Is This What the Kids Are Reading These Days?

A friend told me about this series, that these books fas­ci­nat­ed her in her ear­ly teens. She bought one to see if it would hold her inter­est in adult­hood, and report­ed back that it was a guilty plea­sure. So one morn­ing I decid­ed to read it over coffee.

It’s def­i­nite­ly kids’ fare. The spooky sto­ry was pre­dictable even to the twist end­ing. It was an easy read with­out any pesky char­ac­ter devel­op­ment or sub­text. Here is the equiv­a­lent of a camp­fire ghost sto­ry, expand­ed to fill near­ly two hun­dred pages, even if it is two hun­dred pages of type large enough to dri­ve a truck through.

I can see how a series like this could be a guilty plea­sure, but it did­n’t do much for me. How­ev­er, it should also be not­ed that it had the decen­cy not to take up much more time than it took for me to fin­ish my morn­ing cof­fee. It’s hard to feel cheat­ed when the time invest­ment is so minimal.

The New Year’s Par­ty (Fear Street Super­chiller #9), R.L. Stine
Simon Pulse Paper­back, 1995
193 pages