Protagonists in ‘90s teen horror experience or bear witness to a wide range of terrors, which haunt their memories and dreams. It’s challenging enough to deal with these horrors as they happen, but when you add in visions of past violence and premonitions of things to come, it gets even more complicated. In R.L. Stine’s Fear Street book The Mind Reader (1994) and Sinclair Smith’s Second Sight (1996), the main characters’ visions prove true, drawing them into dangerous webs of deceit, danger, and murder.
In Stine’s The Mind Reader, Ellie Anderson’s clairvoyance has disrupted her life: she had visions of her boyfriend and her best friend kissing, but when she confronted them about it, they both denied it and dropped her–which doesn’t necessarily mean her visions weren’t true. So when Ellie’s dad’s job moves them back to Shadyside (her family originally lived there, but after her mom died when Ellie was two years old, she and her father moved to live with her grandparents)Ellie sees it as a chance to get a fresh start. She works on ignoring her visions and swears off romance, though neither intention lasts for long when she sees a cute guy at the local coffee shop and, later, has a vision of a beckoning skeletal hand while walking her dog in the woods.
Ellie’s deadly vision leads her head-on into a lot of tragic and complicated history (but to be fair, that’s most Shadyside history). Ellie’s new best friend in town is Sarah Wilkins, and a couple of years ago Sarah’s sister Melinda went missing. Sarah and Melinda’s father is a police lieutenant and his daughter’s case has clearly haunted him. Melinda had planned to run away with her motorcycle-riding boyfriend Brett, who everyone agrees is bad news. Melinda and Brett haven’t been seen or heard from since the night they disappeared, and the accepted narrative is that either they were both murdered or that Brett killed Melinda and then ran away. When Ellie calls the police about her vision of death in the woods, they take her seriously, go to check it out, and—in a reverse bait and switch that’s anachronistic for these kinds of stories—the remains are actually right where Ellie said they would be. As the police continue to investigate, all signs point to the body being Melinda’s, and Ellie struggles with both her visions (she realizes she only has visions that relate to people she cares about and if she stops getting close to people, she may be able to make them go away) and figuring out the best way to support and be there for Sarah (who understandably falls into a debilitating depression, but also seems to be keeping some inexplicable secrets).
As Ellie navigates her visions, her friendship with Sarah, and her interest in the murder investigation, her life is complicated even further by her attraction to the mysterious Brian Tanner. When Brian walks into the coffee shop, both Sarah and Ellie are struck by his handsomeness. Brian’s “cute … [with] dark eyes and reddish brown hair, tousled on the top and short on the sides” (3). He doesn’t go to Shadyside High, so the girls assume he attends the local community college. In addition to this older guy mystique, there’s also an intensity about him as “His dark eyes caught Ellie’s. Caught them and held them” (3). But it’s not all good looks and smoldering glances and as Ellie considers Brian, “All at once she felt an uncontrollable need to get out of there” (4). She runs from the coffee shop, not feeling safe until she’s far away from him, before she pauses and wonders “What was that all about?” (4, emphasis original). Her intuition clearly told Ellie to get as far away from Brian as possible, but once she has, instead of recognizing and honoring those danger signs, she shrugs it off as “Totally weird” (5), gets on with her life, and keeps thinking about how handsome Brian is and how much she’d like to see him again.
Ellie doesn’t have to wait long, because now that she’s seen Brian, he keeps turning up everywhere. He shows up at the crime scene with the crowd that gathers to watch the police investigation. He stops in at the public library where Ellie works after school, looking for a book on primitive weapons; he calls her by name despite the fact that she never introduced herself, and when she tells him that she and her dad recently moved to Shadyside, he says “I know” (29). He pulls up beside her while she’s walking and offers her a ride, and while she trusts her intuition and stranger-danger survival instincts enough to turn him down, she does so “playfully” (37) after telling him she’s going to the coffee shop before her fear overwhelms her attraction and she runs away from him again. He immediately shows up at the coffee shop and Ellie invites him to sit with her, flirting and chatting, but when Lieutenant Wilkins comes in and Ellie turns to talk to him, Brian disappears. Later, Ellie hears someone following her as she walks down a dark street; she runs, he chases her, and of course, it’s Brian, who basically tackles her, though Ellie explains this away (at least in part) by rationalizing that she tripped and he just kind of fell on her. Brian is all red flags and disturbing behavior but through it all, Ellie keeps having “a sudden impulse to lean in and kiss him” (65). Maybe her survival instinct isn’t that great after all.
