Warning: Contains Spoilers!! This is a recap blog which means I read the book and tell you everything that happens so you don't have to read it yourself. Do NOT continue to read unless you want to know who the bad guy/girl/redneck cliche is.
Tag Line: Does her boyfriend really want to kill her? (Okay, that is a lame tag line.)From the Back of the Book: A date with death. Jamie and Tom are in love. They've gone steady since junior high and are planning to graduate high school and attend college together. Then, of course, they'll marry. Everything's perfect until Tom breaks a date - and all the horror begins. Suddenly her perfectly planned dream has become a nightmare. She must talk to him. But what has happened to Tom? To Jamie's horror, the boy she loves is stalking her, calling her, threatening her. Tom can't afford to let her live. And there's nowhere she can hide.
Validity Confession: This isn't Point Horror. I feel like we don't even care anymore. I'm going to change the description of this blog because we're not only about Point Horror here anymore. I'm still going to pretend the characters are in PH land though. Old habits die hard.
This book was published in 1988 which makes it one of the earlier ones I've recapped. I hadn't read it before this. Believe me, if I had, I wouldn't have voluntarily picked this off the shelf. Yes, folks, I picked this one. I was terrified my manager would bring me an Athkins or a Cooney so I voluntarily grabbed a Stine. I usually find him comforting in his awfulness. Usually.
We begin with our protagonist Jamie
getting a paper cut. She's mad at the magazine that cut her. She's
mad at her hair which she'd like to cut short but can't because her
boyfriend wants it long.
Mercy. I'm on my third sentence of this
recap and I'm about to go full-on rage rant. It's too early in the
book for this, y'all. I'm going to try to breathe and just cool the
boil.
Oh, fuck it.
Girls, listen to me and listen good.
YOUR BODY DOES NOT BELONG TO YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER. It is YOUR
body. You and YOU ALONE make decisions about what happens to it. If
you want to cut your hair, cut it. If you want to grow the hair on
your legs out until it can be braided, do it. If you want to pierce
or ink or decorate or shave ANY part of your body, do it. YOUR
SIGNIFICANT OTHER DOES NOT OWN ANY PIECE OF YOUR BODY. If he likes
your hair long and you want it short just tell him to get the fuck
over it. If he really loves you then he won't care if every hair on
your head falls out. If he tells you he doesn't love you any more
because you won't conform to his idea of beauty, then he's done you a
huge fucking favor because you don't want that asshole in your life
anyway.
And I'm stepping off my soap box now...
To review, Jamie's pissed about the paper cut,
her hair and the fact that the asshole....I mean her boyfriend Tom
is an hour late for their date. It's out of character for him and
she's worried. She keeps checking her Swatch watch (oh the
nostalgia....and the jealousy....I never had one) and tripping over
things because she's adorbs clumsy. Her brother Casey comes in to ask her to play Hungry
Hippos with him and she screams at him like a shrew. This is so
shocking. Stine is writing an unlikable protagonist? This has never
happened before and I am not sure how to handle it. I feel the
vapors coming on. I shall retire to my fainting couch and call for
my smelling salts to be brought to me on a little silver tray by my
lady's maid.
I might be a tad too sarcastic
today. Might.
Jamie isn't worried he's seeing another
girl. They've been going together since junior high and she's secure
in the relationship. They're going to go to college together and
then get married and live a bland little life. She calls her best
friend Ann-Marie to whine. I almost didn't {bold} Ann-Marie's
name because she's described as having a “round face” and we all
know we don't need to pay attention to the fat girls in PH (ish). They're
all written as giant losers who only impact the story if they turn
out to be the bad guy (and it's usually because they hate the
protagonist for being skinny and beautiful because in PH (ish) land you
can't be beautiful and fat). Ann-Marie lives up to the stereotype by
making jokes out of everything Jamie says until Jamie gets pissed and
snaps at her.
Sigh.
Finally Ann-Marie asks Jamie if she
wants to go to the mall to kill some time before the dance that
night. Jamie reluctantly agrees because it's too late to go ice
skating even if Tom ever does show up. It's too late for ice skating
but there's plenty of time to go to the mall? Ooookay. The girls
are in the mall 20 minutes later and it's packed. Ann-Marie really
wants to buy a pair of neon pink Reeboks (nostalgia overload in this
book) but Jamie disdainfully doesn't want to be anywhere near the
atrocious shoes. She decides to go down to the Record Rack
(records!) instead. On her way, she passes the Diamond Ranch and
sees some antique stick-pins in the window that are on sale. She
decides to go in and check them out.
The door closes behind her and silence
washes over her. The place is completely empty. She walks through
the store and then suddenly sees a robbery happening toward the back.
