Welcome back to Forever Fear Street, a revisit to the most wicked neighborhood in young-adult literature. This installment looks at the eleventh and twelfth books in the classic Fear Street series: The Fire Game and Lights Out.
In The Fire Game, some firebugs let their new hobby get out of control, and a killer lurks at Camp Nightwing in Lights Out.
Fear Street #11, 1991
Cover Artwork: Bill Schmidt
When you’re playing with fire, someone is bound to get burned…
Fear Street dipped its toes in supernatural waters not too long ago, but since then, and for the time being, the series was back on dry land. That doesn’t mean The Fire Game isn’t worth your time, although it’s an entry that hardly ever comes up in nostalgic conversations. Not in the same way as others, at least. Even I had the hardest time remembering a thing about this story of arson.
✴✴✴
THE STORY
Shadyside High Schoolers Jill Franks and her friends—Andrea Hubbard, Diane Hamilton, Nick Malone and Max Bogner— welcome a new member to their group when Diane’s childhood friend, Gabriel “Gabe” Miller, moves to town. Gabe’s a bit stuck-up, with him being from Center City, and Jill and the others try their hardest to convince Gabe that Shadyside isn’t the worst place to live. Yet Gabe is only intrigued once everyone brings up Fear Street, as well as the wastebasket fire that Andrea accidentally caused at school.
Prior to Gabe’s arrival, Nick and Max were fooling around in the school library, with a lighter and a folder, before they inadvertently caused the small fire. Theirs and Andrea’s goof—she didn’t properly dispose of the singed folder—did, however, postpone a geography quiz. This bit of fortune, plus Gabe’s innate attraction to fire-setting, is what then leads to birth of the Fire Game.
So they can ditch class and go on a picnic, the Fire Game’s players pull another stunt at school; this time Max sets off a fire in the restroom.
It’s not just the boys who are enjoying the Fire Game so far; Andrea is excited by the whole thing, although that may have more to do with Gabe. Both Andrea and Jill have eyes for the new guy, now that Diane says she has no feelings for him.
Jill’s unease causes her, along with Diane, to try to get everyone to stop playing the Fire Game. Andrea is resistant, and so was Gabe until someone set his car ablaze. He and Jill were on a date when he made the flaming discovery. And Jill suspects Nick was the pyro to blame. Of course, Nick denies the accusation.
When Nick flakes on their study date, the suspicious Jill follows both him and Max to an abandoned house on Fear Street. Her car stalls nearby, and a cop helps out, before the house in question erupts in flames. With the cop now gone, Jill was the only eyewitness as Nick and Max fled the scene. But when confronted, Nick says neither of them caused the fire; someone else set it off. In fact, the boys only went there because they each got anonymous notes, ones instructing them to go that address for some “real action.”
What’s worse about this ordeal is the fact that the fire-raising wasn’t harmless; the news reports a homeless man died of a heart attack on the house’s front porch. So unless they can find the real arsonist, Nick and Max could be held accountable.
The aforementioned notes were computer-printed, and the ink was blue—the same color as the ink in Andrea’s new printer. Jill and Diane question their friend, but Andrea is insulted, and she even accuses Jill of being jealous of her upcoming date with Gabe. The three soon make amends, or so it would seem, when Andrea asks Jill and Diane to come meet her in the school gym the next morning. Upon arriving, though, Jill and Diane find Andrea unconscious and apparently injured from her gymnastics routine.
What Diane suspects to be self-harm caused by a guilty conscience, looks more like an attempt on Andrea’s life. Gabe, however, asserts the culprit isn’t a stranger, but is really one of them.
With Andrea still unconscious, Diane convinces the nerve-racked Jill to go with her to her family’s new cabin in the Fear Street woods. It’s there that Jill receives an alarming phone call from the awakened Andrea; she tells Jill that Diane tried to kill her.
Jill fails to escape when Diane finds her lost in the woods and brings her back to the cabin. She finally confirms Andrea’s theory, about Diane being in love with Gabe all this time, and she confesses to both the car torching and the housefire. And during their ensuing scuffle, Jill sees the scars all over Diane’s body; she was badly hurt in a kerosene heater explosion from years ago.
In the end, Andrea sends Gabe to help Jill, and he manages to calm the frenzied Diane down. Gabe assures her, “The fire game is over. It’s over for good.”
