Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Beginning of the Evil

First Evil by R.L. Stine

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Oh Fear Street, how I have missed you. I think next year for Halloween bingo I may just read nothing but Fear Street books for squares. This is the first book in Stine’s Fear Street Cheerleaders series. There are five books. As a teen I loved this whole series and couldn’t wait for all of the installments. Fear Street and Shadyside High sounded like such dark and scary places and I always cracked up when something would happen and the police would just be all, […]

I wanted this to be awesome

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Ok so let’s just get this out of the way.  I read R.L. Stine books when I was younger, but I quickly outgrew them and moved on to Christopher Pike books.  He was a little bit more advanced than R.L. Stine.  Still – Stine was a big early influence on my enjoyment of horror / scary books.  So, I had high hopes for this “adult” story. It wasn’t bad.  It was absolutely a page turner, and I love that in a book.  It just could’ve […]

Peer Pressure and Cartoon Villainy

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We get a prologue from a murderer again. And we get a prologue that takes place weeks after the story actually opens. My favorite. Yay. Johanna Wise is one of Shadyside’s poor kids. Her mom has been working two jobs ever since she and Johanna’s dad got divorced–with all of the single parent households in Shadyside, I have to assume the divorce happened while he was awaiting trial on federal charges. She’s envious of Dennis Arthur and his crowd–the wealthiest kids in Shadyside. With enough […]

Turns Out Life Is Cheap

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In the first chapter of this book, we learn Deena Martinson broke up with Gary Brandt. So they’re both still in high school. I’m telling you: Shadyside time warp. No one escapes. Janie, Faith, and Eve are all best friends. They were the head of the committee for the school dance, and they have to meet up after school to count the take and turn it over to the principal. Before they can get started, however, the mysterious new boy at school appears while clutching […]

A Novel of Ridiculous Coincidences

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Once more, we’ve got a Fear Street book that doesn’t even take place in Shadyside. The tenuous connection is a character who lives on Fear Street. I’m tempted to go back and count how many Shadyside High students live on Fear Street so far. Too many to make the street’s reputation plausible, I think. We open this time not with a murderer, but with a victim. Claudia Walker wakes up on the beach with her face severely burned, her eyes swollen shut, and her body […]

Ever Heard of a Broken Aesop?

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Some of these books feel like very special messages: don’t make prank calls, don’t lie and spend the night on an island without any adults and try to cover up a murder, don’t cheat. The messages always seem to miss something, though, since kids making prank calls discovered and helped catch a murderer. I guess the idiots on the island helped catch a couple more murderers. The ‘don’t cheat’ message seems to work, though. At least don’t cheat with someone else’s boyfriend, because you might […]



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