Initial Thoughts: This series has officially lost whatever charm it had for me, opting for flat-footed awkward preachiness. Sorry, series: I tried.

I will say, however, that some of these scenes are unintentionally hilarious. I guess, depending on your belief system, the happy ending might seem touching? I can tell that it was meant to be. It just didn’t hit for me the way it was supposed to.

Also, Becka and Scott are the most judgmental little prigs ever committed to print, and I say that as someone who used to be obsessed with Victorian children’s literature.

I don’t usually do TRIGGER WARNINGs, but this book contains ANIMAL CRUELTY, and I briefly quote from that part, so you may want to stop reading.

Characters:

  • Rebecca (Becka) Williams
  • Scott Williams, her brother
  • Mom
  • Becka’s friends: Ryan, Julie, Krissi, Philip
  • Kara, Scott’s classmate
  • youth ministry people Todd and Susan
  • assorted Satanists, including Brooke and Laura
  • Z, a wise mentor (but only via computer chat)

Recap: Rebecca wakes in the hospital at 3:01 am from a nightmare about the train that hit her last week. Fair enough. I can see how that would stay with you.

Meanwhile, six robed figures are in a secluded area of the park conducting the most ludicrous teenage Satanic ritual imaginable:

There were two boys and four girls. Teenagers. Dressed in homemade robes, complete with hoods. All of the group had been drinking, and the boys’ red, watery eyes gave clear signs they’d been smoking dope. Lots of it.

The rat had already been killed, its neck broken. Now the group’s leader, Brooke, a chunky girl whose black hair was an obvious dye job, carefully drained the animal’s blood, filling the bottom half of a torn Diet Coke can with the dark liquid.

p. 5

Oh noes, alcohol and drugs and hair dye and Diet Coke. And dope, lots of it. I’m sorry, I laughed so hard at that phrase; even the gratuitous animal cruelty barely made me stop.

So this group, led by Brooke, are carrying out a revenge ritual against Scott and Rebecca. Why, you might ask, do they want revenge?

Then there was the sister, Rebecca Williams…as plain as they come. And yet, for some reason, she had been handpicked by the famous guru, Maxwell Hunter, for her supposed gifts. How did such a nobody rate that kind of honor? As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was that stunt Williams had pulled with the train – proof to all that Rebecca Williams was trying to compete with Brooke’s power and position.

p. 6

It’s proof of what now? Huh? How?

Only Brooke and Laura – a girl who adores Brooke in an intense way that may or may not be meant to imply something – are named, and I have issues with that which I’ll rant about later.

Rebecca’s friends group, plus her brother, Scott, are waiting when her mother brings her home the next day. Ryan is not her boyfriend:

When she had first met Ryan, she agreed with Mom that they could hang out as friends. But as far as any “official” dating or boyfriend/girlfriend thing – no way. It made no difference how many backflips her heart did when she saw him or that he just happened to be the cutest and nicest guy in school (no prejudice there). The point is she was a Christian and he was not.

p. 12

…and I already sense there will be a cringeworthy conversion of Ryan by the end of this series or possibly even this book. That doesn’t bother me half as much as the tense-mixing, though. “The point is” does not belong in a paragraph that is otherwise entirely in the past tense, and I feel more strongly about that than I do about interfaith dating.

Anyway. Yes, in spite of Becka’s inability to make new friends (mentioned often in book one), she has an entire group of people waiting for her: Julie, Ryan, Philip and “his airhead girlfriend, Krissi,” and even “Scott’s dweeb friend, Darryl.” JFC, Becka, you are a judgmental cow. You do not deserve these people OR the new puppy Ryan has brought you.

While everyone’s gathered around Becka’s wheelchair being wholesome and admiring the new puppy (Muttly), Becka gets an anonymous phone call.

Now she heard the voice distinctly. “The spell has been cast….Your destiny belongs to me.”

p. 17

On the way to school the next morning Ryan has to swerve his car to avoid a cat, and because they nearly but didn’t hit a car, Becka is convinced she’s cursed. Okay then.

At school an attractive girl approaches Scott, who was lost in judgmental thoughts about “his little dweeb friend” Darryl. This is actually the phrase Scott thinks about his own friend. The girl, Kara, is one of the kids Scott saw at the Ascension Bookstore, so why he isn’t more suspicious of her is a mystery.

No, wait, it isn’t a mystery:

She nodded to a couple of passing boys and continued, “I was wondering – I mean, you’re so good at algebra and everything – could you…I mean, could we, like, get together sometime, and maybe you could…tutor me a little?”

