of her shell by hooking up with Dade even though he's sort-of-dating Cyndi, because these kids are just buckets of hormones.

Foy: Foy is rich and Jane's best friend. That's all I've got on him. He doesn't really contribute anything to the book.

Rick: Rick is not rich. His dad is the town mortician. Rick makes inappropriate jokes to hide his fear of dying. He seems to hang out with Foy a lot, but I don't know why. In retrospect I wondered if they were dating, but neither of them are remotely dateable, so probably not (and I also don't think Cyndi would invite guys she couldn't hook up with to her party).

Charity: Charity is awesome. She takes no shit and turns out to be the heroine of the book in a roundabout way. She hates Cyndi and is best friends with Jane.

Jones: Basically Van Helsing. Wears a cowboy hat.

Georgie: Georgie is poor. Her dad makes vodka out of potatoes, which she steals. She hates Cyndi and crashes the Halloween party with Cyndi's older brother. She performs the seance which probably raises the demon-ripper.

Dorian: Cyndi's older brother. He hates Cyndi and may have tried to kill her as a child. She definitely tried to kill him later. He's dating Georgie in the most casual sense of the word.

That's our team! The story begins with Cyndi's Halloween party at Point Cemetery. Lots of bitchy one-liners are exchanged, because basically everybody is just hear to snipe at each other and hook up with someone's ex if they can. After Georgie shows up and performs a seance, Cyndi decides they should play a game of hide-and-seek. Charity, sensing something is amiss after the seance, legs it. Everyone else hides/seeks.

We cut back and forth to different view points a lot in this book, often with no breaks to indicate it's happening, and whilst the head-hopping can be confusing, it's done well in this early section to create tension. We know something is out in the cemetery with the kids, we know it's going after someone...But who? The changes in perspective keep us guessing - is that Cyndi about to leap out on Dade, or the Ripper? Is Lara about to stumble upon Wills, or something else entirely? Who or what is Charity running from? We're kept guessing - until the screaming starts.

Wills is the first to go, which is great, because he's frankly been a dick the whole party. Our heroes, being relatively sensible as characters in horror stories go, get the fuck out of the cemetery and go straight to the police.

Cyndi is a suspect because of her nasty break-up with Wills, but despite some initial wild accusations (nobody died before Jones came to town!), everyone is quick to agree that something supernatural is at play. Charity, being down-to-earth and also open to new ideas, goes researching the history of the cemetery and finds this:



I mean, that's basically Dracula's arrival in Whitby, right? It also touches on the theory that Jack the Ripper fled to America at some point. Based on the American version of this book being called The Ripper, I assume the parallel is deliberate. We do also get some confirmation from the Ripper itself that it took the form of Jack to kill Wills (what with Wills being a big fan), but I don't really know if we're supposed to think that A) this is Jack and B) Jack is therefore a supernatural being. I don't think it matters; it's just an interesting thread in the book.

Anyway! While Charity is researching and Cyndi is driving madly around town and everyone else is making out with someone or whatever, Georgie and Dorian go back to the cemetery because Georgie thinks it'll be neat to check out a real-live murder scene, and Georgie gets murdered. Dorian abandons her to her fate, because he's a fucking asshole, and drives home to cower in the garage. After a confrontation with Cyndi, Dorian finds himself face-to-face with the Ripper, who has taken Georgie's form to fuck with him. Trouble ensues, and a fire breaks out.

I have to mention this, purely because of Dade. Up til now, Dade has been a fandom Draco Malfoy type, all smooth lines and handsomely evil, hooking up with Jane behind Cyndi's back and dismissing Wills's death as no big deal. But from this point on, Dade is the MVP of this book behind Charity. He's making out with Jane when they realise there's a fire at Cyndi's house, because of course he fucking is, and he drives over there like a bat out of hell and rescues Cyndi from the burning house by himself even though there are already firemen on the scene. Later, when a heavily-medicated Cyndi takes off for the cemetery to find the thing that killed her brother, Dade goes after her, chases her down (even though she could be the killer) and basically saves her from either tripping over a headstone in the dark and breaking her neck, or probably getting murderised by the Ripper.

Guys. I mean, he's still a cheating jerk-face who judges girls for not putting out, and I cannot emphasize that enough, but Dade steps up when the stakes are high. Maybe it's because he (possibly) owns a gun.

However, Dade is not the true hero of The Cemetery. That title goes to Charity, who actually defeats the Ripper. Sort of. I mean...this is part of the book that really confused me as a kid. Our surviving teens take off to the cemetery after Cyndi. It's dark. The Ripper is out there. Everyone is holding hands for safety, until Cyndi emerges from the dark and starts taunting them. We know by now that the Ripper can shapeshift, so...is it Cyndi? Either way, Dade takes off after her, and Jane follows him, and someone punches Rick and Foy is also there, not really contributing. And Jones and Charity, who have both read up on this shit, are left to confront the Ripper.

There are some beautifully creepy touches of ocean folklore in this book. Not nearly enough for my tastes, but hints at pacts with demons, ghosts ships, and suicides are woven together to bring the book to its climax. Its...super-confusing climax. Basically, Charity is possessed by the spirit of a woman from the 19th century who defeated the Ripper before, when it first came to town. The woman...just...like...hangs onto the Ripper while it shifts into different forms, and...that...banishes it? It's Tam Lin, basically, except much less romantic. Charity just...hangs on, until the Ripper is like, "FINE THEN! NO MORE MURDER!" and that's that.

It's confusing. It confused me at fifteen and it confuses me at thirty-four, because it's not really a resolution. I don't know why this woman's spirit can defeat the Ripper. It's hinted that she might have been a witch (and since Charity was dressed as a witch for Halloween and they have the same name, this seems to be why she chooses Charity as her vessel), but that's me extrapolating. The book pretty much ends with Charity hugging the Ripper into oblivion, then cuts to her and Jones making out. After she's asked him if he's some kind of Van Helsing and he avoids the question, which basically means yes, anyway.

It...I...I don't know? I love this book. I still love this book, but I still don't fucking know how and why Charity beat the Ripper.The answer is clearly tied to Jones. He's the new kid in town. Nobody knows anything about him. He hints at a mysterious past and clearly knows straight away that the Ripper is inhuman and can only be defeated through supernatural means. But he never tells anyone anything outright, and instead pulls the strings from behind the scenes. Who he is and what he does isn't really of interest to the author, it seems. He's just there to be silent and intriguing and guide Charity toward the answers. I feel like you could easily have Jones popping up in other books to slip you an ancient diary that explains your haunted house problem, or to leave you the mysterious locket that will help you summon the dead, idk. Jones has seen some shit. Jones knows things, man. And in the end, Jones isn't any more explained to us than the Ripper.

And nobody died before Jones came to town.

Huh.