The robber has a distinctive shock of white-blonde hair over his
forehead and she recognizes him as Tom.
Okay.
There's so much wrong with that
paragraph, y'all.
First, the fact that the shop has a
door is weird. I assumed it was an indoor mall and stores in that
kind of mall rarely have doors that are closed during operating
hours. It's not unheard of so I'm giving this one a pass, but it's
rare so it gets a mention. Second, the mall is described as packed. Jamie and Ann-Marie
were literally pushing through people just a minute before. So even
if the place DOES inexplicably have a door, who the hell would rob a
place in broad daylight just feet from where packs and packs of
people are walking by? And third, who the hell commits a crime in
broad daylight where any number of witnesses could happen upon him
and doesn't disguise the ONE THING that makes him easily
identifiable?
REALLY, STINE????
Jamie stays hidden behind some display
cases and watches as the robber demands money from the register. The
clerk repeatedly calls the robber a punk which seems rather unwise
when being held at gunpoint. Finally the robber shoots the clerk and
Jamie makes a run for it. She hopes he doesn't see and recognize her
on the way out. She slips and falls before she makes it very far and
then Ann-Marie is there helping her up.
Jamie tells Ann-Marie what she
witnessed. At first Ann-Marie doesn't seem to react. Then they see
security guards running into the Diamond Ranch. Ann-Marie tells her
that she needs to talk to the police but Jamie just wants to go home.
In the car, she lets it slip that Tom was the robber and Ann-Marie
thinks she's in shock or something. She doesn't believe that Tom
could possibly do such a thing. She points out that Jamie isn't
wearing her glasses and maybe she wasn't seeing clearly enough to
identify anyone. Jamie points out that she doesn't need to see
clearly to identify the boy she's been dating forever. Ann-Marie
admits that all Jamie would need to see is the white piece of hair in
his bangs to identify Tom. You know, because no one else in the world could possibly have light colored bangs.
It's so unbelievably obvious that it's NOT Tom at this point that I don't even feel like I need to read any more of the book.
Like my manager would let me get away with that.
Jamie gets home to an empty house. Her parents are probably in Europe. There's a message on the machine from Tom saying that the swim coach
kept them super late that day and that's why he didn't show up for
skating. He tells her he has something to do before he picks her up
from the dance and he'll see her later. Jamie thinks he sounds
nervous and wonders if he called her before the robbery or after.
She seems particularly hung up on this point. Because it matters, y'all. It DOES.
Jamie debates whether she should go to
the dance with him and then decides she owes it to him to let him
explain what happened. Then she'll break up with him.
Sigh.
She heads to her room to start getting
ready and remembers that she put the tickets for the dance in her
wallet. When she searches her purse, her wallet is missing. The
chapter ends as she wonders if she dropped her wallet in the Diamond
Ranch.
Tom comes to pick her up that evening
and she's filled with dread. Of course she is. She thinks she
witnessed him kill a man. You'd think this would be enough for her
to break up with him and refuse to see him and....oh, I don't
know....call the POLICE...but this is a Point Horror (ish) so she's
resigned herself to dating a murderer. Allegedly. She notes
he's wearing a new sweater and he seems super upbeat. He comments
that he likes her shirt and she snaps at him that it's a blouse
not a shirt. Holy hell, Stine, no teenager uses the word blouse.
Ever.
They walk to the dance since Tom
doesn't own a car. He jokes the whole time and Jamie thinks he's
being silly and nervous. It irritates her that he could kid around
like this when he just murdered someone that afternoon. They see a
couple of classmates (Sherry and Alex) up ahead and
join them. Jamie hangs back a bit as the other three laugh and joke
around all the way to the school. When they get to the doors, Jamie
suddenly remembers that she doesn't have tickets. She tells the
teacher at the door that she lost her wallet and he waves them in
anyway. Either he just doesn't care or Jamie is an exemplary student
whom he trusts implicitly. Tom is curious about her missing wallet
and Jamie wonders nervously if he picked it up at the scene of the
crime.
She should be more worried that the
police found it and suspect her of murder.
I guess Stine didn't realize that would
be the most logical scenario here.
Tom and Jamie walk around the dance
talking to friends for awhile and then they try to dance. The song
is described as Disco Rap (whatever the fuck that is) and it has an
awkward beat and repetitive lyrics. Finally they give up and Tom
tells her that he needs to talk to her in private. He leads her to
the wood shop and then starts pacing around, playing with some kind
of tool. Jamie calls it a “pick” and says it has a blade. She
thinks his face looks evil and angry and she starts screaming “no”
at him which puzzles him immensely.
