The terrain of dating and romantic relationships is tough to navigate for any teen, full of all kinds of perils and pitfalls, from the taboo crossing of social hierarchies, the faux pas of asking out someone else’s crush, and overthinking whether you should pick up the phone or wait for the other person to make the first move. In the world of R.L. Stine, though, these worries pale in comparison to larger concerns like whether the guy you’re making out with might actually be undead, or how to protect yourself from the violent stalker who thinks she’s your girlfriend and won’t take no for an answer. These are the high-stakes dangers of dating in the ‘90s teen horror world. But what else are you going to do—sit at home alone on a Friday night? Stine’s The Boyfriend (1990) and The Girlfriend (1991) are standalone novels, separate from his popular Fear Street series, and each one delves into the dark side of teen romance.
In The Boyfriend, Joanna Collier is dating a guy named Dex, who is cute, kind, and thoughtful, but also disappointingly poor. Dex goes to another school across town and when Joanna begrudgingly goes to see him in a play there, she reflects that “The neighborhood didn’t look very appealing. She had locked the car and hurried into the building, surprised by how tacky and run-down everything had looked. It had been so long since Joanna had been inside a public school” (7). Joanna is an unrepentant snob, with absolutely no interest in checking her privilege. Dex is a passing diversion for her, not “good enough” to be a long-term romantic prospect, and once she’s made up her mind that she wants to get rid of him, she becomes cold and cruel toward him, ghosting him on a date they set up to meet at the mall, while secretly watching him from afar and enjoying his frustration and disappointment. Joanna is one of just a handful of characters who give Fear Street’s Reva Dalby a run for her money in sheer awfulness: She has the self-awareness to realize that the things she says and does are terrible and hurt other people, but she actively doesn’t care, shrugging off any criticisms of her behavior and stalwartly fending off any crisis of conscience. While in Reva’s case, it was her mother’s death that turned her into a horrible person, in The Boyfriend, Joanna has been traumatized by her father deserting their family, pain that she then externalizes and inflicts on other people. Apparently, in Stine’s world, the nuclear family is an essential foundation if there’s any hope of having non-sociopathic kids. Joanna is a pretty uncomplicated, straightforward villain, which allows the reader to enjoy some top-notch schadenfreude in reading about the range of horrors that soon befall her.
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Dex is sweet and believes Joanna when she tells him their date just slipped her mind and when he keeps coming back to her, she decides it’s really more fun to keep seeing both him AND Shep (her new beau, who is bland, pretentious, but much more socially and financially suited to Joanna’s snobbish priorities). When Dex falls off a cliff while goofing around with his best friend Pete, it seems like all of Joanna’s problems have taken care of themselves (albeit in a tragic, macabre way, though this wrinkle doesn’t really phase Joanna much). While Pete screams for help, Joanna drives away in a panic and ends up being in a terrible car accident when she gets into a head-on collision with a truck. When she’s recovering in the hospital and talking to her best friend Mary after learning of Dex’s death, Joanna tells her “When Pete told me Dex was dead, my first reaction was, Now I don’t have to break up with him” (45). That’s some silver lining.
Joanna starts recovering from her injuries and everything seems to be proceeding according to plan and then… Dex comes back. Joanna knows he’s not a dream or a hallucination because she can touch him and other people can see and hear him too, like when Mary talks to Dex on the phone when he calls Joanna. But there’s something not quite right about him. He’s walking stiffly, he smells kind of funny, and his skin has an odd pallor, which Joanna shrugs off as being aftereffects of his terrible accident. This explanation becomes harder to cling to when his skin shades into a distinctly green hue… and then starts falling off. And his teeth start getting loose. And then he only has one eyeball. Joanna runs away, Pete calls to tell her Dex is definitely back from the dead and on his way to kill her, and Dex walks right into the house through the door that Shep didn’t close behind him when he got there because he “thought the maid would” (131). Joanna and Shep are definitely made for each other and the moral of the story is that a sense of blind entitlement and privilege will get you killed by zombies, or ghouls, or whatever the heck Dex is… which, as it turns out, is just an adolescent boy with a strong sense of theatricality, access to some presumably pretty high-end gore makeup, and a real commitment to getting his revenge on the girl who thought she saw him fall to his death and bailed without a second thought.
