Romance is a major theme in ‘90s teen horror: someone’s always hooking up, breaking up, going out with someone they shouldn’t, or wishing they could be with someone they can’t have. Teenage love is never easy, but it gets even more complicated when someone tries to have it all by secretly dating multiple girls (or less frequently, guys). And when the truth comes out, things get complicated, which is the case in Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall book Deadly Attraction (1993) and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books Double Date (1994) and Killer’s Kiss (1997).
In all three of these books, male protagonists carry on relationships with multiple girls, with varying levels of subterfuge. Deadly Attraction’s Robert Q. Parker III is just having a bit of fun with a girl from Salem until his “real” girlfriend comes back to him, Double Date’s Bobby Newkirk wants to date two identical twins without either one finding out, and in Killer’s Kiss, Vincent Milano can’t make up his mind between wild Delia and “good girl” Karina, so he just keeps dating them both. As far as these guys are concerned, all’s fair in love and war, and they go to pretty outrageous lengths to keep dating as many girls as they can … though the girls are also willing to go pretty far to get their guy or in some cases, their revenge.
Many of Hoh’s Nightmare Hall books are quite insular, focusing on the on-campus community of Salem University. While the students make trips off campus for a bite at the local diner or pizza place, or to do some shopping in town, there isn’t a lot of authentic interaction between the people who live in town and the Salem University students, with a pretty stark division of town and gown. But worlds collide when Robert Q. starts dating Darlene, a waitress from the local diner. She is infatuated with him and does everything she can to fit in with him and his friends. But it’s all for naught: Robert Q. is just having some fun with Darlene until his ex-girlfriend Gerrie gets tired of dating his friend Richard and comes back to him. When Robert Q. brings Darlene to a fraternity party, and then gets back together with Gerrie, Darlene quickly becomes disposable as far as Robert Q. is concerned. A Salem University student named Hailey comforts Darlene in the bathroom after Darlene sees Robert Q. and Gerrie getting cozy together, and the two girls overhear Robert Q. talking with Richard as he says “Look, Richard, twenty bucks is my final offer. You take the townie home. Get her out of here. Just drop her at her house. It’s on Fourth Street. Not that far. Twenty bucks for twenty minutes, that’s not bad” (31). Darlene and Gerrie are very different, in terms of both social class and life experience, but as far as Robert Q. and Richard are concerned, they’re a lot like moveable game pieces, capable of being picked up, passed back and forth, and disposed of at will.
Robert Q. and Gerrie seem well on the road to reconciliation, at least until someone beans Gerrie in the head with a rock outside the fraternity party and she has to be rushed to the hospital. Someone sets Robert Q.’s sports car on fire and when Richard catches someone trying to steal his car at the mall and tries to stop them, the perpetrator hits Richard with his own car, killing him. Many of the Salem University students see Darlene as the prime suspect and while Hailey stands up for her, she starts to have doubts of her own—especially because Darlene refuses to let go of her belief that she and Robert Q. are destined to be together and it’s just a matter of time before he comes back to her. Hailey’s alternate suspect is Darlene’s brother, who is a Salem University student, but Hailey doesn’t know his name and can’t figure out who he is to track him down and ask him a few questions.
Hailey does eventually solve this mystery:Darlene’s brother is actually her half-brother, has a different last name, and happens to be the guy Hailey herself has recently started dating, Finn Conran—but it’s actually Finn’s friend Pete Torrance that they all ought to be worried about. Pete has been friends with Darlene and Finn since they were all kids and while he has had a crush on Darlene for years, she’s never given him a chance. So he figures if he can take out the competition, frame her brother for the attacks, and basically make sure he’s her only remaining option, she’ll have to go out with him. Pete lures Hailey to Darlene and Finn’s house, planning to murder her and frame Finn, but she defends herself with chemicals from Finn’s photography dark room, traps Pete in the basement, and calls the police, saving herself before Finn can come to her rescue, though she sure is happy to see him when he shows up. Even Darlene gets a happy ending of sorts, reunited with her ex-boyfriend Bo (though there’s a bucketload of red flags in that relationship too, including a troubling level of obsession on both sides).