When the pieces all fall into place, there are generational implications to the mystery. First, Ellie finds out that her visions are hereditary: her mother had visions as well, used her powers to try to help the police catch a murderer, and then got murdered herself for her troubles, right in front of her two-year-old daughter, which her father never got around to telling Ellie about, even when she started having her own visions. Then the truth of Melinda’s murder comes out: Sarah feels guilty about her sister’s death because Melinda was their father’s favorite, so Sarah was relieved to send her sister out into the dark unknown with a potentially dangerous guy. But it was actually Melinda’s father, Lieutenant Wilkins, who killed her. When Ellie and Sarah find a gold button from the lieutenant’s uniform jacket in Melinda’s unmarked grave and the conflict comes to a head, he confesses that “It was an accident … I didn’t want Melinda to leave, to go away with him … We fought. I didn’t mean to shove her. She fell and hit her head. An accident” (141-2, emphasis original). The lieutenant then pinned the blame on Melinda’s boyfriend Brett, who is also (of course) Brian, and apparently no one in town recognized him, even though they’ve been looking for him for years. He cut his hair and changed his clothes and voila—no Brett here.
All these secrets end up getting unearthed with Melinda’s body, leaving fractured families in their wake. Sarah has to shoot her father in the shoulder to prevent him from killing Brett, while Ellie has to come to terms with the fact that her father hasn’t been honest with her and come to a new understanding of her visions, what they mean, and where they come from. Despite the multitude of warning signs, it is Ellie and Brian/Brett’s relationship that has a happy ending, when she finds out that he has visions too. This apparently excuses all of his problematic behavior—he’s not a stalker, all of that personal information came to him in a vision, and Ellie was wrong to doubt him, no matter what her wacky women’s intuition was telling her. As he reveals the truth to Ellie, he depicts himself as a hero, saying he saw a vision of her discovering Melinda’s body and “I knew I had to come back to Shadyside. I had to find out the truth about what happened to Melinda. And I had to protect you” (146-7). Ellie’s self-doubt carries over into berating herself, as she asks “Why didn’t I guess? Why didn’t I realize?” (146), like this is a completely commonplace and reasonable explanation for Brian/Brett’s unsettling behavior (it’s definitely not).
In Smith’s Second Sight, vision carries multiple meanings. Much like Ellie, Second Sight’s protagonist, a teenage girl named Grayson, has disturbing visions of violence, including events that have already happened and events that may happen in the future. While Ellie’s ability was passed down to her from her mother, however, Grayson only begins seeing visions after a cornea transplant that allows her to see for the first time in her life. As a result, Grayson goes from being blind to being able to see too much, which in her case includes visions of murder. Grayson is also adjusting to new surroundings as part of this new life, having moved in with her workaholic sister Kara in her Brooklyn apartment in order to be closer to the hospital and doctors Grayson needs to get to for her medical appointments and checkups.
As the visions persist, Grayson begins sleuthing, trying to figure out whether the cornea donor might have been recently murdered millionaire celebrity Zeke Stuart, whose death she sees in her visions. Her doctor reminds her that the donor’s identity is privileged medical information that he can’t share with her, though he is able to assure her that the cornea donor wasn’t murdered, but died in a car accident. This isn’t a good enough answer for Grayson, though, who takes advantage of the doctor’s absence from the examination room during one of her checkups to rifle through his notes on her case to find the name of the donor: Aileen Mills.
