Title: The New Girl
Author: R.L. Stine
Pages: 176
Genre: YA Horror
Blurb: The new girl is as pale as a ghost, blond, and eerily beautiful — and she seems to need him as much as he wants her. Cory Brooks hungers for Anna Corwin’s kisses, drowns in her light blue eyes. He can’t get her out of his mind. He has been loosing sleep, ditching his friends…and everyone has noticed.
Then as suddenly as she came to Shadyside High, Anna disappears. To find a cure for his obsession, Cory must go to Anna’s house on Fear Street — no matter what the consequences.
Anna may be the love of his life … but finding out her secret might mean his death.
Review: Now for something a bit different! A quick departure from Sweet Valley High, we’re taking a trip down Fear Street! I loved these books as a kid, mostly because they were trippy and freaky as hell. A couple of them really spooked me when I was younger.
One thing you can almost always count on with Fear Street is some sort of crazy plot twist. The nice thing about this series is that they are not a continuous story. Each one stands on its own, for the most part, all just taking place in the same small town. There are a few spin-off series (Fear Street Saga, Fear Street Cheerleaders, Fear Street Nights, etc.) that are more connected stories, but for right now we are sticking to the original run.
So this book is pretty short, but it also gets all over the place. The main character, Cory, is a little weird, to be honest. He gets super obsessed with this new girl at school in a relatively short time. The new girl, Anna, is super mysterious and keeps disappearing. Her brother, Brad, is also very strange, and keeps saying that Anna is dead. Cory and is friend Lisa both get threatening phone calls. Lisa even gets a nasty surprise in her locker – a dead cat with a threatening note on it. I don’t remember if I read this particular one as a kid, but that would have really freaked me out.
Some of the Fear Street books have supernatural elements and some are just creepy mysteries. You do spend a good amount of time in this book wondering if Anna is a ghost, if that’s her secret. I’m not going to tell you if she is or isn’t – you’ll have to read the book for that – but the book was actually still pretty enjoyable. It’s funny how dated a lot of this stuff is – Cory makes a call to information to get the phone number for the Corwins’ house. When was the last time a teenager had to do that!
My current plan is to intersperse Fear Street books within my Sweet Valley High readings, just to spice things up a bit. Sweet Valley High is a super long series, so it’s going to take a really long time to get through them all.
Anyone else out there read Fear Street as a kid? What did you think of them?
Categories: nostalgic reads
Life With No Plot 
I still have a bunch of his books. My son and I devoured them when he was younger. Missed this one somehow!