Not How Explosions Work

After Ski Weekend, this book was mostly a refreshing return to form. We open in Shadyside High with some kids arguing in a library. If it had just opened with some narration from a killer, I’d feel right at home.

Jill, Andrea, and Diane are in the library avoiding studying when their friends Nick and Max arrive and manage to set a file folder on fire. Admittedly, that sounds like the kind of thing I’d have done in high school…if I somehow lost about 50 IQ points. Diane has an absolute fit over it (foreshadowing!) before things can go too far…at least until Andrea dropped the thing into a trashcan in a school library, which predictably does exactly what you would expect.

It turns out a benefit to setting the school’s library on fire is getting the afternoon off. They brag about their exploits when they meet Diane’s friend Gabe, who has just arrived from “the city.” Gabe is thoroughly unimpressed by Shadyside and absolutely doesn’t buy the legends about Fear Street. It’s hard to blame him there.

We’re repeatedly reassured that Gabe is a very dangerous kind of guy, but he’s really the kind of guy who eggs other people into committing arson without actually doing anything that might put him in any danger. He manages to talk Max into setting a fire in the boy’s restroom, which…didn’t the girl’s restroom just burn down? You’d think the school would be automatically suspicious of fires in the bathrooms by now. In any case, Max sets a fire and slips out just before…the bottles of cleaning chemicals by the trash can get too hot…and explode.

Seriously, that’s not how explosions work.

It turns out Gabe is also the kind of guy who will ask two best friends out on dates. Then he’ll show up for one of those dates with a guitar. I guess he was bound to show up sooner or later. He’ll also sit in the backseat of a car with one friend and make out with her while one he’s asked on a date is sitting in the front seat. A lovely date is interrupted when Gabe’s car catches on fire…and explodes.

Again, that’s not how explosions work. Please stop.

Not to say he didn’t have it coming on some level.

The game continues to escalate until an abandoned house on Fear Street burns down. Jill sees Nick and Max fleeing the scene, so she naturally believes they’re at fault when it turns out a homeless person died inside the house. At some point everyone suspects everyone else of all kinds of wrong-doing, but no one ever gets around to calling the police. Since all of them were involved in arson or covering up arson at some point, I guess that’s less surprising than usual.

So, the carnage? Simultaneously light and still pretty awful.

Shadyside death count: 22. That one happened off-camera, so to speak, but a homeless person burned alive while trying to sleep. That’s awful.

Additional carnage: A cat gets burned alive in an oven. It turns out to be just a dream, which is cheating, but I’m counting it anyway. Also, one girl is attacked while practicing gymnastics and ends up sending some time in the hospital over it. Also, there’s an attempt to burn a character alive.

Spoiler-laden point at which this all could have been avoided: I’m not sure it’s even a spoiler. Probably if Andrea knew how to make sure paper is no longer on fire, the Fire Game never would have launched. Also, not competing over a guy, most especially when your friend is clearly not totally ok with all this.

Although, to be fair, you don’t normally expect your friend to snap and start trying to cleanse people with fire because she was a victim of a serious fire who survived some terrible burns. Of course, no one would expect it because that’s not how mental illness works.

I’m not sure what I expect from a guy who doesn’t know how explosions work, either.

(To keep up with a year of reading and reviewing Fear Street books, visit The Shadyside Review.)