Welcome back to Forever Fear Street, a revisit to the most wicked neighborhood in young-adult literature. This installment looks at the fifth and sixth books in the classic Fear Street series: The Wrong Number and The Sleepwalker.

In The Wrong Number, telephone pranks lead to murder, and in The Sleepwalker, a caregiver suspects she’s been hexed by a witch.

---

Fear Street #5, 1990

Cover Artwork: Gabriel Picart

The jokes are over when murder is on the line.

If any Fear Street cover instantly grabbed my attention growing up, it was The Wrong Number. Even back then, I couldn’t deny any sort of suspense story dealing with telephones. When a Stranger Calls, Black Christmas, Scream — I simply loved to see people be threatened by only a voice and over a landline.

It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized R. L. Stine was very likely inspired by the 1965 movie I Saw What You Did. Like in that William Castle-directed and Joan Crawford-starring classic, teenagers in The Wrong Number interrupt a murder in progress. Similar setups aside, however, Stine’s story went in a completely different direction.

✴✴✴

THE STORY

Deena Martinson has her own telephone line in her room now, and she and best friend Jade Smith have been using it to prank call their Shadyside High classmates. It’s all harmless enough until Deena’s troublesome half-brother Chuck moves in and learns what she and Jade have been up to lately. Rather than tattling, though, Chuck joins them.

Chuck’s brand of pranking is different from that of his half-sister; as the “Phantom of Fear Street”, he threatens boys from school and calls in a bogus bomb threat to the bowling alley. It’s only when Chuck dials a random number in the phone book does everything go sideways for him and Deena. As fate would have it, Chuck called the Farberson house on Fear Street right when Mrs. Farberson was being murdered. And after Chuck, Deena and Jade go to the address to investigate, they encounter the perpetrator: a masked intruder.

While the three manage to escape their pursuer that night, the police track down Chuck and Deena the next day. Mr. Farberson has now accused Chuck of murdering his wife, and because the boy is eighteen, he can be tried as an adult.

As Deena and Jade look into Mr. Farberson and why he’s pinning his wife’s murder on Chuck and not the intruder, it dawns on them that the masked man and husband are one and the same. Of course, they need more than their inklings to convince the police; they already think Deena and Jade are lying to protect Chuck.

In their sleuthing, Deena and Jade discover Mr. Farberson, a respected restaurant owner in town, was having an affair with his former employee, Linda Morrison. He also has one-way tickets for two to Buenos Aires for himself and, presumably, Miss Morrison. Despite these findings, they’re still not enough to get Chuck off. So Deena and Jade break into the Farberson house to find damning evidence, only to then end up being captured by their prime suspect.

The police, Deena’s father and Chuck all eventually arrive to find Deena and Jade stuck up in a tree, and Mr. Farberson chipping away at said tree with a chain saw. The authorities already suspected Mr. Farberson was the murderer, and Chuck played along until they could collect more proof. As for Mr. Farberson, he killed his wife because she threatened to leave and cut him off financially.

At last, Chuck is cleared of any wrongdoing and returns to school, where both he and Deena are declared heroes by their peers.

✴✴✴

Travel-wise, The Wrong Number didn’t go anywhere too new or offbeat in Shadyside, apart from an indirect visit to Shadyside Lanes. More notable is that brief but tense visit to Mr. Farberson’s restaurant Alberga III, which sounds like part of a local chain or, if you misread the name like I did, a higher-level math course at Shadyside High.

Stine stuck to the usual format of these books; an outsider quickly learns Fear Street’s ill reputation is well deserved and not merely a suburban legend. And prefacing the tangible terror in store for Chuck, et al is also perhaps the smallest of infodumping seen so far in the series. In Deena and Jade’s attempt to make a believer out of Chuck, they keep their menacing words of caution to a minimum:

"[Fear Street is] named after some creepy old guy named Simon Fear. You’d better not make fun of it. Terrible things have happened on Fear Street. Really. People have disappeared, and there have been a number of unsolved murders. Late at night people have heard weird screams from the Fear Street woods."

Stine hasn’t given up connective tissue yet; The New Girl’s Cory Brooks pops up, once again, and he even complains about how the Phantom of Fear Street’s bomb threat ruined his bowling game. In addition, Della O’Connor (The Overnight) and Lisa Blume (The Surprise Party) have cameos.

I’m not opposed to having adult villains in Fear Street, however, they don’t always measure up to the younger ones. It doesn’t help when a story is as foreseeable as The Wrong Number. There are no twists here I would consider shocking to anyone but the main characters, who I must say are lousy detectives. Their delayed realization about the killer’s real identity felt contrived. If nothing else, though, the ending makes up for the initial dullness. Stine gets bonus points for pulling out a chain saw at the last second.

I sense I’m in the minority about The Wrong Number, and the fact that it received a sequel reinforces that feeling. ■

✴✴✴

BODY COUNT

1. Mrs. Farberson
She’s killed by her husband.

✴✴✴

QUOTAGE

“He can’t use a chain saw at night! He’ll wake everyone on Fear Street. Is he crazy?”
– Deena said of Mr. Farberson, as he brought out his chain saw.

---

Fear Street #6, 1990

Cover Artwork: Gabriel Picart

Is the old woman casting a spell on Mayra to make her sleepwalk?

After the straightforwardness of The Wrong Number, The Sleepwalker takes us on a more winding path down Fear Street. And for a good while, Stine has a real hold over you, almost like sleeplessness does on the protagonist at the heart of this peculiar story. There is also a supernatural element here that changes shape over the course of the book; it starts off strong  and obvious before ultimately fizzling out. This kind of outcome, however, is pretty standard in the Fear Street series.

