Everybody in Shadyside knows about Fear Street: the scary sounds in the woods, the mysterious disappearances, the geographically-specific patterns of violence and terror that plague this ill-fated (and appropriately named) street. Throughout much of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, Shadysiders seem to accept the inevitability of these horrors, and more or less get on with their lives, avoiding Fear Street whenever they can. But when new kids move to town, there’s an almost ritualized process of storytelling, passing on the urban legends and dire warnings, which the newcomers often disregard at their peril. But sometimes there’s an unsettling symbiosis, when these new teens and their families bring terrors of their own, compounding the established horrors of Fear Street with their personal histories and traumas. In Stine’s The New Girl (1989) and The New Boy (1994), the potential for new romance also brings new danger.
The New Girl is Stine’s first Fear Street book, the one that started it all, establishing many of the narrative patterns of the series and the mythos of Fear Street. This explanation comes early in The New Girl, where Stine writes “Fear Street, a narrow street that wound past the town cemetery and through the thick woods on the south edge of town, had a special meaning for everyone in Shadyside. The street was cursed, people said” (18). The dangers of Fear Street blur the lines between Shadyside’s past and present, with Simon Fear’s burned mansion looming large in both the landscape and the stories. While people avoid Fear Street whenever possible, it is an established urban legend and integral part of Shadyside’s identity: “People in Shadyside grew up hearing the stories about Fear Street—about people who wandered into the woods there and disappeared forever; about strange creatures that supposedly roamed the Fear Street woods; about mysterious fires that couldn’t be put out, and bizarre accidents that couldn’t be explained; about vengeful spirits that haunted the old houses and prowled through the trees; about unsolved murders and unexplained mysteries” (19). The horrors of Fear Street are a complicated combination of supernatural dangers and human violence, featuring ghosts, monsters, and murder.
When Shadyside High student Cory Brooks sees a mysterious new girl at school, he is unable to shake her from his mind. She is pale, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and “There was something strange about the way she moved. Her feet didn’t make a sound as she ran. She was so light she seemed to be floating a few inches above the ground” (11). There doesn’t seem to be any predictable pattern to where and when Cory might see her: sometimes she’s at school and sometimes she isn’t, and while he keeps an eye out for her in the hallways and waits around by her locker, his hopes are often disappointed. And honestly, this might be for the best, because when the new girl shows up, Cory tends to fall on his face, often literally. He is doing a handstand in the lunchroom the first time he sees her and crashlands in a plate of spaghetti and later, when he spots her in the crowd as his gymnastics meet, he loses both his focus and his balance. Cory asks around about her at school but few people seem to know who he’s talking about and he temporarily doubts the girl’s existence, and his sanity.
She’s real though: her name is Anna Corwin and she and her family just moved into a house on Fear Street. Once he has this information, Cory starts calling and driving by her house, though he doesn’t have any luck. Anna’s mother answers the phone and tells him there’s no Anna there and when he knocks on the door of her house, Anna’s brother answers and tells Cory “Don’t come here again. Anna is DEAD!” (51). This opens a whole set of potential mysteries for Cory to wrestle with. His first instinct is that Anna is in danger, being held against her will or abused by the people he speaks with, a theory that seems to gain some credibility when Cory hears her screaming in the background of one of his unsuccessful phone calls. This disturbing possibility is further validated when Anna starts calling him in the middle of the night, telling him she needs help, and begging him to come meet her on Fear Street. Cory is afraid to go to Fear Street at night but relishes the idea of being Anna’s hero and overall, this pays off well for him, as she jumps in his car and makes out with him, telling him “I’m real … I’ll show you … You’re all mine now” (77-78). Cory has worked hard to find Anna and now that he has, her intensity is a bit unnerving, though that doesn’t deter him. When he realizes his relationship with Anna might be doing him more harm than good, he tries to shake himself free of his obsession with her and says yes when his friend Lisa Blume asks him to a school dance. After he makes his date with Lisa, she finds a disemboweled cat in her locker with a note that says “LISA—YOU’RE DEAD TOO” (108). Lisa gets threatening phone calls and when she actually goes to the dance with Cory, someone pushes her down the stairs, though Cory continues to steadfastly believe that it couldn’t possibly be Anna.
