A One Way Trip to Revenge: Diane Hoh’s <em>The Train</em> 

Characters in ‘90s teen horror are often more complex than meets the eye: the “mean girl” might just be lashing out because her life at home is really difficult, the new “bad boy” in town seems a bit aloof because he’s secretly providing for his family, and sometimes characters aren’t quite who they seem to be because they’ve taken on the identity of a tragically lost loved one in order to seek vengeance, either as part of a fiendishly orchestrated plan or the result of psychological trauma. As a result, it can be  tricky to define characters as uncomplicatedly “good” and “bad,” but in most cases, the protagonists pretty reliably learn from their mistakes, revealing dark secrets and taking responsibility for their actions. In Diane Hoh’s The Train (1992), the vast majority of characters are a notable deviation from this trend, providing a complicated and uneasy view of these teens, their self-awareness, and the potential impact of their terrifying experiences. 

As the book opens, Hannah Denton and her friends are boarding a train in Chicago, part of a school trip from Chicago to San Francisco “so that students could ‘see the country’” (5). This is a  unique opportunity and sort of crosses lines between school and social: there are two teachers traveling with them and it is clearly a school-sponsored trip, but it’s taking place over the summer. There don’t seem to be any organized or academically-focused activities—they basically load a bunch of teenagers on a train for a cross-country road trip and let them do whatever they please. Once the wheels are rolling, they can’t get off the train and are pretty easy to keep track of, but they still manage to find plenty of trouble. In The Train, this trouble almost immediately escalates from adolescent shenanigans to attempted murder when the lights go out in the cafe car and come back on to reveal one of the characters, Lolly Slocum, choking, with a bandana knotted tightly around her neck as “her round, plain face was rapidly turning purple and her eyes, wild with desperation, were bulging dangerously” (35). Even with this inauspicious beginning, the trip (apparently) must go on and while the train stops at the next station to drop Lolly (and a random doctor they met onboard) off, the rest of the group keep heading west. 

The trip is optional (and presumably, quite pricey), so there’s a clear question of privilege that goes largely unaddressed, though Hannah does briefly note the social position and friend groups of her classmates, who are clique-ishly siloed. In fact, her thoughts about Lolly at the start of the trip were less than kind, as Hannah looked around the platform and spotted Lolly with her two friends and fellow outsiders, Eugene Bryer and Dale Sutterworth, as “Hannah couldn’t help wondering why they were taking the trip. They didn’t seem the least bit interested or excited and she knew they would never be included in the fun” (2). This judgment and exclusion are foundational to the horrors that follow, the die for which had already been cast in the previous school year and earlier in the summer, in the teens’ treatment of Frederick Roger Drummond (who prefers to be called Roger), their former classmate, whose coffin is traveling with them in the baggage car. 

Roger—not so affectionately called “Frog” by most of his peers—had transferred to their school the previous December, sent to Chicago by his parents to stay with his grandmother when they were at their wit’s end on how to control his behavior, which included skipping school and shoplifting. His new classmates make their minds up about him almost instantaneously, with Hannah’s boyfriend Mack McComber recalling his first impression of the new boy: “Here was this big, hulking kid with long greasy hair and bad skin and anyone could see he had an attitude problem, and here he was coming in in the middle of the year—social death for a junior in high school. Everyone checked him out real quick and then wrote him off, know what I mean?” (21-22). 

But as Hannah and her friends talk in the cafe car, horrified after their discovery of Roger’s presence in the baggage car, it turns out that their exclusion was a bit more active and intentional than Mack’s reflection would suggest: it’s Mack who gave Roger his unfortunate nickname. When the other boy was called to the blackboard and asked to write his name on his first day there, he began writing as “F. Roger,” abbreviating his first name, but only got as far as F. Rog— before Mack yelled “Hey, the guy’s name is Frog!” (22) to the mirth and derision of his peers, a class clown-ish quip that marks Roger as laughably Othered. Their friend Lewis Reed was captaining a basketball team in gym class and loudly, publicly objected to the idea of having Roger on his team, insulting and excluding him, which ended in Roger getting into an argument with the gym teacher that got him suspended for two days. Hannah’s best friend Kerry Oliver cruelly laughed at Roger when he asked her out on a date and Jean Marie Westlake, the editor of the school newspaper “took one look at him and knew I couldn’t use him” (29), turning him away when he comes to her asking if he can join the paper as a reporter. After hearing her friends’ confessions, Hannah claims that she doesn’t have a similar story of her own to share, but she’s obviously holding out, too ashamed to tell them about her own unkindness toward Roger.  

