A lot of strange stuff happens on Fear Street, from the ominously hulking ruins of Simon Fear’s burned out mansion to odd sounds in the Fear Street woods. If somebody offers you a job on Fear Street, you’re probably putting your life on the line to make that paycheck. If someone invites you over to their house on Fear Street, they might be a ghost. And if someone tells you there’s going to be an awesome party in the Fear Street woods this weekend, you’ll be better off staying at home curled up with a good book and hearing about the mayhem that ensued when you get to school on Monday morning. While the danger of Fear Street seems to be pretty pervasive and free floating, there are a handful of places that are recurring sites of horror, including Simon Fear’s mansion and 99 Fear Street.
R.L. Stine’s 99 Fear Street: House of Evil is a trilogy: The First Horror, The Second Horror, and The Third Horror (all 1994). While 99 Fear Street—both the trilogy and the house itself—are clearly positioned within Stine’s geography of Fear Street and the larger Fear Street mythos, in some ways, these books are a departure from the usual, where there’s something scary going on, there’s often a combination of the potentially supernatural and a logical explanation, and most of the time, everyone makes it out alive. In 99 Fear Street, there’s definitely something scary going on … and after that, all bets are off. 99 Fear Street also channels a wide range of larger horror genre allusions, a metatextual engagement that Stine doesn’t really bother with in most of his other novels.
The horror begins when the Frazier family moves into 99 Fear Street: mom, dad, two teenage twin daughters—Cally and Kody—and their younger brother James. The Fraziers aren’t from Shadyside and don’t know any better than to buy a rundown house on Fear Street (though you’d think the name would kind of give it away). The house is in terrible shape, but it was really cheap and this big move represents a fresh start for the Fraziers. The horrors start so quickly and become so all-encompassing that we never learn what it’s a fresh start from or what brought them to Shadyside in the first place; neither of the Frazier parents seems to leave the house to go to work, so they likely didn’t relocate for a job. They lived in an apartment before coming to Shadyside, so the house is a rung up on the real estate ladder, but why this house in this town?
Buy the Book
A House With Good Bones
Some of the creepy occurrences are explainable, or are scares that end up being not the scary after all.Cally thinks a ghost is moving things around in her room and tapping on her door at night, but it turns out to be her sister Kody, who wants Cally to believe in ghosts so the family stops making fun of Kody for being the only one who buys the supernatural explanation. Later, a branch falls and almost hits Cally but doesn’t, while a kitchen window slams down on Kody’s hands, though somehow she ends up not being hurt at all. However, things quickly escalate and the horrors get real: Cally and Kody’s father is accidentally stabbed with a carving knife when he’s trying to cut the roast for dinner and ends up needing twelve stitches. A cute boy named Anthony comes over to visit and his hand is mangled in the garbage disposal while he’s helping with the dishes. Putrid boiling green goo begins pouring from the bathroom sink. When Mr. Frazier tries to locate Mr. Lurie, the real estate agent who sold them the house, he finds out that the man doesn’t exist and the address on his business card is nothing but an empty lot. James gets an adorable puppy named Cubby, but Cubby disappears, and while they can hear the poor dog crying somewhere within the walls of the house, they can’t find him. Then the same thing happens to James, who cries from within the walls for his increasingly panicked parents to save him. Their mom falls down the stairs and breaks her arm; their dad is stricken blind. When Cally does finally see a ghost, it is her own, a harbinger of doom and her own impending, unavoidable death. There’s no way out. 99 Fear Street plays for keeps.
The First Horror abounds with larger genre allusions and referents. The real estate deal too good to be true has strong Amityville Horror vibes: the Fraziers have put every penny they have into buying this house and even when they want to leave, they have no other options and nowhere else to go. Much like George Lutz, Mr. Frazier begins to lose the thread of day-to-day life, walking around the house, talking to himself, and becoming increasingly erratic. Cubby and James’s cries from within the walls invoke the dislocation of Poltergeist (1982), though with more dismal results, as Cubby and James remain lost, absorbed by the house. The discovery that 99 Fear Street was built on top of graves—in this case, the victims of Simon and Angelica Fear—also echoes the Poltergeist narrative. Stine goes old-school with his introduction of Mr. Hankers and Mrs. Nordstrom, a handyman and cleaning lady who inexplicably show up and offer their services to the Frazier family, with their peripheral omnipresence and malevolence calling to mind the dangerous spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in Henry James’ classic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). Mr. Hankers is supposed to be dealing with the house’s rat infestation and every day he shows up and disappears into the basement, but what he’s doing down there is anybody’s guess, because there are still loads of rats. Mrs. Nordstrom seems to be always quietly cleaning something in the background, though the house never actually gets cleaner as she lurks about and tuts over the strange goings-on. How the Fraziers can afford to pay two domestic employees when they can’t even afford a hotel room to escape from the house that’s trying to kill them remains an abiding mystery, but whether they’re being paid or not, Hankers and Nordstrom keep coming back (and we’ll come back to them too, as we explore the second and third books in the trilogy). In many ways, The First Horror is a very isolated narrative—the Fraziers rarely leave the house, which is the site of all the terror that befalls them—but as a result of these genre narrative connections, the novel feels deeper and more expansive than most of Stine’s other Fear Street books.
