**This blog contains adult language.**
Warning: Spoilers Ahead!!! 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. Please do not continue to read if you don't want to know who the “bad guy” is.
From the Back of the Book: Winning isn't everything.... Tania is having the best year of her life. She has a hot boyfriend, she landed the starring role in a student film, and she’s just been voted homecoming queen. But someone is jealous of Tania. Someone plans to ruin her perfect year – even if they have to kill her. Will Tania live to see the homecoming dance?
This book was published in 1997 as part of the Fear Street Universe and this is my first time reading it. I don’t have much to say about the cover. It’s okay but I really had to stare at it for a minute to figure out what I was looking at.
We begin with Eva heading toward the pep rally. Everyone is eager to hear who the homecoming queen will be. Eva’s best friend Tania joins her. I was expecting Tania to be our protagonist but that doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case. Tania is hoping to win homecoming queen and asks Eva if she’s had any psychic flashes about the results. Eva kinds of laughs that off. She’s not really psychic, she can just sense when something is wrong. Sometimes. Not always.
Tania – who was just eager to hear whether she was going to win HQ or not – suddenly does a 180 and says she doesn’t care if she wins. Her luck has been on the rise lately and she kind of feels like she’s had her share of good fortune. Her mom recently remarried and she likes both her stepfather and her new stepbrother (Jeremy) and they moved into a bigger, nicer house in a better part of town. She’s dating the captain of the football team (Sandy) and she’s doing really well in school. She kind of thinks it might be selfish to add homecoming queen to the list. But she definitely wants to.
As Tania and Eva are going down the stairs, Eva feels someone jostle her. She turns to see “a blur of movement” and hands reaching out toward Tania. Tania screams and slides down a couple of stairs before catching her balance. A girl named Leslie rushes to apologize, saying she tripped and fell into Tania. Eva isn’t so sure it was an accident. Leslie is also up for homecoming queen AND she has a major crush on Sandy so eliminating Tania would be in her best interest all around.
Tania scampers off, eager to get to the gym for the announcement. Eva immediately gets one of her feelings of impending doom.
Eva takes her time but eventually gets to the gymnasium. She sees Tania sitting with the other candidates but Leslie is missing. She gets another bad feeling as she makes her way toward the bleachers. To her horror, the sound of a gunshot fills the gym.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
It was just someone crushing a soda can. Eva is literally the only person who reacted to it. She tells us that her nerves are just raw because of the Bad Feeling.
Yes, it’s a character now.
Leslie runs up and joins the rest of the candidates. Eva goes to sit beside Jeremy and Keith. Keith is described as your typical film kid – longish hair, dressed all in black with a hoop earring and perpetually talking about movies. Eva has a crush on Jeremy and wants to ask him to the homecoming dance.
Girl, you never date your friends’ brothers. Girl code.
Keith, true to form, is going on and on about a video he’s making in the hopes of winning a scholarship to film school. He really wants to cast Tania in it, so he says he really hopes she wins homecoming queen. Eva asks him why that matters and he says he HAS to cast the homecoming queen because the title is “Who Killed the Homecoming Queen”.
Also, he's clearing making a short film but they only refer to it as a video in this book so I will do the same.
Jeremy teases him that he only wants to cast Tania because he has a crush on her. Keith pretty much admits that he does. Jeremy says the only way Keith is going to get Tania is to kill Sandy. Eva has another Bad Feeling and I’m already super tired of this. Keith ignores that and says that Leslie really wants to be in the video because she wants to be an actress after high school and she hopes to use it in her portfolio. If she wins homecoming queen, Keith will cast her instead. Eva gets another Bad Feeling.
The pep rally starts and Tania is announced as homecoming queen. She gets up to accept her crown and immediately collapses. Everyone gasps and Jeremy gets super panicked but she gets right back up. She explains that she has issues with her blood sugar and she tends to faint when she gets overly excited. People swarm up to congratulate her and Jeremy is first in line. He seems very enthusiastic in his congratulatory hug and now I’m starting to get a Bad Feeling about Jeremy. He seems to like his stepsister a little too much.