For a split second Scott was surprised. Then came the grin. He’d heard rumors about California girls and how forward they could be, but he’d never seen one in action. Tutor her? Who’s she kidding? He knew a come-on when he heard one. But that’s okay; if that was how the game was played, he could play it as well as the next guy.

p. 26

That is some impressive conclusion-jumping right there. But the thing is, the book requires Kara to be the embodiment of the temptation of lust, so even when she’s not written as even remotely flirtatious, the text treats her as one step removed from taking up sex work. It’s funny, but also…not.

Becka is embarrassed to be back at school, because she knows the events of book two have been interpreted as “she tried to kill herself” and everyone will stare and whisper. There’s an actually touching scene where popular, outgoing Julie walks with Becka and Ryan, introducing her to people and normalizing the whole situation. Touching, that is, until the last line:

Her friends were standing up for her, making it clear she was not a freak or some nutsoid crazy.

p. 30

Wow. I can usually ignore the use of “crazy” in 80s teen horror – I don’t love it, but I can recognize it as a product of its time – but “nutsoid crazy” is next-level awful, and this book was published in 1994. And is the implication that if Becka had flung herself in front of a train in attempt to kill herself, that it would be okay to whisper and point?

Then Becka finds A DEAD RAT hanging in her locker.

Scotty and Becka chat with Z via computer, and he wisely tells them that most Satanists only have as much power as you give them by fearing them. He also says this, which was so perfectly Chick-tract in tone that I laughed until I cried:

For the most part, Satanists are outcasts who find it difficult to fit in to society. So they indulge in drugs, sex, music, anything leading to self-gratification.

p. 37

I have to ask the obvious: if they’re outcasts, who is doing the casting out and could they maybe be less awful? If they’re finding it difficult to fit in, maybe…help them with the difficulty? Accept them without making them fit in? I don’t know, just throwing out a few suggestions.

Z nags them to attend church, because they need to surround themselves with other believers. I guess if they don’t they’ll be at risk of listening to music.

Kara calls Scott at 3 in the morning to tell him that Brooke and her group are probably doing another ritual. She’s obviously doing that to agitate him and Becka, but somehow Scott still doesn’t get that the girl he saw using a Ouija board with Brooke (book one) and referring to Brooke as “our president” is in fact one of Brooke’s friends.

Speaking of Brooke’s friends, though, the POV in this book is so poorly thought out that it constantly makes it sound as if Brooke and her friends don’t know each others’ names. We get this:

“Should be any time,” the meatier of the two boys growled. The other guy, a kid with a shaved head and more earrings than a jewelry store, looked at him doubtfully. He knew what happened when Meaty Guy drank, and there was no way he was going to become the brunt of all that anger.

p. 44

Okay, “meaty guy” is how Scott referred to him back in book one. So he’s been hanging out with Brooke since book one; why doesn’t he have a name? And it keeps going.

Two other girls stood across the hole from Brooke. The younger and more frail looking of the two shivered when she spoke.

pp. 44-45

Frail girl took the bottle and eyed it warily.

p. 45

“Give me that shovel,” Meaty Guy ordered.

p. 45

WHY DON’T THEY HAVE NAMES? Why are we hearing Scott’s mental nicknames for them when Scott isn’t observing any of these scenes? WHY DOES THIS GO ON FOR THE ENTIRE LENGTH OF THIS DUMB BOOK?

I’m so irritated by this scene, I almost didn’t notice when they steal a skull. So, yeah: this bunch of kids* dig up a grave and steal a skull. I can tell the author probably thought this was expected behaviour from the kind of people who drink and listen to music, but nope, bud, it is a whole other level of thing.

*Speaking of kids, up until now I’d assumed everyone in these series was 12 or 14, but I realized during this book that they all drive. These are supposed to be high school students. They…really feel much younger than that.

After school (the next day, I guess?) Becka reflects on all the minor mishaps she’s had that day, then falls down the steps in her wheelchair while trying to retrieve a note from the ground. I know this is supposed to read like “maybe she IS cursed,” but mostly it comes across like “maybe don’t wheel your chair to the very edge of the steps and then bend down.”

