Well this was a wild ride. I do think that since Stine did not revisit this series for a bit, things got wonky here in terms of continuity errors that I was going, what the world about. All of them were concerning Sarah Fear that we learned about in the Fear Street Cheerleaders trilogy. I don’t know why Stine did this, maybe to have a new spin on things. But it didn’t work because I still own all of the Fear Street Cheerleader books so I went back to make sure I wasn’t crazy and had never heard some of this new information (no spoilers).
Then we had the standalone following Corky, continuing this series, and now we have book #5. There’s no Corky, there’s a new character, Amanda. And honestly, I have a hard time believing that someone growing in Shadyside (or holy cow there’s a lot of dead teens here as I call it) didn’t know about this whole thing. Also Amanda and her crew get the TSTL crown for opening a box that says:
DO NOT OPEN. EVIL INSIDE.
Yes. It legit said that. No there is zero explanation after the events in book #4 how this even happened and why in the world would [redacted] have left a freaking evil box in the locker room at the school after they presumably graduated.
Amanda and her fellow cheerleaders are dealing with jealousy on the squad because two girls [Natalie and Janine] boyfriends [Luke and Brandon] are competing for a top spot on the basketball team. So there’s already tension going along, Amanda finds the evil box, the squad decides let’s do a ceremony that shows instructions (that someone left) on how to call up the evil. You guys, I maybe started cracking up at this point. And anyway, evil is let loose, we get some gruesome teenage death and a really bad ending that I think that Stine was setting up to continue this whole series. But I think he started doing the Fear Street Saga that was following the Fear family that settled in Shadyside. I never read that so I have zero idea if that fixes some of the continuity errors I found.
I read this for Halloween Bingo 2025 “Dark Academia” and for CBR17 book bingo “School.”