Eva notices that Sandy isn’t among the people surrounding Tania. She crosses paths with Leslie who is mega pissed. She says that Tania always gets her way. She stomps away and Eva gets another Bad Feeling. She thinks she has to convince Leslie not to be angry or something bad will happen so she follows Leslie instead of continuing toward Tania. As she passes by a set of bleachers, she sees Sandy underneath them kissing a girl named Cherise. Eva wonders if she should tell Tania.
YES. Yes, you absolutely should, you terrible excuse for a friend.
Leslie also sees Sandy cheating on Tania and she’s gleeful. She figures this will take Tania down a peg or two.
I hope Eva tells her before Leslie does.
We just skip to the next afternoon. Eva is watching Tania and Sandy fight about him seeing other girls behind her back. Sandy denies cheating but Tania isn’t having it. She breaks up with him. He gets pissed and says she can’t break up with him before the dance. She tries to walk away but he grabs her arm and yanks her back. He says he’ll never let her go and then starts shaking her violently. Eva makes a half-hearted protest but doesn’t really try to help her friend. Sandy switches to choking Tania.
Look, I know this is serious but Stine writes that Tania screams “You’re choking me!” and that ruined the tension for me. It just reminds me of the guy in Friday the 13th part 4 who yells “Oh, God, he’s killing me. He’s killing me.” as he’s dying.
Anyway, Sandy chokes her until she goes limp and then he lets her lifeless body drop to the ground.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
It’s just a scene from Keith’s video. He calls cut and tells them they’ll have to do it again because there was a plane flying overhead and it messed with the audio. Suddenly Eva realizes that Tania didn’t get up when the scene ended. She runs over to find Tania completely unresponsive.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
She just passed out because of low blood sugar again. Keith brings her a Pepsi and she’s fine.
I can’t believe Stine just pulled a twofer on us. Diabolical.
So…..I guess no one told Tania that Sandy was actually cheating on her. Eva is a horrible friend.
Tania tells Keith that she can’t do a reshoot because she has to get to homecoming ceremony practice in the auditorium. He throws a tantrum about it but she doesn’t give in. Eva ends up going with her for some reason. She’s still dithering about whether she should tell Tania about Sandy and Cherise.
THE ANSWER IS YES. Why are you even second-guessing it?
The auditorium is dark when they get there so Tania goes to the stage to turn on the lights. A shadow rushes toward her screaming: “I’m going to kill you, Tania!”
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
It’s Leslie and she’s not really trying to kill anyone. She’s just upset because Tania took the role in Keith’s video away from her. Tania says she had no idea Leslie wanted it and wouldn’t have taken it if she had known. Leslie gears up to tell Tania about Sandy but Eva pulls her away and orders her to keep quiet about it.
I have no words for how horrible she is as a friend.
We just skip to the next afternoon. Eva’s at the mall waiting for Tania so they can shop for homecoming dresses. Jeremy runs up to tell her that Tania had to run back home to pick up something she was wanting to return so she’s going to be late. They head to the food court to get a Coke while they wait. Jeremy just blurts out how grateful he is to be a part of Tania’s family now. His mom died when he was younger and he has struggled since. He says he got into trouble at his old school but doesn’t elaborate. Eva assumes it was something minor like skipping classes. I assume he set something on fire or got into fights or something.
Sandy and Cherise show up and sit nearby. They have their hands all over each other which is pretty ballsy considering they’re in a public place where a lot of their peers hang out. Jeremy sees them and gets pissed off.
He’s honestly very worrisome. I've seen the movies. I know how this goes.
Tania arrives and Jeremy rushes to intercept her so she won’t see Sandy and Cherise. So I guess he’s going to keep it from her too.
Sigh.
We skip ahead again to Monday afternoon. They’re all working on the death scene again for Keith’s video. Eva still hasn’t told Tania anything but she confronts Sandy about it. He says he can explain but he doesn’t.
Keith asks them to run the scene again. Sandy chokes Tania out and she doesn’t get up afterwards. Again. Sandy kneels down to check on her and then screams that she’s dead. Jeremy runs over and checks and confirms that Tania isn’t breathing. Keith runs off to call 911. No one does CPR. No one takes a pulse. Sandy runs off. Jeremy runs off. Eva runs after Jeremy. The two of them end up near the building so they see the ambulance when it arrives. They return to where they left Tania along with the paramedics, a couple of cops and Keith. Tania’s body is gone.