Since I’m already annoyed at this book, allow me to share some pointless judginess:

Everyone at Crescent Bay High had their mode of dress: the surfers had their baggy shorts, the jocks had their T-shirts, the grungies had their plaids, the dweebs had their hand-me-downs. Then there were the kids like herself, the MORS – Middle of the Roaders. People who tried to stay in style but never went too far out on a limb, either because they couldn’t afford it or because their folks wouldn’t let them.

p. 52

Leaving aside the teen-movie sorting of kids into clear groups: why is “wearing hand-me-downs” a category, and why is that category “dweebs”? Why is Becka putting down poor kids? Why is she virtuously lumping herself into the normie category, acknowledging that some people are in that category because they can’t afford to belong to the other groups, but still calling the hand-me-down wearers “dweebs”?

Why is everything in this book so tone deaf and infuriating?

Anyway, moving on. Two “MORs” come over to give her the address for the youth group at their church, because one of them has a pastor for a dad. and he got a fax from Z telling him to invite them.

I’m going to make a guess: Z is going to turn out to be their “dead” dad, right? But really he’s been kidnapped or is on a secret mission or something.

Kara flirts with Scott for a while, and tells him she’s a pagan, and I guess we’re reliving everybody-in-the-90s’ junior high years now. Only no, not really, because even girls utterly obsessed with The Craft were never this ridiculous:

She laughed. “I believe everything is one, everything is interconnected. You, me – ” she swooped down and picked up a nearby pinecone – “this pinecone…everything is the same. Everything is God.”

“Everything is God,” Scott repeated slowly to make sure he got it.

“That’s right. The trick is to harmonize yourself with the natural forces around you and become part of that oneness.”

“Welcome to California,” Scott said, shaking his head.

“Don’t laugh.” She grinned. “It does have its advantages.”

“Like what?”

“Well, if something feels good and it’s natural…I’ll always do it.”

p. 60

I reluctantly award one point to Scott for being funny, in a mild, dad-joke way. I deduct points from the author for heavy-handedly implying all pagans are necessarily promiscuous.

Scott is into Kara’s flirting, and I have a lot of questions. Is “attracted to hedonistic non-Christian women” a standard fear for the readers this is aimed at? I mean, I’ve heard about rock music and D&D being things a certain subset of Christians fear, but this is a new one for me.

Inevitably, and against Scott’s clearly-stated instructions, Kara shows up at his house when Scott is home alone, and contrives to basically fall into his arms just in time for his mother to show up and ground him.

Meanwhile Becka and Ryan check out the Community Christian Church, which has been conveniently vandalized (convenient for the plot, I mean).

“What’s that?” Becka asked, pointing to two lines of letters spray painted across the front wall. They read:

N E M A N A T A S

A C C E B E R R E D R U M

“We haven’t figured it out,” Jenny said with a shrug. “Probably some kind of code. The cemetery next door got hit, too. They knocked over a bunch of tombstones and dug up somebody’s grave.”

p. 68

It takes a bunch more pages before Becka notices that it’s a backwards message. No one in this whole book has seen or read The Shining, obviously.

Okay, I’m no expert on Christian fear porn, but up until the “stealing a skull” part I felt this book was doing a reasonably good job at portraying teen Satanists as more pathetic than creepy. This, though…digging up a grave is a whole other, much more disturbed, level of maladaptive behaviour.

And that’s before they start in with the kidnapping and attempted murder, all of which is so over-the-top stupid and dangerous that: yeah, I would be afraid of Satanists if I thought they did this stuff on the regular. These are things legitimately worth being concerned about. “Brooke cursed you” is just silly; “Brooke is coming to kill you” is serious business, and not the kind that can be dismissed as “they only have power if you fear them.” It’s a tonal shift, and I’m not sure which set of things the book wants to reader to believe.

Anyway. Meaty Guy and Shaved Head, reeking of alcohol because subtlety is un-Christian I guess, kidnap Becka’s puppy. You know how some books use animal cruelty as a cheap form of emotional manipulation. Be warned: this is one of those books. (The puppy survives and is seemingly fine later.)

Shaved Head nodded, opened the VW’s door, and threw the bag in the back. It hit the floorboard with a sickening thud. For the moment, all movement inside the pillowcase ceased.

p. 104

Ryan and Becka see “a flash of light that darted across the room and disappeared” in Becka’s garage. This has been ongoing throughout the series so far – the haunted garage with its inexplicable light – and I don’t remember if I’ve ever mentioned it, so now it’s been officially mentioned. Carry on.

Scott tries to tell Z that maybe, since the Bible was written so long ago, it doesn’t really matter that it says sex before marriage is wrong. Z shuts that down super quick, by providing a lot of stats about condom failure, divorce, and AIDs. Holy over-the-top scare tactics.

