Tuesday, December 31, 2013

L.K. Stine's favourite Fear Streets


L.K. Stine's favourite Fear Street books

I had so much fun recapping the Fear Street books. Every one of them had it's own brand of wtf charm, but I'm not going to lie that a few of them stole my heart. I really struggled to get this list down to only five, but these are my five absolute favourite books in Fear Street history. I know that A.M. Stine is also working on her list of faves as well (I bet they are all zombie-related).


Funniest

By “funniest” I mean the ones that made me laugh the most, not necessarily because the book was funny but because the post was. You might think I’m crazy. It’s a very subjective heading. There is also a big element of laughing at your own jokes, but if you made the jokes five years ago is it still lame? Probably. Anyway, these are the ones that I caught myself sniggering at:


Scariest

Yes, I'll admit that occasionally, a Fear Street would send a chill up even our spines. These are the books that we admitted to feeling the slightest, tiniest bit like we might want to hide the book in the freezer for awhile.

5 comments:

Chad Walters said...

I agree with nearly all the choices. In fact, I bought one of my friends a Fear Street book for Christmas because she had previously mentioned wanting to re-read them, and I struggled long and hard about whether to get Switched or Trapped. I went with Switched, but looking back I probably should've just gotten both.

Jenn said...

Bad Moonlight always makes me giggle. Crazy werewolf monsters + high school bad + cheesy songs = good times for everybody.

Mimi said...

I've only read one of the books on your favourites list so I should probably try to get my hands on the other ones soon.

John Dorian said...

I looked at Goodreads to see what the most popular Stine non-kids books are. The original Saga dominates, with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd most ratings. The original Cheerleaders trilogy snags 3 of the next 9 spots. The only other story w/multiple installments with at least 1k ratings is The Baby-Sitter, at #7 & #29.

I agree with the original Cheerleaders trilogy being top-tier, but I would put Fear Park up even higher. I think I liked that they were trilogies with a pretty stable cast (vs. Saga w/various generations, 99 Fear Street which had one family then another family then people working on a film, Cataluna Chronicles with different people who die cuz of the evil car), and weren’t stupid (like Nights) or contrived in the number of people who want to do bad things to the heroine in sequels (Baby-Sitter, Silent Night).

My top 10% of the books you’ve covered: S Forbidden Secrets, The Loudest Scream, The Boy Next Door (#38), The Prom Queen (#9), The First Scream, The Last Scream, The First Evil (#5), The Second Evil (#10), A New Fear (#40), One Evil Summer, The Third Evil (#12), Seniors: The Thirst, S A Sign of Fear.

It looks like I have a strong liking for the Sagas, but my 3 choices are all among the first 4 Sagas (of 16), after which they were mostly subpar by Fear Street standard. The only Sagas with 1k ratings is the first one so I guess other people weren’t so into pseudo-historical-fiction when the vast majority had nothing to do with the main Fear Street lore.
I didn’t really care for any of the non-FS horror offerings.

After having read all of Christopher Pike’s stuff, I think I generally prefer him because even though he’s also often messy and nonsensical, his cracky existentialism at least makes it feel like he’s actually trying to say something in his books and usually at least part of it comes through the weirdness.

Kae said...

Ha ha Halloween Party is my all time favorite too! I always found it more mature and much scarier than any other Fear Street books.