Unsupervised teenagers and attempted murder seem to go hand in hand. When these young men and women are given the go-ahead to have an adults-free party on Fear Island or in the dark depths of the Fear Street Woods, violence and mayhem are inevitable. In both R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books The Surprise Party (1989) and All-Night Party (1997), teenagers are excited about their newfound freedom and independent fun, but this thrill soon gives way to terror when the threats begin.
In The Surprise Party, Ellen Majors is coming back to Shadyside a year after her boyfriend Evan’s tragic death in the Fear Street Woods. Nobody is exactly sure how Evan died, but the “official” story is that he tripped while carrying a rifle and accidentally shot himself. Evan was allegedly alone in the woods when it happened, though Ellen and Evan’s friend Brian heard the gunshot and found Evan’s lifeless body. They all come together in an unlikely intersection, with Ellen pursuing Evan into the woods and Brian already in the woods playing a role-playing game called Wizards and Dungeons (a thinly-veiled callback to the Satanic Panic discourse surrounding Dungeons and Dragons) with his friend Dwayne. Ellen is traumatized by the loss of her boyfriend and the discovery of his body, and her family moves away shortly after Evan’s death. But now she’s coming back to visit and her friends decide they should welcome her back with a surprise party. There are just a few problems with this plan: first of all, Ellen hasn’t actually reached out to any of them since she moved away, so no one’s really all that sure she wants to see them or if she does, how awkward things might be. Second, the place they choose for the surprise party is the old Halsey Manor House, an old house in mid-restoration, deep in the heart of the Fear Street Woods, with no regard for whether or not this might be a difficult spot for Ellen to revisit.
While Ellen’s friend Meg Dalton is excited to get planning the party, not everyone is on board, and she starts getting creepy phone calls and threatening notes. She leaves the invitations on her desk in study hall and when she comes back, they’ve all been cut into tiny pieces. But Meg is committed and no one’s going to talk her out of having the party, even when her refusal to give it up results in her boyfriend Tony breaking up with her. A mysterious car tries to run Meg down while she’s walking home one night and Brian is badly beaten in the Fear Street Woods. But still, the show—or rather, the party—must go on, no matter how dangerous it gets.
The mystery seems pretty straightforward when about halfway through the book, a chapter features Tony’s perspective, as he recalls the night Evan died and the role he played in his friend’s death: “Once again he felt the hunting rifle in his hands, Evan’s rifle. Once again they struggled for control of it, screaming at each other, pulling with all their strength, out of control, out of all reason, pulling, pulling, pulling … And the gun went off. Just a loud pop. Like a firecracker, almost … And Evan fell … Tony had killed Evan” (113). This recollection seems fairly clear, but even as Tony remembers that fateful night, he’s still not certain about his motivation or the chain reaction of choices that brought him to that moment, thinking that he “hadn’t meant to shoot Evan. … Or had he? … That’s what he couldn’t decide. What was he thinking at the moment? Was he thinking that he wanted to kill his friend, Ellen’s boyfriend? Was he thinking he had to kill him?” (113, emphasis original). Tony vacillates back and forth between whether he had intentionally killed Evan or if it was all just a terrible accident and just can’t be certain one way or the other, thinking that “These thoughts were going to drive him crazy” (114). Tony is willing to do whatever he has to do to keep his secret, including killing Meg, Ellen, and Brian, but the truth of the night Evan died in the Fear Street Woods is more complicated that meets the eye.
Ellen wasn’t alone when she pursued Evan into the woods: she and Meg’s boyfriend Tony had been secretly seeing one another behind the others’ backs, and right before Evan ran into the woods, Meg had broken up with him to be with Tony. So when Evan ran into the woods, both Ellen and Tony followed him, which led to the struggle over the gun that killed Evan. Brian went to investigate the gunshot and Tony threatened to kill them all if anyone told what happened, which has so far ensured Ellen and Brian’s silence. The wild card is Dwayne, who was in the woods playing Wizards and Dungeons with Brian: he told Brian he was heading home when they heard the gunshot, but then followed the others instead, and saw Evan’s body … which wasn’t as lifeless as it appeared. As Dwayne tells the others at the ill-fated surprise party, once the others had fled in the woods that night, “I went up close and took a look. Evan wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even hit. He had hit his head on a rock and was knocked unconscious” (160-1). Dwayne and Evan had previously argued because Evan didn’t want Dwayne dating his sister, so Dwayne took this opportunity to get his revenge, saying he “taught Evan a lesson. A final lesson. He was dead already, right? At least three other people thought so. So … I just made it official” (161).
As the truth comes out, Meg has to rethink several of the important relationships in her life, realizing that neither her boyfriend nor her best friend are the people she thought they were. Both are capable of living with (at least what they believe to be) murder and keep that secret from her, all while continuing to playact their way through their relationships with her–Tony as a devoted boyfriend and Ellen as an estranged but enthusiastically reunited friend. Meg had hoped to surprise Ellen with the party in the Fear Street Woods, but Meg’s the one who gets some pretty unpleasant surprises. And in the end, it turns out that Ellen knew about the party the whole time, using this get together to help orchestrate an elaborate prank to trick Tony into confessing when she and Brian get Evan’s brother Mike (who bears a strong resemblance to Evan) to show up at the party, pretending to be Evan back from the dead. Everyone’s surprised in one way or another—Todd that he didn’t actually murder Evan, Meg that no one’s who she thought they were, everyone else by “undead” Evan—and the party is the least of their worries. Tony’s ready to confess and finally face the consequences, but Dwayne shoots Tony, takes Meg and Ellen hostage. He drags them to the house’s rundown kitchen, figuring no one will look for them there, and drops his bombshell. The girls save themselves through the variation of a game they used to play as children that they call “Eek! A Mouse,” which is literally just them screaming as loud as they can to startle people. Ellen screams, Meg whacks Dwayne in the face with a cast iron frying pan, and that’s a wrap on the party.