Roger dated Lolly and was friends with Eugene and Dale, the trio of outcasts that Hannah has unkind thoughts about at the beginning of their train trip, but that seems to be the extent of his social life after being rejected by Hannah and her friends. And then, not long before the train trip, he died, “dead at seventeen, killed in a horrible, fiery crash not far from [Hannah’s] house” (31). Hannah’s having a party at the time and while they hear the sirens, they don’t pay attention, don’t think anything of it, and just keep having fun. Hannah seems to be the only one who considers—or at least is willing to vocalize—the possibility that there may have been a causal relationship between their unkindness to Roger and his death, wondering “Could Frog have been that unhappy, that night? […] Could she and her friends have made the new boy so miserable that he would actually end his own life?” (32, emphasis original). Hannah wrestles with this moral quandary, but for the most part, she does so alone, because her friends aren’t interested in wasting any more time thinking about it, even as the boy’s coffin travels with them, dismissively shoving memories of him aside even as his body remains physically close. 

As the train heads west, bad things happen to people who were mean to Roger, and just like Lolly’s strangulation, whoever is trying to hurt them is playing for keeps. Hannah is attacked from behind, knocked unconscious, and wakes up in Roger’s coffin in the baggage car. Mack is separated from the group and locked in a shed when the train stops in Denver, Lewis is stabbed in the shoulder when someone throws a knife at him, and Jean Marie is killed when she is kidnapped and thrown from the top of the moving train. Hannah is certain that Roger is getting his revenge on them, either supernaturally or by faking his own death, but no one believes her, even when she climbs into one of the beds in her and Kerry’s sleeping car and finds Roger’s charred corpse (a horror that was intended for Kerry but missed her). The overwhelming feeling, remarkably, seems to be that the trip must go on and while the group is joined by a railroad detective in Denver, aside from some basic safety precautions, it’s pretty much business as usual until Jean Marie is murdered, and even then the school’s concession is that if any of the students want to fly directly home when the group gets to San Francisco, the teachers will make the travel arrangements. (There are shockingly few takers and apparently the teens’ far-away parents are cool with this whole plan). 

The mystery is unraveled with two revelations: first, Lolly is behind all of the train horrors. She staged her own strangulation, made sure everyone saw her getting off the train, and then snuck back on, where she has been CRAWLING AROUND IN THE CEILING AND HIDING IN ROGER’S COFFIN the whole time. She loved Roger and while Hannah’s friends are all too willing to let themselves off the hook for how they treated him, Lolly isn’t going to let them get off so easily. As Lolly tells Hannah “you were all so rotten to him. He didn’t deserve that, Hannah. He was new and scared and he’d been dumped by his parents. He didn’t deserve to be treated like pond scum” (137). And as if that weren’t enough, Lolly is especially angry because “Roger died mad at me, Hannah, and that’s your fault!” (137, emphasis original). She’s mad at Hannah and her friends, but she’s also mad at Roger’s parents, and she’s the one who is having the coffin shipped to them, with payment due on delivery. The coffin itself is empty: Roger’s parents opted for cremation and Lolly somehow got her hands on his cremains, which she has been carrying around with her since the group left Chicago.

The second revelation is Hannah’s heretofore unconfessed cruelty toward Roger, the reason for Roger and Lolly’s fight and the root of Lolly’s rage. Hannah was having a party the night Roger died, and her father happened to hire Roger to help with some yard work leading up to the event. With no one else there to judge her for doing so, Hannah is kind to Roger: “she brought him cold lemonade when he was stringing the colored lights across the lawn. Turned the sprinkler on to cool him off when he was sweating in the hot sun over a flower bed. Fixed a sandwich and some fruit to take to him when he was struggling with the heavy recycling bins her father wanted moved […] It just seemed like the decent thing to do” (159). And when he makes a comment about how this must be some party, she offhandedly tells him “You can come, too, if you want” (160). Hannah thinks she has made a huge mistake, Roger thinks his luck is finally changing at his new school, and Lolly tries to warn Roger and protect him from what she sees (and rightfully so) as the inevitable rejection of the popular kids. The night of the party comes, Roger shows up with Lolly in hot pursuit, and Hannah tells him he has to leave because she’s sick and she’s about to send everyone home … all while wearing a fancy dress with the noise and laughter of the party streaming from the house behind her. Roger is humiliated and leaves, driving fast and straight to the crash that kills him, with the sirens audible from Hannah’s party (not that anyone notices or cares). 

Lolly fools them all again, faking her suicide by making people think she jumped from the train window with a note and a broken window, but when the group finally gets to San Francisco and are having some lunch and a bit of fun near a foggy cliffside before Hannah flies home, Lolly emerges from the mist and tries to murder Hannah again, this time by pushing her onto the rocks and crashing waves below, though with some self-defense and quick thinking, Hannah survives and Lolly’s the one who falls to her death. 

