R. L. Stine, Dangerous Girls (HarperCollins, 2003)
R. L. Stine’s vampire novel, Dangerous Girls, sucks. And to say that a book about vampires sucks is wittier and more original than anything in the book itself. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Destiny Weller is a teenage girl with no personality. She and her twin sister Livvy, who also has no personality, are counselors at a summer camp where no one has a personality. Is it Camp Stepford? No, it’s Camp Stine!
"Destiny changed into jeans and a camp sweatshirt. Then she hurried back outside to help build the fire, unaware of the horror that awaited her."A handsome counselor turns her and Livvy into neophytes, or semi-vampires. They have one month to turn human again, before he returns to make them full vampires. Meanwhile, they fight their craving for blood, evade mysterious vampire hunters ... zzzzz ... (the reviewer slaps herself awake) and look for a cure.
R. L. Stine, along with Christopher Pike, fills an essential ecological niche in the field of the young adult horror novel, that of the awful writer whose books fly from the shelves like horrid winged insects.
Vampires have been written about so much that they’ve become a great Gothic cliché. In order to write a good book about vampires, you must think harder, write better, find some way to make the exhausted subject seem fresh and new.
M. T. Anderson’s Thirsty uses black humor and a bizarre alternate America to create a horrifyingly funny teenage wasteland. Barbara Hambly’s Those Who Hunt the Night has unusual and likable protaganists applying early science to age-old folklore in a vividly imagined gaslit London. Annette Curtis Klause’s The Silver Kiss delves into her teenage protagonist’s psyche to create a modern parable of love, death, and moving on. Steven Brust’s stunningly well-written Agyar takes an oblique approach with heartbreaking results.
I could go on. It’s difficult to write well and originally on an overused topic, but it’s not impossible.
R. L. Stine doesn’t even try. There is nothing new or original or poignant or interesting in any of the 247 pages of stultifying hackdom that comprise Dangerous Girls. It’s not even amusingly trashy. It’s just lifeless, cranked-out pages by a writer on autopilot.
I read this book so that you don’t have to. I want a Purple Heart.