But before Joanna realizes that she is the target of an amazingly elaborate and drawn out prank, her driving motivation is to protect herself from rampaging Dex. She stabs him in the chest and Pete tells her “Now you’ve really killed him” (135, emphasis added). While Joanna claims self-defense, she is also really quick to come up with a plan to dispose of the body and once again pretend like none of it ever happened. She cuts Shep’s hand so that there will be a visibly bleeding person in the kitchen when she calls the maid to clean up the blood (and Shep finally starts to wonder if this relationship is all it’s cracked up to be), while Pete and Mary hastily abscond with the body. It seems like it was way too easy to talk Pete and Mary into going along with this messed up plan… until we realize that it was a prop knife and Dex is still not actually dead. It’s a turducken of “oh my gosh, you killed him (but not really)” practical jokes inside of practical jokes, and it’s a mess. In the end, Joanna finds out that Dex isn’t really dead (again), they try to kill each other, no one ends up actually dead, and Dex and Mary get together. Joanna achieves a bit of self-awareness and cries for the first time in years (tears = “I now realize I was a horrible person but now I have feelings and I’m going to be nicer to people” for both Joanna and Reva Dalby, though Reva’s epiphanies rarely last long in the Fear Street books), presumably becoming more empathetic, so all’s well(ish) that ends well(ish)?
The tables are turned a bit in The Girlfriend, which begins with a likable, high-achieving couple—Scotty and Lora—poised on the precipice of the next exciting stage of their lives, as their families celebrate their upcoming graduation and acceptance to Princeton University. As with The Boyfriend, there are some undercurrents of classicism (while Lora’s family is wealthy and she’s definitely going, Scotty’s family is in a more precarious financial situation and he’s waiting for scholarship offers to come through before he knows whether he’ll really be going or not—though Lora’s family glosses over this disconnect, celebrating both of them like it’s a done deal). Scotty and Lora have been dating since the sixth grade and their relationship seems positive if a bit predictable.
After the party, Lora and her family head off on a Paris vacation (again showcasing their inherent class privilege). This trip takes place over homecoming weekend and Scotty is so bummed out about being left on his own for this momentous occasion that he goes on a couple of dates with a quiet mystery girl named Shannon. It all starts innocently enough, when he notices her bike has a flat tire after the homecoming bonfire and offers to give her a ride home, with a stop for hamburgers on the way. When he drops her off at home, though, he asks her on a proper date for the next night, to go out to the movies, and though he wonders what the heck he’s doing, he goes ahead and does it anyway. Exactly what happens remains undefined: he takes her home to an empty house and she begins aggressively kissing him, telling him “You’re my baby now” (49, emphasis original) and she later reminds him that “I was so nice to you” (67), which could mean a whole lot of things, though they all remain unstated here. Much like the sidestepping of any real, substantive consideration of class with Scotty and Lora, there’s definitely the suggestion here that Scotty’s activities with Shannon may have included him taking advantage of a young woman who is less popular, has less social capital or recourse if she she feels wronged, and who is even more economically disadvantaged and with fewer options than Scotty himself, though this is never directly addressed and these possibilities (and the potential exploitation they suggest) remain unspoken.
Scotty’s evening out with Shannon—whatever it may or may not have entailed—is unquestionably a temporary arrangement from his perspective, though he soon finds out that Shannon has other ideas. Scotty is finished with her after that one weekend and when this becomes clear to Shannon, she responds with stalking and violence, in a kind of ‘90s teen horror variation of Fatal Attraction (1987). Shannon calls his house repeatedly and publicly calls him “baby.” When that doesn’t win him over, she kills Scotty’s pet snake by cutting it in half, breaks his hand, sets his car on fire, kills Lora’s cat and stuffs it inside Scotty’s baseball hat (which he left at her house following their dalliance), then leaves it in Lora’s yard for her to find. She tells him she has three really protective, dangerous brothers, and Scotty’s pretty sure he sees one of them following him and menacingly lurking around. She crashes a scholarship luncheon celebrating Scotty and Lora, making a scene at the hotel as she attempts to force her way into the ballroom, and she claws Scotty’s face when he tackles her to keep her from barging in and announcing their relationship to the gathered group within. Finally, she blackmails him into coming to her house for another liaison, threatening to spill his secrets if he doesn’t agree.