Eva looks up at sees Leslie loitering nearby. She points her out to the cops and screams that she must know what happened to the body. Leslie takes off running but the cops catch her and bring her back. Leslie says she didn’t see anything. She just ran because she was scared. The cops ask her about Tania and Leslie says she never saw Tania. She just saw everyone else panic and run off.
If she saw them run off and she was still there when they got back, she must have seen Tania either get up and walk away or get dragged away. This makes no sense.
Sandy comes back. He says he thought Tania would be waiting in his car but he checked and she wasn’t there.
How did he even know she was gone? I’m so confused. When he ran off, her body was still laying there.
The cops ask why he thought Tania might be in his car and he explains that they cooked up this prank to mess with the others. She was going to fake being dead and then when everyone was freaked out, she was going to jump up and yell ‘surprise’. It’s a very shitty thing to do but I’m not surprised. Every one of these people seems pretty horrible.
So why did he let Keith call 911? He had to know they’d get in huge trouble for that. This makes no sense, Stine.
Eva gets a Bad Feeling that someone is lying and then points out that Jeremy checked Tania and she was definitely dead. Jeremy admits that he was so panicked that he might have made a mistake but then he starts screaming that Sandy killed her. He attacks Sandy, hitting him and then choking him and it takes the cops an alarmingly long time to pull him off. The cops say that Tania is probably just prolonging the prank and she’ll turn up soon. They offer to give Jeremy a ride home instead of arresting him for assault like they should.
Eva goes home and tries to call Tania. There’s no answer. She remembers that Keith had been recording at the time and wonders if he might have captured something on his camera. She calls to ask and he says he had the same thought but he hasn’t checked yet. He tells her to come over and they’ll watch it together. She heads straight over. He starts the tape but it’s blank. He says the camera must have malfunctioned.
He couldn’t have checked before she came over? If I was her, I’d be pissed.
Jeremy bursts in without knocking and says that Tania wasn’t at home. He says that Sandy killed her and he has proof. Eva asks him about it and he says he overheard Sandy and Cherise plotting to kill Tania just before rehearsal.
Keith and Eva don’t really believe him either. He keeps insisting he heard them clearly.
We skip to the next morning. There’s no school because of parent teacher conferences so Eva drives over to Cherise’s house to ask her about what Jeremy overheard. Sandy is there when she arrives so she waits until he leaves. As she approaches the front door she hears Cherise scream: “I’ll kill you too!”
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
It was just the TV. Cherise invites her in and offers her a soda. Eva just blurts out that Jeremy heard her and Sandy plotting to kill Tania the day before. Cherise says they were just rehearsing the scene for the video. Eva admits that this makes perfect sense.
Does it though? Jeremy has been at the rehearsals. Surely he would have recognized dialogue from the script. C'mon, Stine.
The phone rings and it’s a whispery voice saying “I killed Tania. You’re next.”
Character gets a creepy phone call? Check.
Eva gets a Bad Feeling that something isn’t as it seems.
Okay.
We skip to the next day. Eva tells Jeremy and Keith about the creepy call Cherise got. Jeremy is acting really weird and just sort of wanders away. Keith asks Eva if she reported it to the police and she says she did but they didn’t take it seriously.
You know what else I've noticed? Tania's parents haven't reached out to Eva, Tania's BEST FRIEND, to ask if she knows anything. None of the teachers have asked if anyone has any information. None of the other students have been questioned. It's almost like no one else knows Tania is gone.
Or everyone else knows where she is.
Leslie runs up and volunteers to take Tania’s place in the video. Keith says he dropped that project. He’s working on a secret project with Sandy and he doesn’t need anyone else for it at the moment. Leslie isn’t happy with that answer. She takes off, heading back into the school.
Sandy wanders by looking like a zombie. He says he forget his math book or something in his locker. He hasn’t been sleeping and his brain is foggy. Eva’s a little surprised that he seems so distraught about Tania since he’s been cheating on her with Cherise.
Keith offers Eva a ride home but she says she has to get her backpack out of her locker. She goes back into the school and hears voices as she passes the auditorium. She wonders if they’re having homecoming practice without Tania and that makes her sad. As she turns the corner, she sees Leslie running toward her covered in blood.
{{{GASP}}}
No LOLZ this time because it really IS blood. Leslie says she was so mad about the video that she slammed her locker open and the little mirror she keeps inside shattered, slicing open her face and hands.
