The cover of Richie Tankersley Cusick’s The Lifeguard (1988) has become iconic, with a buff, blonde lifeguard glowering from atop his chair and behind his mirrored sunglasses. Cusick’s The Lifeguard was a predecessor of the ‘90s teen horror trend and set the stage for many of the narrative patterns to come. While the beach getaway of The Lifeguard seems to promise fun and sun for the novel’s protagonist, Kelsey Tanner, the ominous cover image and the tagline that advises “Don’t call for help. He may just kill you” let readers know differently before they even get to the first page. The sand, the sun, and a vacation from the predictability and pressures from home sound like the recipe for a really fun summer. But looked at from another angle, it could just as easily be a scary one: there are dangerous tides, big waves, the threat of drowning, and sharks. Those sun-tanned strangers could be potential new friends or romantic partners, or they could be murderers, it’s really anybody’s guess. And if—let’s face it, when—something goes wrong, these teens find themselves trapped between the threat of human violence and a watery grave.
While Cusick’s lifeguard is scary, a summer job on top of that chair isn’t all fun and games in other ‘90s teen horror novels, including R.L. Stine’s The Dead Lifeguard (1994) and High Tide (1997), both Fear Street series Super Chillers. In both of these books, the protagonists leave Shadyside to get summer jobs, Lindsay Beck at the North Beach Country Club pool in The Dead Lifeguard, and Adam Malfitano at sea-side Logan Beach in High Tide.
Lindsay and Logan are both well-trained and committed lifeguards. They have also both returned to the scene of a previous trauma: Lindsay is haunted by the memories of another lifeguard who died in the pool a couple of summers before, while Adam is wracked with guilt following a jet ski accident that killed his girlfriend Mitzi the previous summer. You would think there’d be lots of other lifeguarding jobs at other pools and beaches where these teens hadn’t seen someone they care about die, but they each choose to go back to the scene of their nightmares. In addition to the dark memories these places hold for Lindsay and Adam, they are also both dealing with repressed memories that their respective returns bring back for them, misperceptions of what had happened that their subconscious minds might not be willing to let go of quite yet, as each struggles to reconcile what they believe happened with the reality of those tragic events.
The teens in both The Dead Lifeguard and High Tide are largely on their own: the high school-age lifeguards of North Beach Country Club live in a pool house dormitory almost completely unsupervised by any adults, while Adam just finished his freshman year of college and is sharing an apartment with a boat-rental guy named Ian, the same living arrangement they had the previous summer, right out of high school. These teens have families and homes—for both Lindsay and Adam, those homes are in Shadyside—but their summers are defined by work and almost total independence, which means they can have a lot of fun, but can also get themselves into a lot of trouble, with no one to turn to to help get them out of it.
Unsurprisingly, with groups of unsupervised hormonal teenagers, romantic intrigue immediately ensues: in The Dead Lifeguard, there’s a dude bro named Pug, who comes onto just about every girl he encounters, fellow lifeguards and pool visitors alike. Danny is the head lifeguard and one of the rotating first-person narrators of The Dead Lifeguard, and one of his initial observations as the summer gets underway is that “The girls were outstanding” (13, emphasis original). Danny provides a brief physical assessment of each of the girls, noting that Cassie is “a total winner” and Deirdre “was hot. I mean hot” (13). May-Ann isn’t quite Danny’s type, but as he magnanimously pronounces, “I wouldn’t say no to her either” (13). Danny is interested in all of them but fails to make a real connection, occasionally noting how jealous he is of Pug, as the other guy makes time with yet another girl. Though she finds most of the other girls standoffish, Lindsay starts forming a friendship with May-Ann, who is also her roommate, but this gets complicated when May-Ann begins disappearing for large chunks of time with no explanation and the other lifeguards start being murdered. Lindsay’s not as preoccupied with romance as her fellow lifeguards—she’s actually more intrigued by the fact that she vaguely remembers a boy named Spencer from the last summer she spent at the club, and is hopeful that he can help her remember what she has forgotten.