✴✴✴
This wouldn’t be the last Feat Street book to deal with dangerous games and activities; we still have The Thrill Club, Truth or Dare and Night Games to look forward to, and lest we forget, The Wrong Number kicked off the whole concept. Even still, The Fire Game is a fairly intense take on that sort of cautionary tale, and the unraveling, while never much of a head-scratcher, is satisfying, not to mention depressing.
There is a lot of trauma running through all these books, but up to now, none of it quite compares to Diane’s. That studious and uptight girl who claimed to have a sun allergy, one that caused her to stay buttoned up all the time, was really consumed with grief. Not for a lost loved one, mind you, but for the loss of her youth. It’s not reductive or inaccurate to say the average teenage girl invests a good amount of time in her appearance, or how society sees her, so you can only imagine how Diane would feel after her accident. Looking back, Diane’s panic towards the threat of someone coming into her dressing room, and seeing her scars, makes perfect sense. Sad but perfect sense.
Fear Street delivered these jealous killers more often than not; passions of crime run rampant in this series. Yet when it came time for Diane’s unmasking, who you likely pinned as the perpetrator chapters earlier, that reveal takes the air out of the story. Whatever little fun there is in The Fire Game, it’s absolutely gone by that point. As Diane explains, it was Gabe who got her through her recovery, and she eventually saw her scars as the cause for his romantic disinterest. Yeah, Diane’s breakdown led to someone’s tragic death, but that doesn’t mean we can’t kick some pity her way as well.
The Fire Game could be interpreted as a metaphor for addiction. If the characters’ ages, and the time period, are to be considered, drugs or alcohol are what the fires are symbolizing. Sex is another possibility, considering how Andrea’s titillation and Gabe’s fixation each broach a kind of sensuality at times. There is also the question of one’s own death drive whenever arson is involved. Nick and Max’s interest in fire, as a means of destruction, could stem from their love of horror, a genre well versed in ruin. The fly in the ointment, however, is Diane, whose past with fire was purely incidental.
Not wanting to end this on a totally serious note, I was happy to see references to previous books; Missing, Halloween Party and The Wrong Number all come up as the characters give the new kid a tour of the town’s very own haunted neighborhood. By now, it’s become rather baffling how nonchalant everyone is about Shadyside’s goings-on. Even the believers of Fear Street’s legacy are bizarrely unconcerned. And it’s not like anyone can be in complete denial; the news reports these events with urgency and frequency. I don’t detect a coverup there. The constant death and murder, though, doesn’t spark as much attention—or outcry—as you would expect, especially with all the teens involved. The residents’ collective mindset must be something along the lines of “it’s just Fear Street being Fear Street.” Or maybe it’s simply easier, and cheaper, to memory-hole the horrors of that neighborhood than move somewhere else. ■
✴✴✴
BODY COUNT
1. Homeless man
He had a heart attack after Diane set fire to the house in which he was residing.
✴✴✴
QUOTAGE
She smiled in a dreamy way as she switched the torch on. Then she aimed it directly at Jill.
Fear Street #12, 1991
Cover Artwork: Bill Schmidt
Something is very wrong at Camp Nightwing…
If you’re new to the Fear Street books, but you have seen the movie trilogy, Camp Nightwing would sound familiar. Fear Street: Part Two – 1978 also took place at Nightwing, although that’s where their similarities end. What Leigh Janiak cooked up for her loose vision of Fear Street is far more complicated than what we have here in Lights Out.
✴✴✴
THE STORY
The anxious Holly Flynn leaves Shadyside for the summer so she can help her uncle Bill at Camp Nightwing. He’s short on counselors this year, as well as at risk of losing the place if a loan doesn’t come through. There’s also the matter of a vaguely mentioned incident last summer that doesn’t help the place’s reputation, or calm Holly’s nerves.
Holly is not a natural when it comes to the outdoors, although she is good at sailing. That fact, however, doesn’t mean a thing to her senior counselor, Debra; she becomes increasingly hostile towards Holly. This animosity, as it turns out, is largely due to Debra being friends with Geri, another counselor and Holly’s ex-friend from when she lived in Waynesbridge.
Back in Waynesbridge, Geri asked Holly to cover for her while she went on a date with a boy her mother disliked. Holly, who’s not the world’s best liar, panicked when Geri’s mother called and unintentionally betrayed her friend. Nevertheless, Geri never forgave Holly, and that bitterness has now spread throughout Nightwing.