Then because it's Stine and the
chapter is ending, it tells us that Jamie grabs the pick from him and
stabs him right in the chest. She runs from the room screaming “I
killed him. I killed him.”
The next chapter picks up with
Ann-Marie finding Jamie hysterical in the hall. Tom comes out of the
wood shop completely unharmed because of course he does. Jamie
imagined the entire stabbing because of course she did. I hate this
book because of course I do.
Sigh.
Ann-Marie treats Tom coldly and tells
him that she'll be taking Jamie home now. Tom protests that he can
take care of Jamie and Jamie hears it as a sinister threat.
Ann-Marie is generally bitchy to him and finally leads Jamie away
from the hall. She asks if Tom admitted to the robbery and Jamie
says it never came up. Jamie is shivering and Ann-Marie takes off
her jacket to give to her friend. Stine tells us the jacket was too
SMALL so it slid off immediately. Huh. The jacket the fat girl is
wearing is too small for the skinny girl. Wouldn't that mean that
the skinny girl is bigger than the fat girl? I'm so confused, Stine.
Get it straight.
As they approach the gym, Ann-Marie's
date Buddy calls out to her that they're playing their song.
It turns out their song is a Beastie Boys number. So romantic.
Ann-Marie says she'll get the keys from Buddy and drive Jamie home.
They can talk on the way. Jamie is happy and relieved until she sees
that Buddy is upset by this turn of events. When Ann-Marie returns,
Jamie tells her that she just wants to walk home by herself and
think.
Stine.
You just told us that Jamie was so
frightened that she hallucinated stabbing someone and then ran out
into a hallway screaming. Do you expect us to buy that this SAME
person is going to walk home in the dark alone? I beg you.....MAKE
SENSE. Just once. Please.
Naturally by the end of the chapter she
realizes she's being followed. I'm shocked. Shocked I say! She
turns and catches a glimpse of the white hair and knows it's Tom.
She's scared but yells out at him, asking him if he wants to talk.
He runs off and she goes into her house.
You know, I'm going to be seriously
annoyed if Tom is the bad guy. Just sayin'.
Jamie's mom makes a huge fuss over her. I guess she's not in Europe after all. Stine really hammers hard on the fact that Jamie's mom is
overweight. The word “pudgy” keeps getting thrown about. I
mostly hate him. Jamie thinks her mom is like a bee, always buzzing
around and getting into her personal space and irritating her.
Usually this would just be teenager assholishness but Jamie's mom IS
annoying. I completely lost count of how many times she told Jamie
how green she was. I suppose my manager can relate because I'm
always telling her she looks “wan”.
Jamie heads off to bed but she can't
sleep. She decides to call Tom....because....reasons I guess. I
don't know and I just read it. This book is sure making a lasting
impression on me. No one answers the phone and Jamie is instantly
suspicious because Tom's mom should be home. She doesn't come right
out and say that Tom killed his mom but it's pretty clear that her
mind is wandering down that path. As soon as she hangs up, the phone
rings because in PH (ish) land the bad guy always calls the
protagonist. Sure enough a voice tells her that he's very sorry she
saw him at the mall that afternoon. At least he's a polite obscene
caller.
Jamie calls the person Tom and tells
him that he can talk to her about this. She's a great listener. The
person (with a muffled and slow voice) just keeps repeating that
she's given him no choice and then he hangs up.
Jamie frets for awhile and then decides
to call Tom's friend (and fellow swim team member) Andy. She asks
him if Tom was at swim practice and Andy confirms that he was.
However, Andy didn't see him in the locker room after and assumed
that Tom left early. Jamie realizes that Tom probably had time to
get to the mall and commit the crime and she “oh noes” herself
until the end of the chapter.
That night she has a typical PH (ish) nightmare about Tom showing up and trying to kill her. The next
morning she goes downstairs and her mom tells her that Tom stopped by
and left a gift. The gift turns out to be a pair of gold earrings
and Jamie is horrified that he bought them with the money he stole
from the man. She sees a story in the newspaper about the
robbery/murder and it makes her more frightened.
Ann-Marie comes to pick her up so they
can go swimming at the Y. No one else is in the pool. They swim for
awhile and then Ann-Marie conveniently remembers that she was
supposed to call her aunt about babysitting. She leaves Jamie alone.
Hmmmm. I wonder if anything will
happen while Jamie is alone in the pool???
Jamie floats for awhile. She imagines
confronting Tom about the robbery and Tom reassuring her that he was
no where near the mall and everything being fine. As she floats she
notices a shadow fall across the water. Someone is standing on the
balcony above the pool staring down at her. Despite the fact that
she is, again, not wearing her glasses, Jamie can tell it's a boy and
he has blonde hair. She hears him laugh softly and thinks the sound
is super menacing.
