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Alissa Burger

Close Reads

Pushing Daisies: Death, Life, and The Pie Hole

Tue Mar 14, 2023 1:00pm 5 comments 13 Favorites [+]

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Television

Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and guest authors dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Alissa Burger celebrates Pi Day with a look back at Pushing Daisies and a visit to our favorite cafe: the Pie Hole.

While Alfred, Lord Tennyson notes that “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” as Pi Day nears, Pushing Daisies fans’ thoughts turn yearningly to thoughts of The Pie Hole. Or at least, mine do.

Series: Close Reads

Teen Horror Time Machine

Playing for Keeps: The Dead Game, Truth or Die, and Hide and Seek

Thu Feb 23, 2023 2:00pm Post a comment 3 Favorites [+]

There’s so much subterfuge and deception in ‘90s teen horror, from outright lies and misplaced suspicion to hidden or mistaken identities. People’s motivations are rarely straightforward, your best friend could be the one who’s trying to kill you, and there’s a good chance that pretty much everyone is lying about something, whether it’s where they were last Friday night, who they’ve been making out with behind someone else’s back, or whether they’re secretly terrorizing their classmates under cover of darkness. People are playing a lot of games, but the parameters are often fuzzy and the rules unarticulated. So it should be a refreshing change of pace when the games are out in the open, a fun diversion from all of the murder and mayhem, right? Not exactly. In A. Bates’ The Dead Game (1992), Diane Hoh’s Truth or Die (1994), and Jane McFann’s Hide and Seek (1995), the stakes of these games are high: you lose, you die.

Teen Horror Time Machine

A Date With Death: R.L. Stine’s The Boyfriend and The Girlfriend

Thu Feb 9, 2023 3:00pm 3 Favorites [+]

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.

Teen Horror Time Machine

Secrets of the Wilderness: Christopher Pike’s Spellbound and Fall Into Darkness

Thu Jan 26, 2023 1:00pm 4 Favorites [+]

A group of teens heads out into the wilderness, chock full of sexual tension and dark secrets, and they don’t all make it back alive. What happened out there? With Spellbound (1988) and Fall Into Darkness (1990), Christopher Pike begins with this shared premise and then provides readers with two very different explanations. While Fall Into Darkness foregrounds realistic horror and Spellbound draws on the supernatural, both also reflect on how these stories get told and who gets to tell them, as lawyers and journalists try to shape the narrative of what happens to these teens, and the books become a tug-of-war over different versions of the truth.

Teen Horror Time Machine

Winter Chills: R.L. Stine’s The Snowman and Caroline B. Cooney’s Freeze Tag

Thu Jan 12, 2023 12:00pm 3 Favorites [+]

When the snow starts falling and the cold winter chill settles in, the best place to be is warm and toasty inside with a blanket, the fireplace crackling, and a good book. But for our teen horror heroes, sometimes that chill is inescapable, following them into their homes and into their hearts. With R.L. Stine’s The Snowman (1991), nowhere is safe from a predatory stranger, while in Caroline B. Cooney’s Freeze Tag (1992), antagonists and friends both prove dangerous and horrifying.

Close Reads

“What Song for Christmas?” The Joyful Silliness of Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger

Tue Dec 20, 2022 1:30pm 5 comments 1 Favorite [+]

Screenshot: Mirrorball Films

Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and guest authors dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds. This time out, Alissa Burger celebrates the sheer joy of a holiday film featuring a ragtag group of students, a Christmas song competition, and David Tennant’s evil twin.

One of my very favorite holiday traditions is watching (and rewatching and rewatching) Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger (2012), the second film in a British series that includes Nativity! (2009), Danger in the Manger, Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey? (2014), and Nativity Rocks! (2018). I enjoy the others, but Danger in the Manger is where my heart is, for its exuberant silliness, optimism that defies all logic and reasoning, and unapologetic joy.

Series: Close Reads

Teen Horror Time Machine

‘Tis the Season to Revisit R.L. Stine’s Silent Night Trilogy

Thu Dec 15, 2022 1:30pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

Holiday horror has a long and illustrious history, from traditional Victorian Christmas ghost stories like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) to more contemporary examples like Black Christmas (1974), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Krampus (2015), and A Christmas Horror Story (2015), among others.

R.L. Stine’s first Silent Night (1991) Fear Street novel combines the traditions of the Christmas slasher film with the redemptive transformation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with mean girl Reva Dalby as the Scrooge character in this variation.

Teen Horror Time Machine

Welcome to Nightmare Hall: The Silent Scream, Monster, and The Vampire’s Kiss

Thu Dec 1, 2022 1:30pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

R.L. Stine’s Fear Street is the best-known of the ‘90s teen horror series, but it wasn’t the only one. Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall is a 29-book series chronicling the dark history and inexplicable goings-on at Salem University. Hoh’s series followed the kids of ‘90s teen horror beyond graduation as they ventured into the great wide world, where they usually discovered a whole new set of horrors. The cover design of the Nightmare Hall books featured a window cut-out in the cover, through which the bookstore browser could get a tantalizingly incomplete peek at the horrors that lay within, with a second, inner cover providing further visual clues—a dead body, a lurking monster—without giving away the novel’s mystery.