Scotty goes to Shannon’s house and—unsurprisingly—all does not go well. She aggressively comes on to him, he rebuffs her, and after some tussling, he shoves her to the floor, inadvertently killing her. Rather than calling 911 for medical help or to report the sequence of events to the police, or even just getting the heck out of there and hoping for the best, Scotty decides that he wants some time to think and just needs to find somewhere to stash the body in the meantime. He’s on a tight time frame—Lora’s coming to get him at 9:00 for his birthday party and he can’t hide the body at his own house, so his totally logical solution is to sneak into Lora’s basement (because it’s apparently never locked), hide the body there, and come back for it later. Except when he quietly slips through Lora’s back door with Shannon’s body thrown over his shoulders, Lora and his friends and family all jump out, yelling “surprise!” in what has to be one of the oddest surprise party hellos of all time. Scotty freezes and drops Shannon’s body, simultaneously relieved and horrified when she moans and he blurts out “I knew she wasn’t dead” (158).
Everyone takes this remarkably in stride… except for Shannon, who springs back into unhinged action and attempts to stab Scotty with a ski pole. The man Scotty has been running from—thinking he is one of Shannon’s scary brothers—busts in and saves the day, because he’s really Lieutenant Jarmusch, a juvenile division police officer who has a long track record with Shannon’s criminally violent behavior, which includes a conviction for manslaughter. Jarmusch tells the gathered group that following this conviction, “she only did juvenile time. You know. Like ten minutes,” as he “snickered, shaking his head” (163). He has been doing off-the-clock surveillance (suspicious and creepy—basically, he’s stalking Shannon while Shannon stalks Scotty) and is here to save Shannon from herself and make sure she gets the help she needs. When faced with this reality, Shannon’s demeanor immediately and terrifyingly shifts, as she switches from vulnerable and emotionally fragile to manipulative and sociopathic, grumbling “Uh-oh… busted again” (163).
Perhaps the most shocking part of this whole plot, however, may be that everything sort of ends happily ever after for Scotty and Lora, with no actual discussion of what happened, why it happened, what it means for their relationship, or what changes they might need to make moving forward. Lora shrugs and notes that they’ve been together for a long time and are maybe a little too serious for their age, but they don’t break up—or even fight—as she jokes about Shannon ruining the gift she bought Scotty by attacking him with the ski pole and “They were both smiling as she walked him out to his car to say good night” (165). So once again, all’s well that ends well for the most part (with the exception of Shannon, who doesn’t seem to really count, as far as anyone else is concerned).
In Stine’s The Boyfriend and The Girlfriend, dating takes a dark turn, bursting with not just jealousy and intrigue but a range of obsessive, destructive behaviors. In The Boyfriend, Joanna is not a particularly sympathetic character and she certainly wrongs Dex by stringing him along, getting her kicks spying on him while she’s standing him up, and seeing another guy behind his back, but faking his death THREE times seems like a bit much and a whole lot of work for not much payoff. The Girlfriend’s resolution is similarly unsatisfying, with no insight into why Shannon does the things she does and no real consequences for Scotty, as Lora seems to brush off his infidelity and his gathered loved ones quickly dismiss the fact that he thought he killed someone and they caught him in the act of trying to hide the body. If these are the dangers lurking beneath the surface of the dating pool, maybe sitting at home alone on Friday night isn’t so bad after all.
Alissa Burger is an associate professor at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. She writes about horror, queer representation in literature and popular culture, graphic novels, and Stephen King. She loves yoga, cats, and cheese.