Z also tries (but fails, because someone “calls in on the line” and “disrupts” the computer “transmission” – that feels like gibberish but okay) to tell Scott that pagan means WITCH. That would probably scare a three-year-old away from Kara, but not so much a horny teenage boy.

Becka gets creepy phone calls, but the police claim they can’t do much because there’s no hard evidence and “it’s just a couple of prank phone calls.” Uh, how about the gravedigging and the church vandalism (that mentioned Becka by name); could you maybe look into those? Not to mention that these kids regularly MEET AT A LOCAL BOOKSTORE. You could fairly easily locate these criminal masterminds, guys.

The mysterious moving garage light turns out to be…wait for it…the reflection of a streetlight through the attic vent. How the hell…you know what, never mind. I don’t care.

Then the Society KIDNAP BECKA, which is such a dramatic escalation of teenage dipshit Satanism, even compared to graverobbing, that I have whiplash now. They beat up Ryan, knocking him unconscious. Scotty isn’t there to help because he’s sneaking over to Kara’s house (this is the single most convoluted argument against premarital sex ever – “Don’t have sex with pagans because they’ll kidnap your sister” – but it kind of feels convincing in the moment). Scotty, smartening up slightly, flees Kara’s house the minute he realizes her parents aren’t there.

Ryan comes to and tries to get help from Scotty (who, obviously, isn’t at Darryl’s house where he said he’d be), and when that fails he turns to Susan Murdock, the youth minister at Becka’s new church. Surprisingly, she turns out to be of major use. Surprisingly to me, I mean; I guess Susan would be an obvious source of help to the intended readers? I mean, in retrospect I can see that it makes sense within the world of this book.

Susan searched his face. He was dead earnest. “Where?” she asked. “How?”

“You said you knew some of the kids.”

“One, yes. Laura Henderson. We were getting to be good friends. She even came over for dinner a couple of times. But now….” Her voice dropped as she shook her head. “Things have been real tough for her.”

p. 134

The Society take Becka to the graveyard for some chanting and bloodletting, as one does, and then get ready to kill her puppy. That’s not a euphemism, unfortunately.

Becka, meanwhile, has been praying so hard that they only take off her sweatshirt, not her pants. Wait, what? Maybe it was a euphemism. Oh, wait, it’s because they’re dressing her in a white nightgown for some completely unfathomable reason. I guess they’ve watched a lot of Italian horror movies from the 70s.

Becka breaks Brooke’s hand by smashing it with her cast, and then Susan shows up. Laura (the teen Satanist who seems to be infatuated with Brooke) is holding a dagger to Becka’s throat, but Susan defeats her with the power of Christian love. I’m not even kidding: there’s a full-on Christian showdown.

Brooke rose to her feet, motioning for her followers to join her. “Hate your enemies with your whole heart…”

But they would not participate. Meaty Guy, Shaved Head, Frail Girl…they all looked away.

The siren grew louder. The police were practically there.

“…and if a man smite you on the cheek, smash him on the other!”

“Give me the knife, Laura,” Susan repeated. “I love you. Jesus loves you.”

“Hate your enemies with your whole heart, and if a man smite you on the cheek, smash him on the other!” Brooke stood there, holding her hand, trembling in rage.

Laura was sobbing. Ever so slowly, she released the dagger. It fell into Susan’s palm. Instantly, Susan dropped to the mud and threw her arms around Laura.

p. 145

That might feel like a long quote, but the actual Susan-Brooke battle for Laura takes up FIVE PAGES, so actually I spared you a lot.

Annnnnd we’re done, except for the main characters recapping at each other a bit, and a message from Z warning them that the Society might challenge them to visit a haunted house.

Final Thoughts: The writing is definitely immersive, but the worldview is so jarring I kept un-immersing. Also, the author wavers between a stance I’d consider sensible re: teen Satanists (they are sad and easily ignored) and a more sensational “they are like the Manson family” vibe. It’s almost as though he wants teen Satanists to be scarier than they actually are. Like, maybe he knew better but still wanted to scare his readers. Brooke and her crew were beyond cringe with their anti-prayers and spells, but on the other hand they were kidnappers and would-be murderers who fully belong in jail. That…feels like two separate, distinct categories of people.

The showdown at the end was the most melodramatic thing I’ve read in a while. I have to admit, if they televised this I would watch it.