Cally Frazier is the common element throughout all three books of the trilogy: the bubbly, positive protagonist of The First Horror, she becomes the vengeful ghost left to haunt 99 Fear Street when the surviving members of her family flee at the end of the first book. In the final chapter of The First Horror, Cally is absorbed by the house, when the floor of her room turns into a kind of tarpit beneath her feet. When the house allows Cally’s discorporated spirit to roam freely, “as she floated up, she felt the century-old rage, felt all the anger, all the fury, all the smoldering evil … Cally floated through the house, floated through a new world of swirling dark shadows, a ghost, an evil ghost in an evil house, unaware of everything but her own hatred and anger” (The First Horror 143). Cally’s ghostly point of view is featured sporadically throughout The Second Horror and The Third Horror, interspersed with the perspectives of the living people who take center stage in those stories, and while Cally is frequently depersonalized and Othered in these glimpses, reduced to simply “evil,” there are occasional glimpses of her complexity, her motivation, and—particularly in The Third Horror—the dissonance between the evil that has consumed her and the remaining elements of her individual identity.
The Second Horror adheres more closely to the traditional Fear Street pattern, though it builds on several of the unique characteristics introduced in The First Horror. A new family—the McCloys—moves into 99 Fear Street a year later, and Cally is there to welcome them. The McCloys at least moved to Shadyside on purpose and for a specific reason: Mr. McCloy is an academic whose research focuses on ritual magic, and while the McCloys have lived all over the world, he has accepted a teaching position at Waynesbridge Junior College in the next town over. (Ritual magic doesn’t seem like it would really be a high-demand focus at a junior college in the rural Midwest, but then again, Mr. and Mrs. McCloy go to a fancy faculty tea at the college later in the book, so maybe Waynesbridge Junior College is special. Or maybe they’ve been keeping their eye on the strange goings-on in neighboring Shadyside and figure it wouldn’t hurt to have an expert in the field kicking around, for survival’s sake). The McCloys’ global experiences are literally on display in their decor, which includes tribal masks, armor, spears, and blow guns, a problematic appropriation that becomes a symbol of exotic mystery (particularly for the girls the McCloy’s teenage son Brandt hopes to impress) and a source of death and danger. Before they have even properly begun moving in, the ghosts use one of these spears to kill Brandt’s cat Ezra. (Seriously, NOT cool: first Cubby, now Ezra. This is not a pet-friendly house).
Brandt is the central character of The Second Horror and he’s presented as a bit of a mystery himself, with an undisclosed “condition” (The Second Horror 8). He’s not supposed to lift heavy boxes, overexert himself, or play basketball, and he bruises really easily. Unlike The First Horror, a good deal of The Second Horror takes place outside of the house, as Brandt goes to school, makes friends, and has a pretty typical high school boy life. Other than his mysterious “condition,” Brandt’s defining characteristic is that he seems to be a bit of a ladies’ man. He likes girls a lot and he doesn’t seem to feel any need to pick just one. There’s a cute girl at school named Jinny, and the fact that Jinny has a jealous boyfriend who likes to beat people up doesn’t bother Brandt in the slightest. Then there’s Meg, who Brandt also likes, and never mind the fact that Meg and Jinny are best friends. Finally, there’s Abbie, a pretty neighbor girl who goes to a different school and occasionally pops by to say hello. While the house’s shenanigans sometimes derail Brandt’s plans, he makes dates and makes out with all three of these girls. And while Suki Thomas is frequently lambasted throughout the Fear Street series for being “loose” because she dates a couple of guys at once or is seen out with someone else’s boyfriend, it’s apparently totally okay when Brandt does it. Sure, there’s some drama and conflict, but it pretty much boils down to Brandt having a great time watching a couple of girls fight over him, and it doesn’t seem to slow him down at all, personally or socially. It’s the same old exhausting and predictable gender-based double standard, and while it’s not surprising, it’s still infuriating. Brandt’s girl-juggling takes a tragic turn when Jinny and Meg show up together at his house, he steps out for a few minutes to help his dad with a tree mystery—the tree doesn’t want to be cut down and actually seems to be bleeding, but the guys dismiss this as simply an oddity, not another infernal sign—and goes back inside to find both girls near death, with blow gun darts in their throats. Brandt also gets a bit of a horrifying surprise when it turns out that Abbie is actually Cally’s ghost screwing with him.