Double Date’s Bobby Newkirk is conceited and obnoxious. He dates and discards one girl after another, doesn’t spare a single thought for their feelings or see them as human beings deserving of respect or consideration, and feels that it’s his duty to date as many girls as possible, because he doesn’t want to “deprive” any of them of the (dubious) pleasure of his company. When he sees identical twins Bree and Samantha Wade, he bets his friends he can go out with both girls in a single weekend, without either of them finding out about the other. Much like Robert Q. and Richard in Deadly Attraction, he views the girls largely interchangeable. When his friend Paul says “I couldn’t tell them apart […] Which one was Bree and which one was Samantha?”, Bobby’s response is “What difference does it make? […] They’re both totally hot! […] Talk about dating two girls at once! What would it be like to go out with twins? Wow” (10). And, confident in his desirability and powers of persuasion, Bobby goes for it, asking Bree to come see his band play on Friday night and meeting up with Samantha at the mall on Saturday.
Bobby quickly learns that there are some major differences between the twins: Bree is quiet and reserved, while Samantha is more of a risk-taker, capping off their date night at the mall by shoplifting earrings from a jewelry store and running from security guards. Samantha knows that Bobby is dating both of them and Bree starts to get suspicious, which is when things begin to take some pretty wacky turns. First, Samantha warns Bobby that Bree could be potentially dangerous, telling him that if she finds out about Bobby dating them both, there’s no telling what might happen. Samantha hints that Bree has a history of instability, though she doesn’t go into detail, telling Bobby that “She’s starting to go over the edge. You don’t know her. She’s fragile—like glass […] If she breaks, she could do anything” (62, emphasis original). One of Bobby’s many ex-girlfriends, Melanie, is friends with the Wade twins and tries to steer him away with cryptic warnings as well. But no challenge or danger is too big for Bobby and he keeps on dating both sisters, confident that he can tell them apart by the small butterfly tattoo that Samantha has shown him on her shoulder, which distinguishes her from her sister. Things get even more complicated when Bree tells him that they have a secret third sister, Jennilynn, who is actually the unstable one. She tried to kill Samantha and Bree, and for everyone’s safety, she lives with their aunt and uncle now, but it seems like she has tracked them down and is trying to make their lives miserable again … and claim Bobby for herself, which is simultaneously an ego boost and a mind game, as Bobby goes back through his encounters with the girls, trying to figure out who he was with when, who he should be afraid of, and whether or not he can level up by making out with triplets instead of twins, even if it could be potentially fatal.
Jennilynn lures him to her family’s cabin in the woods and knocks him unconscious. When he wakes up, he’s in his T-shirt and underwear and tied to a chair as she pours honey all over him and then dumps a box full of biting ants on his head, as he screams and tries to free himself. Jennilynn flees, Bobby finally gets loose, and when he escapes the cabin, he runs into Melanie, who tells him she came to the cabin looking for Jennilynn and offers him a ride to the Wades’ house so he can warn them (but not before she digs some beach towels out of the trunk to avoid him getting her car set all sticky. Dude is a mess). But when they get to the Wade house, the joke is definitely on Bobby, as he is humiliated and mocked by all the girls he’s used and discarded. There’s no Jennilynn. The twins have known what Bobby was doing the whole time and decided to teach him a lesson. Nobody has a tattoo, but a sheet of temporary tattoos have allowed the twins to switch identities back and forth to mess with him. Bobby is terrified and publicly humiliated, both by the girls he wronged and the Wade twins’ parents, who can’t figure out why a half-naked guy covered in honey is in their living room screaming about a third Wade daughter who doesn’t exist. Bobby still seems a bit perplexed—his final question to the gathered girls is “You—you mean you don’t like me?” (152, emphasis original), before “Defeated, he turned and slumped out of the room, their laughter ringing in his ears” (152). The lesson may or may not stick as well as the honey did, but the girls have leveraged sisterhood and solidarity in getting their revenge on Bobby.