Teen Horror Time Machine

A Dark and Lonely Path: Road to Nowhere and The Hitchhiker

Thu Nov 17, 2022 1:00pm 1 comment 3 Favorites [+]

One of the great thrills of being a teenager is getting your license and discovering the freedom of the open road, even if that open road only leads you to the grocery store to get milk for your mom. Driving to school, nights out with friends, or just cruising around, there’s a real freedom in being behind the wheel that the guys and girls of ‘90s teen horror enjoy, no matter where that road takes them. Time in the car is frequently about more than just driving: it’s a chance to escape, to rock out to a favorite song, to have serious talks with friends, to hear others’ stories and even tell some of their own.

In both Christopher Pike’s Road to Nowhere (1990) and R.L. Stine’s The Hitchhiker (1993), these road trips serve as a liminal space, an experience outside the scope of these teens’ everyday realities, where anything could happen and unforeseen dangers lurk around every corner. These cars also serve as a significant space of narrative construction and meaning-making, as the individuals within them give voice to their deepest truths through the stories they tell.

Teen Horror Time Machine

School Spirits: The Phantom and Homecoming Queen

Thu Nov 3, 2022 1:00pm Favorite This

As the leaves turn and the nights get colder, ‘90s teen horror fancies turn to football games under the Friday Night Lights and who will be honored with a spot on the homecoming court. In both Barbara Steiner’s The Phantom (1993) and John Hall’s Homecoming Queen (1996), the school spirit is literal. In The Phantom, the students of Stony Bay High begin seeing the ghost of Reggie Westerman, the high school quarterback who died the year before as the result of football injury, while in Homecoming Queen, Brenda Sheldon is the eponymous queen, returned from the dead twenty-five years after dying on homecoming night and apparently angry that Westdale High is reviving the homecoming queen tradition.

While much of each novel focuses on the teens trying to figure out if these ghosts are actually real—and if they’re not, who’s pretending to be them and why—The Phantom and Homecoming Queen both also reflect upon the way teens grieve and cope with death, particularly the loss of one of their own.

Teen Horror Time Machine

Stories Old and New: The Midnight Club

Thu Oct 20, 2022 1:00pm 2 comments 1 Favorite [+]

Christopher Pike’s The Midnight Club (1994) was hands-down my favorite of the ‘90s teen horror novels. I don’t remember exactly how many copies of the paperback I went through, but I read and reread it until it fell apart, necessitating at least one trip to the mall Waldenbooks to buy a replacement copy. Even now as I write this, there are multiple copies of The Midnight Club on my bookshelves, including the tattered and well-loved surviving copy from my adolescence.

Teen Horror Time Machine

Books of Secret Knowledge: The Diary and The Yearbook

Thu Sep 29, 2022 2:00pm Favorite This

Books and textual artifacts have been frequent catalysts in Gothic and horror literature. H.P. Lovecraft’s characters have The Necronomicon and Francis Wayland Thurston discovers dark truths he cannot live with in his dead uncle’s notes in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), while the Overlook Hotel seduces Jack Torrance with a pile of historical documents in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977). Offering detailed chronicles of the past—whether recent or ancient—and forbidden knowledge that can be achieved in no other way, these books serve as both repositories and doorways.

Books bursting with dark secrets play a similarly pivotal role in Sinclair Smith’s The Diary (1994; also published as Let Me Tell You How I Died) and Peter Lerangis’ The Yearbook (1994).

Teen Horror Time Machine

Don’t Stray From the Path: Teacher’s Pet and Help Wanted

Thu Sep 15, 2022 2:00pm 2 comments 1 Favorite [+]

Richie Tankersley Cusick’s Teacher’s Pet (1990) and Help Wanted (1993) have quite different plots, but they both end up in the same place: with a young woman in danger in the woods. In these two Cusick novels, these girls have been told to stay out of the woods and that, if they must pass through them, they must stick to the path, much like Little Red Riding Hood setting out for Grandma’s house. But following the Gothic tradition, these woods hold intrigue and temptation, as well as danger, and both characters find themselves drawn toward these secrets, with disastrous consequences.

Teen Horror Time Machine

School’s in Session: Final Exam and Night School

Thu Sep 1, 2022 11:00am 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

Often in ‘90s teen horror, school serves as a backdrop or a distraction, with characters drowsing their way through the school day until they can head to cheerleading practice to find out if a supernatural disaster has taken out another one of their squad-mates, or grumbling about having to shoehorn homework assignments in around trying to not get murdered. But sometimes school itself is the source of the horror, which is the case in A. Bates’ Final Exam (1990) and Caroline B. Cooney’s Night School (1995). The threat could be realistic, supernatural, or some combination of the two, but whichever it is, it makes it challenging to get to graduation alive.

Teen Horror Time Machine

Who’s The Fairest of Them All? Diane Hoh’s The Accident and D.E. Athkins’ Mirror, Mirror

Thu Aug 18, 2022 11:00am Favorite This

Mirrors in the horror genre can be pretty terrifying and not just in a “yikes, bad hair day” kind of way. They can plunge us into the realm of the uncanny where what we see is simultaneously recognizable and unfamiliar. They can act as thin spots between realities, fluid and permeable when they’re supposed to be solid and reliable. They can show us things that are meant to remain invisible, reflections of people or things that shouldn’t be there, that aren’t there in “real life,” like a figure just over the shoulder of our reflection or a different face lurking just beneath our own. In Diane Hoh’s The Accident (1991) and D.E. Athkins’ Mirror, Mirror (1992), mirrors are central to the horrors encountered by their protagonists, ranging from past trauma to the price of beauty.