There’s plenty of horrifying stuff going on here, but what I find the most unsettling is that aside from Hannah, the rest of the group really doesn’t seem to feel any genuine sense of culpability, regret, or remorse over what happened to Roger. There’s a kind of performative guilt—they know they’re supposed to feel bad about the way they treated Roger, so they confess their unkindnesses and claim remorse, but once they’ve said they feel bad about it, their friends reassure them that they’re good people and what happened to Roger wasn’t their fault, and that’s that. They’re not going to learn from their mistakes or be kinder to people in the future, because as far as they’re concerned, they didn’t do anything wrong. When Hannah is absorbed in thoughts of Roger early in the trip, Mack chides her, telling her “Hannah, he was a creep. Don’t make him a saint now because something awful happened to him” (33) and even Hannah has to admit that he has a point, thinking “None of them had liked Frog, that was the truth, and Mack was being more honest about it than she was” (33). They confess their unkindnesses to Roger without really believing they’ve done anything wrong and they almost immediately forgive themselves and one another, acknowledging they did something mean in the same breath that they absolve themselves of any responsibility. 

There is an overwhelming sense of entitlement, self-absorption, and privilege at play here as well: the students are limited to one suitcase and one carry on, so Kerry packs an enormous carry on and then throws a fit when she’s told it’s too big and will have to be stowed in the baggage car. When they find out that Roger’s coffin is in the baggage compartment, Kerry is outraged, screaming “How could they put it on this train? […] It’s just not right! Why didn’t they put it on a regular train with people who never knew Frog? Why did they have to put it on this one and ruin our trip? It’s not fair!” (17, emphasis original). Kerry is the most egregious example of this entitlement, but there is a collective self-absorption that is echoed in the story itself, as Hannah and her friends have zero awareness of or interest in Roger’s interactions with other students at their school or really his life at all outside of the awful interactions he had with each of them. Roger is dead but they each still manage to situate themselves at the center of his world and of this traumatic experience. Their unkindness might not have been directly responsible for Roger’s death, but they definitely made him miserable and even though they say they feel bad about it, they never call him anything other than Frog, continuing to dehumanize and ridicule him. Nothing has fundamentally changed in their perception of him: he will never be Roger to them, only Frog. While her methods are misguided and go too far, Lolly might actually have a point in trying to get Hannah and her friends to face the reality of the world beyond their insular, self-affirming sphere and face up to the consequences of their actions. 

Even in the book’s final pages, Hannah is the only one of her social group who has any self-awareness or authentic grief about their impact on Roger’s life and (potentially) his death. She’s the only one who takes the teachers up on the offer to get a plane ticket home once the group gets to San Francisco, but once Lolly is dead and Hannah’s life is no longer in danger, she changes her mind and decides to stay, reflecting that “She was here, in a wonderful, exciting city, with friends she cared about and trusted. Lolly was gone. So was Frog. Would going back home change anything that happened? Would it be wrong to stay?” (164). So Hannah stays, though she tells her friends that she wants to come back to the cliff where Lolly died and Roger’s ashes were inadvertently scattered when Lolly fell once the fog lifts, “to say a decent good-bye […] Then it will really be over” (164). Rather than telling her she’s overreacting again, Mack, Lewis, and Kerry tell her that they’ll come with her, though this solidarity is compromised and any potential empathy or growth is undercut when “Kerry added with a grin, ‘and then we’ll go shopping” (164, emphasis original). 

Roger, Lolly, and Jean Marie’s deaths have deeply moved Hannah and she is earnest in her intent to honor their memories and make what amends she can, but she’s an outlier. Her friends will go along with it because they care for Hannah and understand that this matters to her, but they still don’t seem to have any idea why. One of the most terrifying possibilities at the end of Hoh’s The Train is that it’s just a matter of time and peer pressure before Hannah loses this sense of herself. She has tried more than anyone else to do the right thing during their horrifying westward journey, but all told, she has been hesitant to stand up to her friends or push them too hard. When she looked at Lolly, Eugene, and Dale as the group boarded the train in Chicago, she wondered “What was it like to always be on the outside looking in?” (2), a possibility that she finds almost unbearable as she counts herself “[g]rateful that she and her little group didn’t fall into that dismal category” (2). No matter what she thinks or feels, it will always be challenging for Hannah to resist her friends, what they want her to do, how they want her to act, and who they want her to be. As she mourns Roger, Jean Marie, and Lolly once the horror has come to its end, Hannah tells her friends “I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want any of us to forget it. If we do, what’s the point?” (164). But Mack, Lewis, and Kerry are not willing to carry that baggage, to hear what Hannah has to say, or to support her in this emotional processing of remembrance and atonement. In the book’s final pages, on the foggy San Francisco cliffs, Hannah is at a crossroads, though most of the signs point to her going back to the same old reliable path of conformity and acceptance, leaving nothing learned and no one changed except the dead.