The Second Horror is less grounded in the larger narrative of the house’s history than The First Horror, where stories of Fear Street, Simon and Angelica Fear, and the family who built the house but never lived in it are frequent narrative touchstones. This history is largely supplanted in The Second Horror, where Brandt hears urban legend-style stories about how a family lived in his house a year ago, their daughter died, and the family moved away; these stories are heavy on the spooky, light on the details, and don’t really provide Brandt with any true or useful information. However, Jinny and Meg’s near-death experience draws on some of this past mystery, with their attack mirroring that of the Luries, the family who built the house. When Mr. Lurie took his family to the half-finished house to show them its progress, he left his wife and children alone in the living room for five minutes, then came back to find them all brutally decapitated and their heads missing. Mr. Frazier sees these heads in the attic in The First Horror and stumbles around, mumbling in inarticulate horror. No one sees any heads in The Second Horror, but the inexplicable attack on Jinny and Meg when the girls are left alone in the same living room for a few minutes unites these two narratives. Even when it remains unknown or unspoken by the characters themselves, the same horrors keep appearing in the same places, a foundational terror that lives on. Mr. Hankers and Mrs. Nordstrom are back in The Second Horror, dealing with rats and cleaning things, respectively, though they still remain peripheral, creepy shadows in the background of more overt horrors. Another tragic echo of The First Horror that reverberates through The Second Horror is that of James and Cubby, who Brandt hears calling through the walls. In The First Horror, the Fraziers knocked out walls in their search for James and Cubby, only to come up empty-handed, but when Brandt breaks through, he finds James and Cubby’s two small, sad bodies tangled together. The discovery is horrifying, but hopefully provides a resolution, with the removal of their remains setting them free from their imprisonment within the house.
The Second Horror takes a wacky Fear Street turn, when it turns out that Brandt’s condition is that he’s actually dead. Or undead. Brandt died while the McCloys were living overseas and rather than mourning their son and laying him to rest, Mr. McCloy put some of his ritual magic knowledge into action to steal the life force of another man, using it to revive his son. Brandt is aware of his resurrected state, but seems pretty blase about it; he doesn’t feel any guilt about benefiting from someone else’s life force and rather than feeling elated about having a second chance, he’s mostly just annoyed with his parents every time they remind him that he’s not quite like the other boys. Brandt’s body also isn’t what it once was and seems to have some trouble holding together, as his arm just pops out of his socket one day while he’s at school. While Brandt’s return from the dead raises some questions about whether the McCloys chose to move, were driven out, or had to flee to escape retribution, these are questions that go unanswered. The man’s death, however, does not go unavenged, as his spirit has followed the McCloys to Shadyside, further complicating the amalgamation of ghostly presences at 99 Fear Street. In the end, Cally is unable to destroy Brandt—because he’s already dead, not through lack of any will or effort on her part—but the man whose life force has been keeping Brandt upright is successful, with the spirit reclaiming his life force and Brandt collapsing in a pretty dramatic and gross process of accelerated decomposition, as time catches up with him and death reasserts itself.
Finally The Third Horror gets properly metatextual. Foreshadowing films like Scream 3 (2000) or Halloween: Resurrection (2002), the third book takes readers and Kody Frazier back to the beginning, returning to where it all started as Kody heads back to 99 Fear Street to make a movie about the horrors her family faced there, in which she will play the part of her sister Cally. In The Third Horror, Scream 3, and Halloween: Resurrection, we are invited to explore the places where reality and fiction blur into one another, as survivors face their pasts, real places become overlaid with the legends that surround them, and the true story becomes fictionalized and commodified for a media audience.
