The nightmare begins

 So, one of the purchases I made with birthday money was the omnibus Fear Street: The Beginning featuring the first four novels in R. L. Stine's Fear Street series. (To be fair, I know I owned all of these as a teen, but they've vanished over the years.)

We open with The New Girl, in which gymnast Cody falls in love with Anna, the eponymous New Girl who lives n Fear Street in Shadyside. Anna is a bit... old fashioned, and Cody's best friend/neighbor Lisa doesn't like her. Anna's brother Brad keeps insisting Anna is dead, and pushes Lisa down a flight of stairs at the Sadie Hawkins dance. In the end, we find out Anna is actually Anna's sister, who killed Anna because Anna got all the attention. Lisa and Cody wind up dating.

Next is The Surprise Party, wherein Meg finds out an old friend is coming back to town a year after her boyfriend died in the Fear Street Woods. Meg decides to throw a surprise part for Ellen. Meg keeps getting death threats because of the party. Party happens, we find out Meg's boyfriend thought he killed Ellen's boyfriend, but it was actually somebody else. We also get a whole bunch of nearly Satanic Panic shit about D&D. 

Continuing on, The Overnight involves the Shadyside Outdoors Club taking an overnight without adult supervision on Fear Island. In this one, Della runs into psycho, thinks she kills him, finds out when everyone goes back to get rid of evidence that the guy was still alive, as was his partner. 

We finish with Missing, we get twin narration from Cara and Mark, who live on Fear Street with frequently moving parents. Said parents fail to come home one night, or for several days thereafter. Come to find out the police officer they've been talking to is a crooked cop, Mark's girlfriend's father runs a White Supremacist Cult, and Mom and Dad are FBI. 

So, while there are volumes in this series I really enjoyed, the ones collected here reminded me of how I learned as a teen that a great cover might be the only redeeming quality of the volume within. I do remember thinking Stein was trying to edge out Christopher Pike in the YA Horror glut of the late 80s early 90s. While this is partially true, I have more than a few volumes from much earlier with an author name that's belied by and R L Stine copyright. Also, while Pike had no issues adding the supernatural into his writing, Stine mostly avoided doing so. (I think later volumes added hints of things, but his YA never really went all out. his Tween books, notably the whole Goosebumps series, on the other hand....)

 These may have started it, but they're really not up to what would come later.

No atheists in the trenches

 So, KL Charles's Slippery Creatures wound up being a surprisingly good period erotic novel. (Yeah, I know.) 

We open in Jolly Olde England not long after Armistice Day, as one Will Darling, former British soldier who fought in the trenches for most of the war is back in London having pawned most of his medals to keep going. However, an estranged uncle he managed to find did leave him a used book store, which is currently tied up in probate. Which, other than the fact the store is kind of like the better used stores, where things aren't exactly well organized, is a step up. 

We get an early hook when two different sets of men enter the store at two different times demanding information promised to them. Problem being, the information is something Will has no clue about. (Of the two groups, one is the War Office, whom Will wants nothing to do with. The other is a group of Tories going under the group alias Zodiac. Whom Will also unceremoniously kicks out of the shop.) During one of these visits, the Honorable Kim Secretan comes a shopping, and he and Will hit it off.

Sort of. While they do eventually manage to get into some fairly smutty scenes, every time Will starts trusting Kim, he finds out another way Kim betrayed him. (Now at the outset, it's a bit like the movie version of Clue, where we find out The Honorable Secretan supported the Bolsheviks prior to the Great War. Then it gets into the fact that Kim is engaged to a woman, that he's tipped off the War Office, that he... well, lets just say while he isn't exactly a Bond Girl double agent, he does some rather dastardly things. 

 While the central mysteries are engaging, I was more sucked in by the conversations on homosexuality is 20's London. Reminded me quite a bit of a conversation in God and Monsters where James Whale makes a comment about how there are no atheists in a foxhole, but plenty of lovers. Given that Weimar Berlin in the years after this novel became a Homosexual Hangout, I kept pondering if the main characters might find time to slip off to see a certain Sally Bowles in later volumes. 

While I'm sure there are historical inaccuracies, it was a fun read with characters who while not morally pure certainly made understandable gray characters.