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.