Though Danny routinely objectifies the girls with whom he works, he’s actually presented as a likable and sensitive guy. It’s Arnie who’s the problematic one. Arnie is socially awkward and the butt of frequent jokes from his fellow lifeguards. He has a crush on Lindsay and has a really difficult time taking no for an answer. In one of the chapters narrated by Lindsay, Arnie invites her to go for a walk after dinner one night and as they’re walking through a stand of trees, “Without warning, Arnie grabbed me by both shoulders. His tiny eyes lit up and a strange smile crossed his lips. He shoved me back—hard—against a wide tree trunk” (121). Arnie then proceeds to aggressively kiss Lindsay, despite her telling him no and attempting to push him away. This assault is interrupted by another one of the lifeguards, Spencer, who extricates Lindsay, and Arnie apologizes, though this apology feels a bit hollow when he later hides in the backseat of her car because she’s been avoiding him and he wants to spend time with her. She says no when he kisses her, she screams when he pops up out of the backseat of the car while she’s driving down the road, but Arnie is still undeterred, insisting that “I can tell you like me” (154) and “You’re making a big mistake, Lindsay” (155).
While Arnie’s behavior is occasionally called out as being problematic—particularly by Spencer—the more significant parallel and narrative function lies in Arnie’s similarity to Terry, a club employee who was teased by the lifeguards two summers before. Terry and his friend Jack worked in the club’s kitchen, but desperately wanted to be lifeguards, to be part of the cool crowd, but the lifeguards did nothing but prank and harass the boys. When Terry applied to be a lifeguard the following summer and was turned down, he committed suicide; as Jack explains, “He was messed up … He couldn’t take being rejected. He had too many other problems” (176). Jack has returned to the club this summer to get his revenge on the lifeguards: he murdered the real Spencer, assumed the other boy’s identity, and took his place. In a complicated bait-and-switch, predatory Arnie becomes aligned with tragically sympathetic Terry, who just wanted to be accepted and belong, while Spencer, who stood up to Arnie when he was attacking Lindsay, ends up being Jack, the murderous madman in disguise.
The good guy is the bad guy and the bad guy, well, he’s maybe not so bad after all. (He is—no means no, Arnie).
In High Tide, Adam’s circle of friends is smaller than Lindsay’s (fewer suspects!), consisting mostly of his roommate Ian, his fellow lifeguard Sean, and his girlfriend Leslie. Ian and Adam have a pretty chill coexistence, aside from the fact that Ian is always borrowing Adam’s stuff, and Leslie remains pretty peripheral to the story, aside from being annoyed when she finds Adam out on the town with other girls. But Sean is an even bigger jerk than The Dead Lifeguard’s Arnie.
Sean has his sights set on Alyce, who is “a major babe” (23). Watching Alyce on the beach, Sean even reflects that “To tell the truth, she’s the only reason I keep this lifeguard job. So I can sit up high and stare at her all day” (23), which is super creepy. He abandons his post to go grab her and kiss her, despite her telling him in no uncertain terms to “Let go of me, Sean!” and “I don’t like being grabbed like that” (24). Instead of apologizing and respecting Alyce’s boundaries, Sean’s witty retort is “You want me to grab you some other way? Show me how, babe!” (24). When Alyce turns Sean down for a date that night, she isn’t at her house when he shows up for the date she told him she wasn’t going on with him, and he sees her out with another guy instead, Sean’s threat factor immediately skyrockets. As Sean thinks about the idea of Alyce with another guy, he confesses to Adam that he’s got real problems with jealousy, anger, and violence, telling Adam about how he suspected his high school girlfriend was stepping out on him, so he followed her and her date, stalked them for their entire night out, harassed and threatened the guy incessantly in the days following the date, and then finally, lured him to the woods and beat him. As Sean tells Adam, “the more he screamed, the harder I beat him! I beat him so bad, he almost died!” (33). When Sean sees another guy out with Alyce and can’t cross the street to get to them because of heavy traffic, he attacks and severely beats a random man who just happens to be passing by. Sean then ramps up a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the guy Alyce has been seeing, including making threatening phone calls, wrapping the corpse of dismembered seagull in the guy’s sweatshirt and leaving it in his bedroom for him to find, and slashing his mattress to bits with a butcher knife.