If not for best friend Thea and an aloof but kind guy named Sandy, and to some extent Uncle Bill when he’s not preoccupied, Holly would be friendless at camp. Debra and Geri are mercilessly mean, the clownish Kit goes with the flow, as far as Debra is concerned, and Mick is resentful after Holly rebuffs his advances. Another counselor, John, isn’t a fan of Holly either, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with Debra and Geri’s issue. Holly later learns how John, the guy who Thea once liked, was worried that she’d found out about his dating a 15-year-old camper he first met back home. So he’s not the one who killed Debra.
Before death strikes Nightwing (again), a series of “accidents”—a falling cabinet, a collapsing bunk bed, and some sunken canoes—leads Holly to think that someone’s out to sabotage the camp. And their calling card is a lone red feather found at the scene of each crime. Uncle Bill and everyone else she tells, including a cop, dismisses Holly’s speculation, even after Debra is found dead. From the looks of things, Debra’s owl necklace simply got caught in the camp’s pottery wheel, which then rubbed her face to a “bloody mass of raw pulp.”
With Debra’s death not ruled the work of foul play, the camp is allowed to stay open. And with Debra gone now, Holly takes her place during a camper-counselor excursion. The trip is already unpleasant, thanks to Geri, but then things become frightening after Sandy and Holly take a canoe out on the river before everyone else wakes up.
Holly’s one ally on the outing, Sandy, turns out to be Debra’s killer. His stepbrother, Seth a.k.a. “Chief”, died last summer at Nightwing, and Sandy blamed Debra. And since Holly was snooping around, naturally Sandy also had to get rid of her.
Holly escapes Sandy’s grasp at first, but then he catches up to her. The snake-phobic Holly, however, overcomes her fear when she spots a nest of snakes nearby. Finally, she flings one of the reptiles at Sandy, causing him to panic and fall over a cliff.
Holly runs into Mick, who had been looking for her that morning, hoping to apologize for how he’d been treating her. And Sandy, who is still alive, is taken away by the authorities.
Uncle Bill reunites with Holly in the end, and he confirms there was a stash of red feathers among Sandy’s belongings. Holly also spots a random snake during the aftermath, and she picks it up without flinching.
✴✴✴
As you can see, Lights Out is far less convoluted than the 1978 portion of the Fear Street film trilogy. The twelfth book actually has more in common with the original Friday the 13th, a movie that the character Kit claims to love yet doesn’t remember all that well; he tells Holly there’s a scene with a hatchet-wielding, hockey-masked killer in the original movie. Wrong. Anyway, his spotty memory or ignorance notwithstanding, Stine showed self-awareness as he addressed Friday the 13th, a horror movie that would naturally come to mind when reading Lights Out.
In the vein of Friday the 13th, Lights Out has a camper’s death becoming the motivation for murder. Instead of one bloodthirsty mother, however, there’s a vengeful brother mourning his drowned stepbrother. The similarities don’t end there; Sandy even continues to “talk” to his late loved one through letters, updating him on his progress at Nightwing. Stine might as well have included some inner dialogue along the lines of “Kill her, Sandy, kill her.” On the plus side, those who complain about the abrupt introduction of Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th could appreciate Lights Out for having its killer be hiding among the cast all along. That said, Sandy telling Holly to be thankful for her sister, and so early on, was a dead giveaway.
The most surprising, and satisfying, thing about Lights Out is Debra’s death; this was the first true instance of a gruesome murder in Fear Street. Debra’s execution, even when left unseen, is comparable to the villain’s often-grisly handiwork in any given teen slasher movie. Color me both impressed and disturbed. So while only one character died here, it’s a matter of quality over quantity.
It’s not breaking new ground, in terms of YA from this era, but Lights Out plays out like a real mystery. It’s the most Nancy Drew Fear Street yet. And having it set at a creepy and atmospheric summer camp is a big plus. ■
✴✴✴
BODY COUNT
1. Debra
Killed by Sandy.
✴✴✴
QUOTAGE
It was Debra who sat slumped over the table, her face nearly rubbed off by the potting wheel. Only the long black braids identified her as Debra.
See you next time on Fear Street — it’s where your worst nightmares live.
Tales from the Paulside 
Leave a comment