Where the first Pandemic! book seemed hopeful, Žižek is just as jaded as everyone else in this entry.

We could have done great things, but instead we turned on ourselves.

It’s a bummer of a book, but never boring. It talks about what the pandemic did for peoples’ sex lives (sales of sex dolls skyrocketed, which you would expect, but they were mostly bought by married couples, which you might not expect), the violent reaction to acknowledging a new reality by way of spitting on minimum wage employees for asking people to put on a mask, and clearer lines in class division.

I’m a sucker for class war. I grew up on punk rock and was poor at a few points in life and it really, REALLY sucked. It left scars, if you know what I mean.

And Covid really brought out peoples’ true colors when it comes to class division. People were more than happy to demand the poor go back to work to keep the economy going rather than keeping people safe and stopping a pandemic.

And the poor had to oblige.

Except for one thing: unemployment benefits were pretty good and it wasn’t uncommon to hear that the poor are lazily not working because they make more money from unemployment.

Maybe it’s because I recently finished Grapes of Wrath, but that’s a statement that would have fit perfectly in that book. People are upset with the WORKER for not working and not the EMPLOYER for paying such lousy wages in the first place.

I blame day-traders who focus on making as much money as possible in as little time as possible while doing as little actual work as possible.

But I also blame the stubborn trait where one says “I had to do X, so you have to do X,” even if society and maybe even the person saying this would benefit otherwise. Instead, they would rather hold themselves and their communities back in order to maintain the status quo with them on top, better than other people because they were given the opportunities to pursue whatever it was while others weren’t.

It’s frustrating.

For those that don’t know, the Fear Street series and the Goosebumps series were published by different houses, which explains why Stine didn’t end the original GB run with a kid moving to Fear Street or even Shadyside (where Fear Street sits).

My conjecture here is that the lawsuits from Scholastic left a bad taste in his mouth and he tried to get a GB-ish series off the ground as a spin-off called Ghosts of Fear Street.

And there were other spin-offs as well. Fear Street, Ghosts of Fear Street, 99 Fear Street, Fear Street Saga, etc.

But at some point, Stine stopped writing them. Some sources say that it’s because they just weren’t selling well anymore.

Stine sat.

And waited.

And then he came back with a vengeance and new Fear Street books. They were longer and more graphic than the Fear Street books of the 90s.

This is one of those new books (published in 2018).

And it was a lot of fun, it feels like Stine riffing on The Shining (movie). Room 237 is mentioned, it mostly takes place in a hotel in Colorado that has a sort of time warp and curse attached to it, and there was even a photo from 1924 that had people from modern times.

It might be unfair of me to compare Stine’s stories to King’s so often (I did it with at least two Goosebumps books) but I’ve read a lot of King and he’s been around for so long - has written so much - that it’s tough not to see similarities and call them out.

His changes to the series (longer and more violent) are plenty visible and I didn’t mind the additional violence but this book did stretch on a bit and felt a little bloated. Stine can write tight stories and pack a punch. Sometimes this feels like there’s character development lacking, but the extra length here isn’t exactly adding to it - it’s just making the book longer. There’s more repetition and, in some books’ cases, a couple different chances to end it.

All that said, it was still fun to read and I’m glad I did.

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If there was ever a toe-in-the-water to the Fear Street series, this is it. It’s also the only copy of a classic Fear Street in size, cover, and price at my local Books-A-Million and I can’t help but feel that’s because it doesn’t bring the scares (or, really, much of anything).

The story centers on a douche of a dude who is so self-centered and full of himself that he challenges himself to date twins within a specific time frame. They both fall in love with him and begin to play off each other while a third sister - an EVIL sister - is thrown into the mix.

The only thing I kept thinking throughout the whole book is that SURELY sisters would talk to each other more. I mean, I wasn’t particularly close to my brother when we were teenagers, but we knew who each other was dating.

It wasn’t a dumb book per se, but it wasn’t anything special.

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Talk about a red herring - this book flat-out exposes the killer in the past few pages. If you like the idea of sudden surprises, this is up your alley.

That said, there were a couple of things that were interesting in this book:

1) The weird idea that longevity in your relationship is more important than it really is in high school. Like, if you can just make it longer together than any other couple, you’ll find real happiness. In reality, splitting up and finding someone else would probably make you more happy. But I did see it in high school - hell, I participated in it in high school - and it’s always struck out to me as one of the weirder things we did. Like we were really giving it our best to be grown-ups as children.

2) Abusive relationships. In this book, the abuser was portrayed more as a “wild card,” than anything else, but the words were there. He cracked a pool cue over a friend’s head and said his hand must have slipped. The next paragraph said sometimes the guy would be fun and the life of the party and sometimes… his hand would slip.

But the guy who got his head cracked open never faltered in his dedication to his friend. He WAS going behind the guy’s back with his girlfriend, but he wouldn’t let anyone talk shit about his bud and wouldn’t hear that maybe he was dangerous.

It was clear to everyone else, though.

This one’s a whole lot of drama, but it still works. It was a fun time.

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You know what? Let’s go back to the beginning. To Fear Street #1.

I keep getting thrown with the Columbo/Law & Order: CI openings where a crime is committed by SOMEONE and then the story actually starts, but it’s fine. I like Columbo and I LOVED CI.

I will say that a common critique you’re going to hear from me is a plot driven by poor communication. It’s a pet peeve of mine and just lazy writing. It’s also all OVER the Fear Street series.