Ann-Marie returns as Jamie is running
across the tile floor like an idiot. I'm surprised she didn't fall
and bust her skull. Jamie tells her that they have to leave and, at
first, Ann-Marie is skeptical again. Jamie worries that she's
“cracking up”.
Ann-Marie encourages Jamie to talk to
Tom and Jamie decides that she should. She's going to take the
bus to his house since Ann-Marie has to leave to babysit for her
aunt. Jamie walks to the bus stop and again she hears footsteps
following her. This is getting super boring, y'all. She reaches the
bus stop as the chapter ends, so hands reach out and grab her.
Fortunately for her, the bus arrives at that instant and she's able
to pull away and get into the bus.
The bus driver doesn't see who it was
because he was adjusting the mirrors. When Jamie looks out at the
sidewalk, there's no one there. She rides the bus to the stop
nearest Tom's house and then disembarks. When she gets to Tom's
house, a strange man answers. He's in his mid-20's but already
balding. He says his name is Eric and he's a co-worker of
Tom's dad. He had stopped by to get some paperwork that morning when
a call came in saying Tom's dad had been in a horrible accident and
was in critical condition. Tom and his mother had left immediately
and Eric had stayed behind to take care of the cat and close up the
house.
Only, it says that Tom and his mom let
at 9:30 which Jamie tells us means that Tom couldn't have been the
person at the pool or by the bus. That means 9:30 must have been
awhile ago. So why is this Eric guy still in the house? He should
be long gone by then. Something doesn't add up about this.
Eric tells Jamie that Tom left an
envelope for her. Except Tom had no idea that she was even coming to
his house and they expected Eric to be leaving just a few minutes
after they did. So why would Tom leave anything for Jamie with Eric?
You stopped making sense a long time ago,
Stine. I'm expecting the piranhas to show up any minute now.
Jamie takes the envelope and imagines
what is written inside. She imagines that Tom tells her that it
wasn't him in the jewelry shop the day before and that the earrings
had belonged to his grandma and on and on for three or four
paragraphs. She spends an awful long amount of time crafting this
fake letter in her head. She walks back to the bus stop and then
finally decides to read the letter.
But before she can, a dog runs up and
grabs it from her.
You have no idea how much I wish I
wasn't serious right now. It's actually in the book. A dog stole
her letter.
For fuck's sake, Stine.
Jamie chases the dog all around and
finally gets him to drop it. The letter is short.
“Dear Jamie – I guess we all act
crazy sometimes. I'll try to call you. Love, Tom.”
She's disappointed
it doesn't match her fantasy letter.
Time passes. She's
playing Scrabble with her little brother. She ends up yelling at him
and yelling at her mother and just generally being a huge brat. Her
aunt calls to talk to her mother and Jamie is furious because she
wants to keep the line free for Tom to call. Several times she picks
up the extension and, when she hears her aunt and mom still talking,
she slams the receiver down to make the point they should be clearing
the line for her.
I'm a pretty
easy-going mom but I wouldn't tolerate this level of disrespect at
all. At a minimum, this brat needs to lose her phone privileges.
The line finally
gets clear and Ann-Marie calls to find out if Tom has called. Jamie
laments that he has not. They hang up and Jamie goes to bed. The
chapter is ending, so we get treated to a three page nightmare of Tom
crawling through Jamie's window, confessing to the crime and then
trying to kill her. The nightmare only ends because the phone rings.
The voice on the other end tells her that she shouldn't have seen
what she did in the mall and now she has to pay.
Like maybe he'll
stand on a balcony and laugh at her again. That was truly vicious.
The next day,
Ann-Marie urges Jamie to go to the police. Jamie says she will after
school and Ann-Marie volunteers to go with her. The school day
passes in a haze for Jamie. Several times she gets caught not paying
attention. Once she's called on in math but can't answer the
question because she's left her glasses at home and she can't see the
board. She looks around the room and enjoys the blurriness of her
eye impairment for awhile.
Jeez, y'all, do you
think Stine is trying to tell us something important here? I mean,
it's not like this section has BIG FUCKING CLUE written above it in
neon lights or anything. I don't think we're supposed to notice that
Jamie can't see crap without her glasses and we're not supposed to
remember she wasn't wearing them the day of the robbery and we're not
supposed to question how she ONLY identified “Tom” at a distance
by his blonde hair or anything. Just ignore the BIG FUCKING CLUE
sign, y'all. It means nothing.