Kody’s motivations in doing this movie are complicated: she is an aspiring actress and this could be a big break for her. After fleeing 99 Fear Street, she and her parents moved to Los Angeles (again, with what money???) to get as far away from the horrors they endured as possible. As an actress, this is a good opportunity for her, though she’s also aware that her casting is an exploitative publicity gimmick. Turning to more personal motivation, Kody is back at 99 Fear Street because when she and her family left, she caught a glimpse of Cally’s ghost in a window and promised her sister she would come back for her one day. Kody is looking for connection, closure, and the chance to properly say goodbye. She’s also existing at the intersection of a range of overlapping traumas: coming back to 99 Fear Street of course calls up a range of horrific memories for her, which are compounded and complicated by reliving some of these scenes of horror alongside the actors who are playing her family, including her dead siblings. Kody is also being harassed and bullied by Persia, the actor who is playing Kody herself, and who continually undermines Kody’s confidence, verbally abuses her, and physically attacks her. Finally, when the cast and crew get to 99 Fear Street to start making their movie, things (of course) begin going horribly wrong. A stand-in is killed in a gruesome accident, there’s another horrifying garbage disposal incident that echoes Anthony’s maiming in The First Horror (the exact scene the filmmakers are setting up to recreate), a prop knife is swapped out for a real one, and a special effects machine designed to pump out putrid goo disastrously malfunctions. Kody begins hearing her sister’s voice calling to her and finds herself uncertain how much of this might be Cally’s ghost and how much might be either wishful thinking or the effect of her own overstressed, traumatized brain, which drives her to further distress and distraction.
When Kody is finally reunited with her sister, this encounter is not all that she hoped it would be. Cally lures Kody into the basement and when Kody goes to embrace her sister, a “shadow rolled down over her like darkness falling” (The Third Horror 131), as Cally imprisons Kody and takes her place on set, where she stabs Persia and badly burns the director with a spotlight. With this violence achieved, Cally is ready to release Kody back to her real life, telling her sister that “I don’t think you’re going to be a movie star after all. I think you’re going to spend a lot of years in prison—or in a mental hospital” (The Third Horror 151). It’s a pretty ingenious plan, actually: several cast and crew members have already suspected Kody of sabotaging the film, either intentionally or because the trauma of returning to 99 Fear Street has been too much for her. And “it wasn’t me, it was the vengeful ghost of my sister” doesn’t seem like a defense that will hold up in court. While there’s plenty for Kody to worry about in terms of what comes next, however, her main focus continues to be on understanding why Cally has changed and how she can set her sister’s spirit free.
Cally has become evil, for sure, influenced and absorbed by the overwhelming spirit of the house and its dark, tainted history. But in some ways, she has also been manipulated, controlled by Mr. Hankers, Mrs. Nordstrom, and Mr. Lurie. These three keep coming back, repeated presences in every iteration of 99 Fear Street and the horrors that occur there. Kody reminds her sister of the stories they heard when they moved in, how when “the workers dug the foundation, they found bodies buried in the ground … The people buried here were the victims of Angelica and Simon Fear. Remember?” (The Third Horror 152). Mr. Hankers and Mrs. Nordstrom are presumably two of these victims, tortured and murdered by the Fears, their bodies buried in unmarked graves where the house would one day stand. Mr. Lurie is the spirit of the man who built 99 Fear Street in 1960, only to have his family murdered in the house before it was even completed, a horror that he now sells to one family after another. Cally has done some pretty terrible things, but Kody never gives up on the goodness she still believes is somewhere within her sister, displacing the responsibility to Hankers, Nordstrom, and Lurie, who she tells Cally are “controlling you. They’re using you … They’re making you do these horrible things” (The Third Horror 153). That has to be easier for Kody to believe than that her own sister wants to kill her but it’s definitely a gamble. The gamble pays off, however, and Cally covers her sister’s retreat until Kody is able to escape, then blows up the house with dynamite the director had secretly stashed in the basement, with the house’s destruction hopefully ending the horror once and for all.
The 99 Fear Street: House of Evil trilogy is a wild ride. While it is firmly embedded in the larger Fear Street mythos, particularly in the invocation of the evils of Simon and Angelica Fear, it often feels separate from the larger Fear Street series. There are few familiar faces from the other books, little overlap with the other contemporary urban legends (aside from the generally cursed nature of Fear Street), and Shadyside High School and its teen dramas are limited to The Second Horror. The trilogy itself is also a bit uneven, with the whiplash of shifting horror traditions from one book to another. It’s a haunted house story that taps into the complexities of historical horrors and the interconnections between past and present. It’s a ghost story with a wide range of ghosts, including a relatable protagonist who becomes a vengeful spirit, though readers are never entirely disconnected from her perspective. The horrors range from the unbelievable and slightly ridiculous adventures of Brandt the girl-crazy zombie to the truly heartbreaking, with Cubby and James’s terrified cries echoing within the walls, as they remain audible but forever out of reach, impossible to reclaim. 99 Fear Street taps into timeless evils, larger genre conventions, and the unique aesthetic of ‘90s teen horror fiction to create something distinctive, simultaneously familiar and new, offering recognizable conventions while keeping the reader guessing, always wondering which direction the next horror will come from.
Alissa Burger is an associate professor at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. She writes about horror, queer representation in literature and popular culture, graphic novels, and Stephen King. She loves yoga, cats, and cheese.