Anyway, this book centers around a kid in high school who falls in love with the new girl, Anna. It IS a little strange that none of his friends know who she is, has her in their classes, and everyone that DOES know Anna insists that Anna…

Is dead.

I looked this up on Wikipedia to make sure I remembered the plot since I read this a couple years ago and it says that the boyfriend was convinced she was alive with her “human-like kisses.”

I literally laughed out loud.

Anyway, it turns out “Anna” isn’t Anna at ALL and she’s actually WILLA, Anna’s sister who killed Anna out of jealousy and assumed her identity. There’s a brother, Brad, and he plays a pretty important role. He shoved a girl down some stairs and I think he even killed a cat to stuff in a locker as a warning, but I don’t care about him.

My mind got snagged HARD on the idea that a teenage girl killed her teenage girl sister and just ADOPTED her personality. Where were her parents? Where was Brad? Why had nobody heard of Anna? Why is Willa going to school?

I just think that if you’re going to murder a sibling and assume their identity, high school years are the WORST years to do it.

That said, it was fun to re-read and still way better than Goosebumps.

I’m excited for the next one.

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I really don’t want to be overly critical here, but the motive behind the bad guy’s decision was questionable at best.

That said, it was still a lot of fun. I really thought I would have enjoyed reading Goosebumps more than I actually did so when I finally got out of the kiddie pool and into an area where stakes are higher, there’s more violence, the threat of death is a thing, and the ghosts aren’t cool girls next door but malevolent beings that want to kill you, it’s so much better.

It’s not life-shaking literature but it IS a lot of fun and this feels way more like my comfort zone when it comes to horror for a younger audience.

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Ooh, a Fear Street enters the reading log, eh? I wonder where this could lead!

You just don’t see covers like this anymore. Now it’s all stark lines and cartoony stuff - where did all the paintings go?!

I promise I’m not one of those guys who insist that the past was better just because it was THEIR past, but just look at this cover! This one’s insane with the amount of things to look at but Fear Street books featured covers that, while definitely not timeless, did such a good job of capturing a mood that you really have to wonder why they stopped. Or why Fear Street specifically shifted to easier covers that said nothing about the book inside.

*sigh*

Anyway, this book was okay. I’m not generally a historical fiction kind of guy (especially when it comes to colonial times as the real history is almost always more interesting), and I feel like explaining lore - especially for a subject like Fear Street - will only bog stuff down later on with continuity and logical problems, but this does scratch a real itch for RL Stine for me. Here was violence. Here were stakes! Here was a twist that was pretty decent!

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It’s super interesting to read a philosopher’s take on how he thought Covid would impact our culture as a whole.

He was wrong, but I think we all were. I distinctly remember thinking that Covid could - for all the heartache and death it brought with it - also bring a reframing of our lives and a refreshed priority list to all of us. We could really take a moment and breathe for a bit, look around, and evaluate whether we as a society are okay with the grind that is modernity.

Turns out yes, people were okay with it. Well. Rich people were okay with it. As so often happens, the curtain lifted a bit to show that that so-called “unskilled labor force,” is actually holding up civilization while the rich just pretend to do important things.

At this point, Covid feels like a wasted opportunity to right an awful lot of wrongs.

Edit: I wrote the above in 2022 and I feel like I’ve just gotten more radicalized year after year from my disappointment in all of us as a society. We could have done so much. We could currently be in such a better place. But no, the workforce was forced to cave to the rich, showing their trick of limiting wages to barely livable also meant that nobody had the opportunity to reject the systems that they set up.

We were set up, exploited, and manipulated and words cannot express just how fucking angry I am about the whole thing because now there are ZERO silver linings or redeeming values to Covid19. Just a whole lot of unnecessary death and tighter grip on the people by corporations and billionaires.

It kills me, man. I’m not even kidding. I hate it and it breaks my heart every. single. day.

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I’m usually a little hesitant to get into philosophy books from military folks because I’ve seen… we’ll say a “rah rah,” attitude where things could be a lot more objective than they wind up. I think it’s a product of our modern all-or-nothing society that allows so little room for nuance.

But I heard his commencement speech and thought the idea of a book where he expands on his lessons learned sounded interesting.

And it was.

It’s also a good philosophy book harping on the importance of team work and pragmatism.

I found the most interesting part of it was the foreword where he said he was hesitant to give the commencement speech in the first place because, even if it was in Texas, he had doubts that a military man would have an audience in a college.

Then he was shocked that they seemed to like it so much.

I think that we’re often sold black and white pictures of people or groups and there’s very little room for gray. Even less so with increasingly-sparse social media outlets where we’re limited so much. Too much.

Nuance slips away until you’re left with such basic sentences that everyone is either friend or foe and the lines are clearly dividing everyone when, in reality, there’s a lot more middle ground and occupants of said ground than we’ve been led to believe.

It’s okay to be nuanced. Hell, I would say most of us are pretty friggin’ nuanced so I guess what I’m saying is it’s okay to acknowledge it in ourselves and others.

This guy was sold the idea that all universities are left-wing anti-military incubators and he was wrong, wrong, wrong. Tons of people in college are nuanced enough to realize it’s okay to support troops while also being anti-war and angry at politicians who are so blasé about sending troops in to die.

That’s probably the best lesson I got from this book: be open to the idea that we’ve been manipulated into thinking the world is FAR more black and white than it really is.

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