The school day ends
and Ann-Marie meets Jamie at her locker so they can go to the police
station. Jamie is snappy and ungrateful for a change {sarcasm}and
whines about how much her life is going to suck once she does this.
They leave the building and Jamie spots Tom across the street leaning
up against a van she doesn't recognize. She is so happy to see him
that she yells his name and starts across the street. Ann-Marie asks
her what the heck she's doing just as Jamie realizes a second
Tom is running down the sidewalk toward her.
She keeps heading
toward van “Tom” and he ends up grabbing her and forcing her into
the back of the van. Too late she realizes that this “Tom” isn't
Tom and he is, in fact, the bad guy who robbed the store, killed the
man and has been making threatening phone calls to Jamie.
Jamie can't escape
the van. The bad guy....who I shall call Faux Tom until I get
his name....pulls onto the freeway, threatening Jamie the entire way.
Stine decides to be a total dick and he gives the bad guy a very
pronounced stutter. He also keeps calling her “Babes” which is
Stine's standard bad guy nickname for our protagonists (it was used
in the Babysitter books and maybe some others).
The bad guy's name
is Okie Farnum.
Jamie feels all
kinds of heinous for suspecting poor Tom. I feel a little bad because I suspected poor Ann-Marie. Sorry, Ann-Marie, but that's what you get
for being in a Point Horror (ish) book.
They stop by a
cabin in the woods and Okie takes Jamie out of the back of the van.
They start toward the cabin when all of a sudden, Tom leaps from the
roof of the van and tackles Okie.
For fuck's sake,
Stine.
Seriously.
NO!!
No, Tom did not
manage to ride on the top of a van at fucking freeway speeds. No he
did not manage to ride on the top of the van while Okie was swerving
all around. No. Just no. This is not even possible.
NO!!
Tom encourages
Jamie to run and get help but Jamie is generally incompetent. She
can't decide which direction to run and she just sort of spins in
place uselessly for a long time. Eventually she heads into the woods
but she's stopped by a woman with “bleached red hair” who turns
out to be Okie's girlfriend Dolly.
First of all, what
is bleached red hair? Bleached is usually white or blonde. Does he
mean light red? Like strawberry blonde? Whatever.
The next chapter
opens with Jamie and Tom tied up together in the cabin. Okie tells
Dolly that he's going to have to drown them both in the tub and then
he and Dolly will clear out of town. Dolly agrees that it has to be
that way. They pick Tom first. Okie holds him under the water for exactly three minutes and then declares the deed done.
I'm sure Stine's
going to tell us that Tom survived because he's a swimmer and knows
how to hold his breath. I'm so over this book. Why isn't it over?
Okie thinks Jamie
is pretty and he proposes keeping her as a “slave”. Dolly is
pretty pissed at the idea. She knows what he really wants to keep
Jamie for and she doesn't like it one bit. Okie finally decides to
drown Jamie as well, but before he can, Tom comes up behind him and
hits him with a broom in the shoulder hard enough to break it.
There's this huge
physical struggle that I can't be bothered caring about with all four of them fighting for survival. In
the end, Dolly and Okie are both knocked unconscious. Tom and Jamie
decide this is the perfect opportunity to make out for awhile because
it's not like there's two dangerous criminals on the floor who want
to kill them or anything. Okie starts to come out of it and Tom
finally remembers they're in danger. They tie up the criminals and
then Tom asks her for the story.
Jamie hems and haws
a great deal while Tom encourages her with gentle words and kisses on
the cheek.
This is so fucking
dumb.
She tells him about
the robbery as they leave the cabin in Okie's van. He laughs at her
for thinking it was him. If this was real life, he'd be pretty hurt
and angry that she thought he was capable of robbing a store and
killing a man. Stine doesn't exactly give any fucks about realism
though. Jamie asks him why he's been acting so weird and he tells
her that he decided to quit the swim team to get a job so he can help
out his family financially. He thought she'd be disappointed in him
so he was acting strange. Does Jamie really care about him being on the swim team that much? Is she living vicariously through his 200m relay or what?
In the end, she
agrees not to go out without her glasses again and he agrees never to
break another date.
The End.
Final Thoughts:
This book was so stupid I can barely even muster the strength to do
final thoughts. This was Stine at his worst. It was ridiculous and
didn't make sense most of the time. The sad thing is that he's
completely capable of writing good books. His Fear Street books were
better than this. Weren't they? Am I completely misremembering my
entire adolescence? I'm almost afraid to reread one and find out. I will say that I thought the "horror" of this book was pretty lame. Okie laughed at her once, followed her a couple of times and called her twice. It was pretty low on the scares and lacked a lot of tension. On the flip side, her parents weren't in Europe. So I guess it had that going for it.
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