That was a vicious mirror.
Eva herds Leslie into the bathroom and does her best to clean up the blood. There’s no mention of the actual injuries so I have no idea how bad they were or if they even existed. Leslie thanks her for the help and then takes off. She seems to be in a hurry to get the fuck out of there.
Eva heads for her locker. She pauses when she sees a pool of dark liquid on the floor beneath it but goes ahead and opens it anyway. Sandy’s dead body falls out, a knife protruding from his back. The words “Your Turn Next” are written in blood on the inside of her locker.
I expected this to be the secret project Sandy and Keith were working on, but I guess it’s real. The police come to collect the body and question our group of characters. They pay special attention to Leslie because she was covered in blood and running from the locker area when Eva saw her.
The group leaves the school and goes back to Eva’s house where they basically just say ‘this can’t be happening’ over and over and recap the book for us. Jeremy seems particularly distressed and it’s at this point that I drop him as my main suspect. Stine is making him WAY too obvious. I know it happens. We occasionally get an effing Justin moment but this just feels like misdirection to me. Either none of this is real and it’s something Keith is doing for his film school submission which would involve hiring people to be fake police OR some of it is real but Jeremy didn’t do it. I know that didn’t make much sense but if Sandy is really and truly dead, I think we have two suspects on our hands.
Odds Tania is the bad guy: 50%
Odds Cherise is the bad guy: 50%
Hear me out. When a guy is cheating and he ends up murdered it’s usually either the person he was cheating on or the person he was cheating with. I’m not convinced Tania is dead because the police don’t seem to care and her parents aren’t frantically calling everyone looking for her.
But I’ve been wrong before.
I once didn't even put the bad guy in the fucking blog until the very end because I didn't think he was important.
Eva has a Bad Feeling that something seems wrong.
Someone’s dead.
Maybe.
Probably.
Someone's missing.
Kinda?
Allegedly.
Of course something's wrong, you nitwit.
Her special power just seems like common sense at this point.
To be fair, though, most people seem to lack it so maybe it IS a special power.
Anyway, the phone rings and Eva answers it. A creepy voice says “Your turn next. First Tania. Then Sandy. Then you.”
Well, given that nearly our entire cast is in the living room with Eva right now, that just leaves Tania as the person making the phone calls. Or Sandy if he isn’t really and truly dead. My money’s on Tania. I wonder how she heard about Sandy so fast. Someone in the living room must have told her before they went to Eva’s.
So someone else knows she's only allegedly missing. Keith? Jeremy?
We skip to the next afternoon. Keith has Eva up on the bleachers to do something he’s calling “candid video portraits”. I have no idea what that is but he tells her she just has to introduce herself and then talk about whatever she chooses. She says she can’t think of anything and he tells her that Cherise is on her way over to join them and they can just talk to each other. Eva seems just as confused about this concept as I am. They wait for a bit but Cherise doesn’t show and Eva wants to leave. Keith tells her to stand at the very top of the bleachers and lean casually against the railing for her shot. She does. The railing snaps and she falls, dangling from the bleachers by one hand. Keith rushes over to grab her. It takes awhile but he manages to pull her to safety. When they check the railing, they realize it’s been sawed through so that it will break.
Um.
So Keith is the only one that could have done that, right? No one else knew he was going to have Eva stand there. No one else knew he’d direct her to lean against the railing. It had to have been Keith.
Unless it was Cherise and Cherise was going to suggest that Eva lean against it. If that was the case, wouldn't she have shown up to do that? It doesn't make sense this way.
Suddenly Eva notices someone walking along the top of the bleachers. She’s stunned when it turns out to be Tania.
I knew that bitch wasn’t dead.
Tania says she just heard that Sandy was murdered so she came right over.
Um.
If Sandy is really and truly dead, then Tania made the creepy call. That means she had to have known he was dead at least 24 hours ago. Why is she just showing up now? I fear this book may be filled with plot holes.
Anyway, Tania reveals that she cooked up her disappearance with Jeremy in order to pay everyone back for not telling her that Sandy was cheating on her. They arranged it so Tania would get up during the panic and sneak away to stay with relatives. That’s why her parents and the police were unconcerned. They knew where she was the entire time.
Um.
I really hate to be this girl, but...........
