A Book Review - Halloween Night by R.L. Stine (Point Horror)

Spoilers abound for this book; it's too hard to review it without them. Also swearing. Sorry.

I originally gave this three stars, but had to go and change it to two, because I've been thinking about it this week, and it's been grating on me. I hate having to decrease a rating. Sigh.

I wanted to like this book so much. I ordered this and number two three years ago, having never read them in my younger years, and I was so excited. Halloween is my favourite time of year - one of my favourite things in general - and Halloween-themed books are a huge pleasure of mine. I have Stine's Halloween Party, from the Fear Street series, and that was a really fun book, so I was hoping that Halloween Night would be something similar.

Instead, we have a book that runs along similar plot lines to The Stepsister, but with some of the most unlikeable characters I've encountered lately.

Basic plot points: Brenda's cousin Halley has moved in with Brenda's family and basically taken over Brenda's life. She's got Brenda's room - and Brenda's now sleeping in what appears to be a closet - and she steals her clothes and borrows her car and all that sibling stuff that's supposedly normal but is actually really irritating. Then she goes after Brenda's boyfriend. And Brenda's friend Traci's boyfriend. So Brenda, Traci and other friend Dina decide to kill her.

Or not. They're planning a murder mystery for English class, so they murder Halley's character in their story. And then Brenda starts having nasty tricks played on her - dead birds in her room, writing in blood on her wall, maggoty meat in her bed - and of course she assumes it's Halley who's doing it. And her folks don't believe her. So she decides to kill Halley for real. Or something.

First: Brenda. I want to sympathise with her, because Stine does that - he has a talent for making you angry on the part of the characters who are getting stiffed. But I can't understand if she's genuinely getting a raw deal, or if she's just a whinger. I also can't figure out if she was ever genuinely planning to kill Halley, or if it was all a ruse. If it's the former, then she's sick and twisted. If it's the latter, she's sick and twisted and just s bit awesome.

Halley is a bitch, pure and simple. I do feel for her a bit, because her home life is miserable, but being miserable doesn't give you carte blanche to treat others like shit. Now I realise I may be overreacting here, because I'm a) a spoiled only child (four sisters and two brothers, but I wasn't raised in the same house) and b) someone who grew up poor, without a lot of money for stuff. The combination of these two things has made me territorial when it comes to my things. Mine is mine. I'm (almost always) happy to lend people stuff - if they ask. And if I have a pretty good idea that it'll come back in the same condition it went out in, or that it'll be replaced if it's damaged. YMMV here; I'm sure some of you are more generous than I am when it comes to friends and relatives "borrowing" (ie stealing) your things without asking. But just the description of Halley as someone who thought it was okay to take Brenda's things without permission - that made me hate her, just like I hated Jessie in The Stepsister for the same reason.

Well, I did say I was probably overreacting.

The other characters? Traci's fine. Dina's fine. Ted (Brenda's boyfriend) and Noah (Traci's boyfriend), who both end up hooking up with Halley, are pretty much jerks. I don't know how Stine continually writes these teenagers with no conscience. Thankfully I never knew boys like this in high school, although I'm sure there were a few around.

My main contempt, though, is saved for Brenda's parents. They take in their niece, because her parents are going through a bad divorce - but then they find they have no room. Their solution? Give the niece their daughter's bedroom, and shove the daughter into a closet. Harry Potter, but in reverse. Someone carves a threatening message on their daughter's walls, in blood, and instead of comforting her, or questioning the niece, or calling the freaking police if they believed it was done by an intruder, they get upset with their daughter for being angry about it. Repeat pattern with the burnt carcass of a bird thar shows up in a Jack O'Lantern on Brenda's desk. Someone's threatening their kid, and they're more concerned with her hostility towards her cousin. Point Horrors are full of absent parents and absent-minded parents and naïve parents and sometimes just BAD parents, but these ones get the Scumbag Parental Units Of The Year award.

The plot is just too confusing for me. After Brenda finds maggoty meat in her bed, she decides that she needs to kill Halley for real. Then Halley overhears Brenda talking about it, apologises for being rotten, and cries. We're led to believe that Brenda's continuing with the plot to kill Halley, but then at the party they switch costumes and Brenda gets stabbed instead of Halley, cleverly drawing out the prankster and potential killer. The problem is that it's never made clear whether a) Brenda actually planned to kill Halley, and just changed her mind when Halley apologised, or b) the whole killing-Halley thing was one elaborate plot to draw out the prankster. There are too many red herrings in this book, and the amount of twists and turns make it damn near impossible - for this girl, at least - to know what's going on.

So, two stars. Although it's a bit higher on the two-star rating than, say, Hit and Run.

Verdict: A big disappointment, due to an overly complicated plot and unlikable characters.