While there seems to be a fair amount of evidence that something is amiss at Anna’s house and she might be both in danger and dangerous, the other potential explanation is that Cory has fallen in love with a ghost. The people at Anna’s house tell Cory that she’s dead, and when Cory and Lisa head to the library to check out newspapers from the town Anna’s family moved from, they find Anna’s obituary. Cory occasionally works in the Shadyside High office after school and takes advantage of this access to try to sneak a peek at Anna’s permanent record, only to discover that there’s no record of her in the files. Lisa and Cory receive threats that if they don’t stay away from Anna, they’ll be “dead too,” which seems to imply that Anna already is. Despite her steamy kiss with Cory, Anna’s corporeality is suspect and she has an uncanny ability to simply disappear when she wants to. And while “the hot new girl could be a vengeful ghost” seems pretty far-fetched, nothing’s impossible on Fear Street.
In the end, it turns out that Anna’s not being abused, she’s not a ghost, and she’s not Anna. The girl’s name is actually Willa and her sister Anna is really dead, because Willa killed her. In Shadyside, Willa has the opportunity to reinvent herself and she takes advantage of it … by taking on Anna’s identity. When Cory and Lisa are processing everything they’ve endured at the end of the book, Cory still kind of defends Anna, responding to Lisa’s explanation that “it was all Anna” with “No. All Willa” (167), drawing a clear line between his fantasy of Anna (who he somehow still can’t seem to completely shake) and the reality of Willa, whose fate is uncertain, though Brad’s final word on the situation is that “We’ve got to get her some help” (166). Whether that means institutionalization or incarceration, Willa’s not in Shadyside anymore.
It’s no secret that things aren’t going to go well for everyone in The New Boy, with the first line of the book being “Two weeks before the murder, Janie Simpson saw the new boy at Shadyside High for the first time” (1). So murder is a foregone conclusion but Stine keeps readers guessing about both its victim and motivation. Janie, Faith, and Eve successfully organize a high school dance and raise a bunch of money, but the money goes missing, providing a potential financial motive. Faith and Eve pursue Ross, though they both have boyfriends who wouldn’t be happy to hear this, opening the door for a crime of passion or jealousy. The competition between the girls is pretty fierce and tempers are running high over who’s going to be the first to date the new boy. And Ross is a tall, dark, handsome stranger, so it could just be that the new guy in town is a murderer, who has killed before and will kill again in Shadyside.
Eve scores the first date with Ross and wins the bet, but she also turns up dead the next morning, her body discovered on the edge of the Fear Street woods. The last glimpse of Ross and Eve The New Boy provides is a hot and heavy makeout session in his car by the woods, before Ross asks Eve if she would like to go for a walk. Ross isn’t yet up to speed on the Fear Street reputation and Eve is horrified by the prospect, saying “Huh? These are the Fear Street woods … I forgot that you’re new here … You don’t know the horrible stories about these woods” (41). Ross tells her he’s not interested in the stories, talks her into coming with him, and they disappear into the darkness together. Janie and Eve’s boyfriend Ian find her body the next morning, a gruesome discovery: “Eve’s face was turned sideways, half buried in three inches of mud. The top half of her skull had been bashed in, cracked like an eggshell. A thick circle of dried blood was caked and matted in her dark hair” (51). Ian, Faith, Faith’s boyfriend Paul, and most of the Shadyside High students immediately suspect Ross, who the police take in for questioning but then release. Faith is murdered soon after, killed in her own home with a fireplace poker, and once again, Janie is first on the scene, joined quickly by Ian. As the death toll rises, Janie is the only one who gives Ross the benefit of the doubt, though her feelings about him are uneasily balanced between fear and desire.
Much like The New Girl’s Willa/Anna, Ross’s family’s move to Shadyside was intended to give him a fresh start following his girlfriend’s murder. Janie gets the scoop from Jordan Blye, another new Shadyside transfer who used to go to school with Ross, whose real name is Robert Kingston (he has taken on both a new first and last name, adopting his mother’s maiden name in his move to Shadyside). Jordan tells Janie about the girl’s murder, saying that Ross/Robert “was questioned. But he had an alibi. The police let him go. But everyone in school knew he did it” (114-5). At both his old school and now at Shadyside, he is tried in the court of public opinion by his peers and found guilty. And to be honest, he looks like a pretty good suspect: he has been in close proximity to and under suspicion for the murders of three young women and his house is right across from the spot where Eve’s body was found at the edge of the Fear Street woods. Ross starts to look even better as a suspect when his behavior toward Janie becomes troubling: he follows her relentlessly, even when she tells him to leave her alone, including grabbing her arm and trying to physically force her into his car, asking “What is your problem?” (118, emphasis original) and telling her “I need to talk to you” (119, emphasis original). Janie gets away from Ross but later that night, he shows up at her house, forces his way in, and tackles her in the driveway when she tries to run away, telling her “You’re not getting away … until you tell me why you don’t believe me” (130).