Like Ellie, Grayson feels she has a civic duty to report her visions to the police and while the first detective she talks to ridicules and dismisses her, the second one she speaks with, Detective Soames, is more open to hearing what she has to say. Grayson’s credibility skyrockets in Soames’ estimation when she mentions Aileen Mills, who it turns out was “a psychic who worked with the police department” (61) and whose car accident might not have been really accidental. In The Mind Reader, Ellie’s mother was murdered for sharing the truth of her visions and it seems likely that Second Sight’s Aileen suffered the same fate, killed to keep her silent about what she had seen. Soames wants to keep Grayson’s abilities secret to make sure she doesn’t meet the same end, but that’s easier said than done. Grayson’s visions start to show her people who haven’t been murdered yet and she and Soames set out to find and save them, with Grayson’s ability creating quite a media buzz (though her identity thankfully remains concealed). Grayson likes a neighborhood guy named Jared and when her disturbing visions keep getting in the way of romance, she decides it’s best to just tell him the truth; Jared gets angry with Grayson, accuses her of making up a ridiculous lie to break it off with him instead of just telling him she doesn’t want to see him anymore, then dumps her. When Detective Soames calls the apartment, Kara demands an explanation and when Grayson tells her the truth, her overworked sister gets angry and forbids Grayson from cooperating with the investigation.
Grayson begins to suspect everyone, from those closest to her to strangers watching her on the subway and on the street. One afternoon when Grayson comes back to the apartment, “a looming figure stepped out of the shadows. It was a tall, big-boned man with a head of shaggy gray hair … The man was holding a hammer in his right hand. He smacked the head lightly against the palm of his left hand” (126-7). Grayson runs and takes refuge in an elderly neighbor’s apartment, where the man follows her and introduces himself as the building superintendent, Degan. Grayson has never seen him before and the extent of his presence in the book up to this point is not answering his phone when Kara calls and failing to show up to fix the things he’s supposed to take care of, but when Grayson speaks to him after this terrifying encounter, he seems relatively kind and harmless (though not particularly good at his job). The elderly neighbor, Degan, and Grayson have an uneasy laugh about how anyone could mistake him for a murderer just because he’s hanging out in a dark hallway, whacking a hammer, and grumbling to himself, and then Grayson lets him into her and her sister’s apartment to get to work on the bathroom tiles (work that comes with a gratis lecture about how the girls need to make sure they don’t let the bathtub overflow).
Evidence piles up in different quarters: Grayson receives a threatening note that seems to be in her sister’s handwriting and written with Kara’s shade of lipstick, and she finds Kara’s mangled lipstick in the apartment. But Degan has a key to the apartment, and both Jared and Soames are able to pick locks with surprising ease, so just because something is in the apartment doesn’t mean someone else didn’t put it there. When Grayson sees a vision of her own potential murder, the stakes get a lot higher, but she doesn’t put the pieces together until after the murderer makes his way into her apartment again and she wakes up from a chloroform nap locked in a basement storage area.
While there has been no shortage of potentially viable suspects throughout the book, from Grayson’s own sister to strangers on the subway, the real murderer turns out to be the building super, Degan … kind of. It turns out Degan has multiple personalities, with the murder-y one named Roy, who claims to be Degan’s stepbrother and to have suffered familial abuse. There’s no further information provided to prove or disprove the veracity of Roy’s story, so Grayson and the reader never find out whether Degan might still be potentially dangerous. Grayson escapes the storage area and flees to the roof, which is ideal for Roy, who likes to murder people by pushing them from high places. But Grayson makes a daring leap to the next building over, Detective Soames apprehends Roy/Degan, and the case is closed, except for Grayson’s nightmares, where “Roy escaped every night … into her dreams” (163).
In both The Mind Reader and Second Sight, Ellie and Grayson see more than meets the eye, often with life and death consequences. But while their visions show them hidden secrets and true dangers, that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone believes them or even that these young women believe themselves. Ellie and Grayson both doubt the veracity of their visions, often putting themselves in dangerous situations despite their intuition or because they feel the need to prove themselves, whether this means getting the attention of a love interest or helping the police. They are saddled with the weight of not just the visions, but the demand to prove themselves over and over again. All in all, while Ellie and Grayson’s visions could be seen as empowering, they are instead cast as a problematic burden, something these young women wish would just go away.