The Sleepwalker doesn’t venture into that land of dream and nightmare horror as far as you would expect, or probably like, but it’s not a long ways off either. What Stine did well here was convey the dread of helplessness; his writing for the sleepwalking scenes was mysterious and a tad surreal, not to mention suspenseful. The author was, much to my own surprise, quite effective at darkening that universal sense of disorientation that we all feel upon waking up.

✴✴✴

THE STORY

Mayra Barnes has found a summer job working as a part-time caregiver for the elderly Lucy Cottier, who happens to live on Fear Street. Mayra cooks Mrs. Cottier’s meals, reads to her, accompanies her on walks, and takes care of her cat Hazel. Not long after starting the job, though, Mayra begins to sleepwalk and wake up on Fear Street with no recollection of how she got there.

Initially, Mayra’s biggest concern was working for a former patient of her mother, a nurse; she and Mrs. Cottier didn’t get along during the old woman’s previous stay at the hospital. Now Mayra thinks her employer is a vengeful and spellcasting witch. Naturally, no one believes Mayra when she brings up the notion, including best friend Donna Cash. Mayra’s new boyfriend Walker, a magician who practices hypnotism, is less skeptical.

Aside from Mrs. Cottier, Mayra wonders if Stephanie, her former friend and the sister of her ex-boyfriend Link, could be behind the sleepwalking. Stephanie herself dabbles in the occult, and she hasn’t been too happy about Mayra breaking up with her brother and getting with Walker. And down the line, it’s revealed that Mrs. Cottier is Link and Stephanie’s aunt; Mayra doesn’t recall Stephanie mentioning that part when she first recommended the job.

On top of the sleepwalking, Mayra has been followed, more than once, by a tall and thick-necked man she doesn’t seem to know. He came looking for Mayra at her house, and he later chased her at the hospital when she went to see a therapist, Dr. Sterne, for her sleep problem. His vanishing act has Mayra questioning her sanity. Then there is the incident of Donna getting run off the road and nearly killed by a madman in a red truck. The fact that Donna was driving Mrs. Barnes’ car at the time has Mayra believe the attack was intended for herself, and the culprit could be Link, who drives a similar-looking truck.

Dr. Sterne believes that Mayra is responding to a repressed trauma. “Something is troubling you. Something very upsetting. You’re trying to deal with it when you’re asleep because you find it too upsetting to deal with when you’re awake.” Not long after this revelation, Mayra reasons that her answers are in the lake on Fear Street.

After plunging into the waters behind Mrs. Cottier’s house, Mayra remembers a car accident she had forgotten about. On their date a few weeks ago, Walker stole a car and, due to his reckless driving, ended up causing another car to sink into the Conononka River near River Ridge. There were two passengers inside this other vehicle, but before Mayra could help them, Walker pulled her away from the scene.

With her memory restored, Mayra invites Walker to the Fear Street lake when Mrs. Cottier is out of town. She asks him to use his hypnosis to make her feel less uneasy. Instead, Walker wants Mayra to forget all about that night at River Ridge… Again.

After having pretended to be under, Mayra confronts Walker about everything. And when Walker retaliates, Hazel the cat, out of nowhere, attacks him. This is also when the thick-necked man from before, whose name is Cal, shows up. This time, however, he helps Mayra by subduing Walker until the police can arrive.

In the end, Cal turns out to be the survivor of the car accident, which took his brother’s life. The crazed and traumatized Cal mistook Mayra for the responsible party, hence his coming after her and hurting Donna.

Finally free of Walker’s hypnosis, Mayra is able to move on from her ordeal. She even reunites with Link and plans to patch things up with Stephanie.

✴✴✴

The more demanding and snaky a Fear Street book is, the more I enjoy it. This and Missing, which I also liked, have that in common. Ridiculousness is another attraction, and this entry certainly has that going for it as well.

The Sleepwalker isn’t above predictability, yet that glimmering I had early on was only half right. And it wasn’t as if Stine didn’t plant clues. Mrs. Cottier being a witch was a blatant red herring, seeing as how soon that idea was introduced. At the same time, Cottier as a false trail helped take the heat off of Walker, at least until Mayra spotted him holding hands with Suki Thomas (from The Overnight). That scene of flagrant cheating, followed with gaslighting, cemented Walker’s guiltiness, although his simply being a magician was reasonable grounds for suspicion.

Walker using hypnotism to manipulate Mayra’s memory was silly in the best way. It’s not only a less typical answer for the sleepwalking, it loosens the story’s supernatural sheath without fully removing it. Hypnosis is, after all, a murky subject matter that the average person would see as more strange than not.

Mrs. Cottier being a professor in occult studies, as opposed to a bona fide witch, was par for the course, but not every ounce of the supernatural was tossed out. Myra’s afterthought, about Hazel the cat, was a great hanging thread:

How did [Hazel] get down to the lake to rescue me from Walker? And how did she get back to the house before I did?

Even if Mrs. Cottier wasn’t a witch, that doesn’t mean Hazel wasn’t a familiar. ■

✴✴✴

BODY COUNT

1. Cal’s brother
Died in the hit-and-run.

✴✴✴

QUOTAGE

“I can’t let you ruin my life. I’m going to be a famous magician.”
– Walker to Mayra

---

See you next time on Fear Street — it’s where your worst nightmares live.