While Meg and the others have their party off the beaten path in the Fear Street Woods, in All-Night Party, Gretchen Davies and her friends are even more cut off from the outside world, alone on Fear Island for a surprise birthday party when a storm sets in. Hannah Waters, Gil Shepherd, Jackson Kane, Patrick Munson, and Gretchen have cooked up an elaborate plan to “kidnap” their friend Cindy to whisk her away to an all-night birthday party in a cabin on the island, far from adult supervision. They unadvisedly set up this “kidnapping” by sneaking into Cindy’s house at night and tensions run even higher when Patrick pulls out a gun, terrifying his friends. Patrick justifies his actions by saying that he heard from his policeman father than there’s an escaped murderer who might be hiding out in the Fear Street Woods, which seems like a pretty good reason to cancel the party and catch a movie or something instead, but they proceed as planned, figuring as long as they stick together, they probably won’t get murdered.
Gretchen’s boyfriend Marco isn’t invited to the birthday party because Gretchen’s getting ready to break up with him. Marco is definitely not a catch: as Gretchen reflects, “he had a terrible temper … Everything had to be done his way. Or else. The littlest thing could send Marco into a rage … Gretchen didn’t like admitting it to herself, but she was a little bit afraid of Marco” (21-2, emphasis original). It’s a recipe for disaster when Marco finds out about the party and shows up anyway, telling Gretchen “You can’t get away from me so easily … Don’t you know that?” (22).
Her friends have gone to a lot of trouble to make Cindy’s birthday one to remember, but she’s not particularly grateful. They’ve brought her a pile of presents, but none of them are good enough. Cindy keeps busy flirting with everyone else’s boyfriends, including Hannah’s boyfriend Gil, who used to go out with Cindy. On top of that, Hannah is angry at Cindy because Cindy beat out Hannah for a competitive scholarship, which Hannah was relying on to get out of Shadyside. Cindy doesn’t have any financial need, but is all too happy to take something Hannah wants, just so that Hannah can’t have it. Cindy’s making a lot of enemies out of her friends, which raises an awful lot of questions when she turns up stabbed to death in the kitchen of the cabin.
Everyone’s a suspect and everyone has a motive, though all clues seem to point directly toward Patrick: his hands are cut, there’s flour from the kitchen floor on his shoe, his baseball cap is in Cindy’s hand, and the knife used to stab Cindy is tucked into his rolled up sleeping bag. Patrick is adamant about his innocence, begging his friends to “Please, just think about it … Somebody is trying to make me look guilty. I’m not stupid. If I were the killer, I wouldn’t leave clues all over the cabin” (108). He points the finger at the escaped murderer, though the familiarity with the cabin and Patrick’s belongings suggest it’s likely someone more familiar with the group of friends and their complicated dramas. Patrick talks his friends into believing his innocence … which makes it all the more of a betrayal when it turns out that he actually did it, killing Cindy because she kept teasing him about how she knew his dark secret and all about what he did before he moved to Shadyside. She’s bluffing, just giving him a hard time to get under his skin, but it turns out Patrick actually does have a secret: he set a fire in Waynesbridge, though his dad was able to hush it up. There’s also actually no escaped murderer: Patrick made the whole thing up to keep his friends off balance, on edge, and looking in another direction.
The lack of adult supervision is definitely a problem in The Surprise Party and All-Night Party and while the girls make some bad choices, it’s the guys that are the most unsettling. Even the “nice” guys are capable of doing terrible things and none of them are willing to take no for an answer. In The Surprise Party, Tony offers to come over and keep Meg company after the scare of the threatening phone calls (which he himself made), but she tells him he can’t because she has a paper to work on for school. “No” apparently doesn’t mean “no” to Tony though, who keeps meeting every refusal with “Was that a yes?” and “But you mean yes, right?” (16, emphasis), until Meg gives in “happily” (17). Dwayne is interested in Evan’s sister Shannon and is always cornering her in the hallways at school or when they run into each other at parties, refusing to believe that she’s really not interested in him. And Tony also has a bad temper, though Meg often shrugs it off and makes excuses for him. The guys in All-Night Party aren’t any better.Marco is possessive, ignores Gretchen’s clearly stated boundaries, and is potentially violent. Jackson is quiet but also makes Gretchen uncomfortable: he stays a bit outside of the main action and always seems to be watching Gretchen when she looks at him. Once things start getting scary at the cabin, Jackson keeps turning up in the shadows when Gretchen least expects him, but in the end, these red flags are pretty much dismissed when it turns out he likes Gretchen, which allegedly explains all of his otherwise creepy behavior. And Patrick, as previously mentioned, is a murderer.
In both The Surprise Party and All-Night Party, the parties serve as a backdrop for the interpersonal drama in these friend groups, a pressure cooker that brings all of their simmering conflicts and hidden secrets to the surface. The parties are the kids’ chance to cut loose, though once everything’s out in the open, it’s impossible to get it back in, and life will never be the same. The party favors are terrifying and not everyone makes it out alive: these are guest lists it’s better not to be on.