Somewhat horrifyingly, Ross actually isn’t the bad guy: Eve’s boyfriend Ian is the one who killed her. His motive has a couple of layers. Eve stole the dance money for Ian, who is working two after-school jobs to try to save enough money for college, but she has second thoughts and tells him they need to give the money back. Ian tells her “I couldn’t do that, Janie. I worked too hard” (145). When Ian showed up at Eve’s house with a baseball bat as a gift for her little brother, he saw Eve and Ross kissing and after Ross left, he killed Eve with the bat. Ian had means, a couple of different motives, and the opportunity to kill Eve, and once it was done, he figured he could lay the blame on Ross and get on with his life. Ian doesn’t say much about why he killed Faith—he just says “Eve died. And Faith, too” (146)—but presumably, she suspected Ian and he worried she was going to turn him in. As Ian prepares to kill Janie, Ross comes to her rescue and once he has Ian immobilized, he tells Janie “You’ve been really good at running away from me … Let’s see how fast you can run to my house and call the police” (150). This is apparently an effective flirtation and Janie is willing to forget all of the troubling and terrifying behavior Ross previously exhibited now that he’s saved her life, telling him “ I won’t run away again!” (150). You’d think she might pause for just a second and wonder how he knew where she was in order to mount this daring escape, but she doesn’t.
In both The New Girl and The New Boy, Shadyside and Fear Street are intended to be a fresh start for their eponymous characters, somewhere the nightmares and transgressions of their pasts won’t follow them. As Willa’s brother Brad tells Cory, “When Anna fell down the stairs and died, Mom and I suspected that it wasn’t an accident, that Willa pushed her … She was always insanely jealous of Anna. Anna had everything. Anna was beautiful. She had a million friends. She got straight A’s without having to study hard. Willa couldn’t compete in any way—and Anna never let her forget it” (164). While they had their suspicions, Brad and his mom weren’t 100% sure about Willa’s role in Anna’s death and not wanting to lose both girls, they don’t do anything about Willa’s suspected instability and violence, aside from moving to a new town where they hope Willa (and their family) can get a fresh start. But Willa’s jealousy of Anna and her guilt over her sister’s murder manifest in troubling new ways, and while Ross might be entirely innocent of his ex-girlfriend’s murder, there’s plenty of problematic behavior in his interactions with Janie that pretty clearly indicate that at the very least, he’s not great boyfriend material. Both Willa and Ross also have some pretty complicated family dynamics that keep other characters guessing: Willa’s mother and brother repeatedly tell Cory that Anna is dead, trying to warn him away from Willa, while also protecting Willa from the consequences of her actions. In The New Boy, Janie has a similarly odd experience when she stops by Ross’s house to return his French textbook and an old woman tells her that “There’s no one named Ross Gabriel here” (82). The old woman is his grandmother and technically, she’s right, since he’s probably still Robert Kingston to her. She is also likely suffering from dementia or a similar affliction; as Ross tells Janie, “Her mind isn’t quite right anymore. Sometimes she gets confused. She calls me by my father’s name. And sometimes she confuses my father with her younger brother who died twenty years ago … It isn’t easy having her live with us” (90). In both The New Girl and The New Boy, home is a place of secrets, silent struggles, and complicated family dynamics that make it difficult for others to get to know these characters.
In The New Girl and The New Boy, the arrival of a new student presents a range of romantic possibilities. While the long-time residents of Shadyside are well-versed in the horrors of their town and Fear Street—and try to warn the newcomers—the families that move there see Shadyside as a bright new beginning, often shrugging off the urban legends as nothing more than a scary story that can’t touch their real lives. However, Willa and Ross’s complicated pasts combine with the established horrors of Shadyside and Fear Street to create new terrors, ones that quickly consume the characters who have been drawn into the new students’ orbits. As Cory thinks to himself in The New Girl, “The stories are all true, and now you are one of them” (53).