In Killer’s Kiss, Vincent Milano sees himself as a real catch, much like Bobby and Robert Q., but in a bit of a twist, he is also framed as a desirable prize to be won. Delia and Karina have competed for everything their whole lives, from the best grades to homecoming queen. They’re always trying to one-up one another: as Delia tells her friends “I’m the front-page editor, but Karina is editor of the whole paper […] I manage the volleyball team. Karina is the star player” (17). And now, in senior year, they’re competing for the prestigious Conklin scholarship, which is based on a combination of academics, a talent competition, and artistic achievement. On top of that, they both have their sights set on Vincent, who tells both Delia and Karina that she’s his one and only. Vincent plays them off one another, telling Delia that Karina is delusional and believes she’s dating him, but swears it isn’t true. The girls finally realize what’s going on when Delia sees Vincent and Karina together. They have a pretty good conversation and Karina tells Delia “he made it easy to believe what I wanted to believe. He should have told me. He should have told you too. He lied to both of us” (71). But the truce doesn’t last long and before they know it, Vincent is playing them off one another again. Tensions rise even higher when someone starts to sabotage Delia’s Conklin competition materials, destroying her guitar before the talent portion and defacing her portfolio before the artistic evaluation. To top it all off, it turns out Karina and Delia aren’t enough for Vincent—he starts making out with Delia’s younger sister Sarah as well.
It all comes to a head at Vincent’s birthday party, which he decides to hold in an abandoned house on Fear Street. The partygoers spend a lot of the night wondering where Delia is … until she shows up late, looking like a disaster. The gathered teens look on in horror as “Delia staggered into the doorway. She took two steps—then stumbled. The heel of one of her red shoes had snapped off […] The right sleeve of her dress was ripped at the shoulder” (99). She is covered with bruises, scratches, and blood, and tells everyone that it’s because Karina tricked her into coming over and then tied Delia up in her room to keep her away from Vincent’s party. It’s a wild end to the night, but the next morning is even more intense, when Delia and the others show up at the house to help Vincent clean up and find him dead, with a lipstick print in Delia’s signature shade on his cheek. Once again, it looks like Karina is out to get Delia, this time framing her for murder: the lip print is reversed, planted on his cheek with a paper that Delia used to blot her lips. The police find several of these blotting papers in Karina’s room, who vehemently denies everything, but this apparently evidence enough to get Karina charged with Vincent’s murder and institutionalized.
But Delia seems to be a good friend, going to visit Karina in the hospital with their friend Gabe. As they wait for Karina’s doctor to finish in her room so they can see her, Delia and Gabe talk about how she won the Conklin scholarship and their bright futures that are waiting for them after graduation. Delia muses that “It’s not the way I wanted to win it” (143), before telling Gabe “Karina would have won, you know […] If I had let her” (144). Once Delia starts talking, the truth comes tumbling out: Delia did it all. She sabotaged her own guitar and portfolio. She faked her injuries the night of Vincent’s birthday party, killed him after everyone else had left, and planted the blotting papers in Karina’s room to frame her for the murder. As she confesses to Gabe, “I was losing everything. Everything. Vincent. My sister. The award. I saw everything slip away […] I had to kill him for liking Karina better than me. And for kissing my sister […] And if I could pin the blame on Karina—then all my problems would be solved!” (146-7). Gabe is understandably horrified and Delia tries to make him promise not to tell, but Karina’s doctor overheard the whole thing, calls the cops, and begins to set things right.
In Deadly Attraction, Double Date, and Killer’s Kiss, when guys try to date multiple girls, things end badly, with consequences ranging from humiliation to death. There are a lot of moving pieces in all three books: the guys treat the girls badly, using and exploiting them, viewing them as prizes to be won rather than people to know and respect as equal partners. In competing for these young men’s affections—none of whom seem to be worth the trouble, to be honest—the girls go to great lengths as well. In Deadly Attraction, Darlene is fixated on Robert Q. and when she gives up on getting back together with him, she becomes just as intensely fixated when she gets back together with her ex-boyfriend Bo, as Hailey laments that “Darlene’s switched heroes […] but she’s still using the same script. Woman overboard. She may not be a killer, but she sure could use some help” (179). The girls in Double Date go to elaborate lengths to get their revenge on Bobby, while Karina and Delia publicly attack one another as their fight over Vincent in Killer’s Kiss. All might be fair in love and war, but the consequences end up being more than any of them bargained for.