They had no idea that Eva would run off in pursuit of Jeremy. Most people would have stayed with their best friend while the others went to get help. What was the plan if she didn’t leave? Why did they allow the cops to be called? They had to know that they would get in trouble for that later. Why did the cops dismiss it before they’d even been told that Tania was safe and sound at her aunt’s house? Because there’s no way they could have known that when they showed up on the scene. Why did Jeremy beat the shit out of Sandy if he knew Sandy hadn’t killed Tania?
Oh, wait. I think I know that one. He was probably beating the shit out of Sandy because he cheated on Tania.
This book is swiss cheese.
Anyway, Tania was just going to stay gone for awhile to punish them and then reappear to say ‘gotcha’. She also admits to making both of the creepy phone calls. It’s truly a horrible thing to do but all these people are horrible so I don’t care much. Eva gets a Bad Feeling that someone is in danger and they all assume it’s Cherise since she never showed up for her candid portrait thing. Eva theorizes that Cherise is being murdered so they all pile into someone’s car and drive over to Cherise’s house. Even though she should be at the school. Because she was supposed to come directly to the bleachers after class. Which means she wouldn’t have been at home. But whatever. Stine doesn’t care so I guess we don’t need to either.
When they get to Cherise’s house they can hear her screaming for help so they just burst in. She’s crouched by the couch with a knife in her hand. Jeremy is standing a few feet away looking panicked. He turns to run and Tania just flat out tackles him, knocking him into the coffee table. He bangs his head and is out cold.
{{{Note from future me: I still have ABSOLUTELY no idea why Tania tackled him like that. It's just another thing that doesn't make much sense.}}}
Cherise gets up – still holding the knife – and says Jeremy killed Sandy and he tried to kill her. She was able to get the knife away from him just as they came into the house.
Then why was he standing so far away from her?
She says that Jeremy was seeking revenge on her and Sandy because they hurt Tania and that he also threatened to kill Eva because Tania spent too much time with her. She says something like “that must be why he sawed through the railing” but there’s no way that Cherise should even know about that. I mean, I guess Jeremy could have told her when he was telling her everything else but the way she phrased it made it seem like he hadn’t admitted to doing it. So how did she know unless she's the one who did it?
At this point I think we all know she did it.
But that's such an asinine way to try to kill someone when SHE COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN THAT EVA WOULD EVEN BE IN THAT PARTICULAR PLACE OR THAT KEITH WOULD ASK HER TO LEAN AGAINST THE RAILING. IF CHERISE DIDN'T PLAN TO BE THERE TO MAKE IT HAPPEN - AND IT DOESN'T SEEM LIKE SHE DID - THEN THIS DOESN’T MAKE LOGICAL SENSE, STINE!
Cherise wants to call the cops before Jeremy wakes up but the others hesitate for some reason. Maybe because she’s still holding the knife. Jeremy comes to and he accuses Cherise of being the murderer and trying to kill him. We literally have page after page of them accusing each other of murder and calling each other crazy. It’s exhausting to read and feels like a bad SNL skit.
Eva finally realizes that Cherise told on herself with that railing thing. She points it out and Cherise instantly says that all of this is Keith’s fault because he was making Sandy pretend to like her for a video. Keith admits that Sandy was just acting for “hidden cameras” every time he interacted with Cherise in order to get candid reactions from the rest of them. It was a shitty thing to do and I don’t know how they thought Tania would just be okay with it after it was revealed. Cherise says she killed Sandy when she found out that he never even liked her and it was all fake.
This is weak, Stine. Very weak.
One of them threatens to call the cops but Cherise says it will just be their word against hers. She still plans to pin everything on Jeremy. Keith holds up the camera and says he’s been recording the entire thing. Cherise rushes him, trying to get the camera. When that doesn’t work, she tries to stab him but he deflects the blade with the camera. They’re able to subdue Cherise on the couch and then they call the cops.
The police take Cherise away. Keith realizes they’ve forgotten to take the tape as evidence and everyone wants to see it, so they pop it into the VCR. Nothing but a blue screen appears. Keith sighs that the camera malfunctioned again and the book ends there.
That was messy even for a Stine. So much of it didn’t really make sense. It would have been a better book if Jeremy had been the bad guy, trying to keep his new sister all to himself. Alas, we never quite get the good book though.
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