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All’s (apparently) well that ends well, though: the guy Sean has been harassing turns out to be a murderer, and Alyce really likes Sean after all. Sean isn’t ever really held accountable for his actions, either legally or within his personal relationships, and the closest he comes to remorse is toward the end of the book, when he tells Adam, “You’re probably right about me having to do something about my temper” (162), saying that “maybe” he’ll seek therapy, because it “Couldn’t hurt, right?” (162). Sean has definitely hurt people and he absolutely needs help, but the role and representation of therapy in High Tide doesn’t instill much confidence in this potential intervention.
Adam has been seeing a therapist, Dr. Thrall, since the accident that killed Mitzi last summer. In the immediate aftermath, Adam felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for Mitzi’s death and now as he has returned to the beach, he has begun experiencing hallucinations, including the reappearance of Mitzi’s grisly ghost. While Adam thinks he has done what he needed to do in accepting that what happened to Mitzi was an accident, there are some memories he’s repressing and that his mind is trying to force him to face, one way or the other. Adam finds his conversations with Dr. Thrall to be very helpful, but his therapy treatment gets a bit radical when the doctor decides that another death might jog Adam’s memory and shake loose whatever it is his subconscious is holding onto. Dr. Thrall doesn’t actually kill anyone: he just lets Adam believe that one of his high school friends, Joy, drowned because he was unable to save her—getting Joy, their friend Raina, and Adam’s roommate Ian to go along with the plan, to see what will happen when Adam is put in a position where he feels like he has contributed to another young woman’s death. Unsurprisingly, this is traumatic for Adam, though it does also allow him to recover his memories of what happened that night, revealing that it was Ian, not Adam, who was responsible for Mitzi’s death, though Ian was more than happy to let Adam take the blame.
In The Dead Lifeguard, Lindsay is also dealing with some pretty significant repressed memories. Plus, the fact that she’s not actually Lindsay. Lindsay is the lifeguard who died two years ago, while the girl who has thought she was Lindsay throughout the novel is actually Marissa Dutton, another young woman who was there that summer, who recovers her memory and confesses to having killed Lindsay. But, much like Adam in High Tide, Marissa’s not actually a murderer. he, the real Lindsay, and the other lifeguards were goofing around by the pool one night when Lindsay slipped and hit her head on the side of the pool. And much like Adam, Marissa’s guilt takes over her whole life, except that instead of seeing the dead girl like Adam does, Marissa becomes the dead girl. As Marissa tells her fellow lifeguards, following Lindsay’s death, “I felt so guilty—so guilty that I had to bring her back to life. So I became her. I brought Lindsay back to life by becoming her” (164, emphasis original). Marissa was institutionalized following Lindsay’s death, but after intensive psychotherapy, was sent back home to Shadyside, where she had what sounds like a pretty uneventful school year, until summer came and she felt compelled to return to the North Beach Country Club and assume Lindsay’s identity once more.
For both Lindsay and Adam, facing what they believe to be the dark secrets of their respective pasts is cathartic, revealing a hidden reality that allows them to reframe their role in the deaths that have haunted them and move forward without their misplaced guilt weighing them down, ready to take on a new and brighter day. Lifeguards are the central characters of both The Dead Lifeguard and High Tide, and while they are (for the most part) vigilant in watching over those who go swimming on their watch, it’s really the lifeguards themselves who need saving, from their flawed memories, from one another, and from themselves.
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.
