#one evil summer

[90smovies]

[kamreadsandrecs]

Algebra, Murder, and Supernatural Powers: R.L. Stine’s One Evil Summer  - Reactor

Math can be maddening, but this seems a bit extreme...

[kammartinez]

Algebra, Murder, and Supernatural Powers: R.L. Stine’s One Evil Summer  - Reactor

Math can be maddening, but this seems a bit extreme...

[creeposterribleliveblogs]

i love telling people about one evil summer because i say the name and they already start laughing before i can even tell them the plot

[creeposterribleliveblogs]

One Evil Summer (chapters 10-28)

10

yes, well, people don't have hallucinations on purpose

i was like, can teenagers even drive boats legally? but i'm looking at american boating laws by state and surprisingly, most of them will even let a 12-year-old drive a boat. well i guess dave had a car too

i... did not remember this. i vaguely remembered there being a shed (bc i thought that was so cool and i wanted a secret shed of my own) but this...

11

oh ok

bold of this book to call dave amanda's 'friend' mere paragraphs after he kissed her. it's fine tho bc too many people forget about the 'friend' part of 'boyfriend'

12

after the incidents with the clipping and the phone, i feel like it's sort of on amanda to not see where this was gonna go

13

oh of course, it totally makes sense for someone to be so distressed over failing a class that they have a bunch of hallucinations and kill their pets.

(...actually, yeah, maybe. i don't know about the hallucinating and killing part, but i do know someone who self-harmed due to failing a school test. but they were already mentally ill to begin with.)

i always remember this line bc it seems like something an 11-year-old would think up

bro you can't just take a random kitten into your room. cats love pretending to be homeless in order to get attention, it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually have nowhere to go

14

no commentary

15

amanda has good taste in movies lol

honestly i'm sad that blood surfer isn't a real movie bc i'd love to watch it

it's really funny how chrissy appears to be infatuated with dave and changing her whole personality for him. but it's probably an act

16

no commentary

17

still none

18

this is tied with the "pure evil" thing as most memorable quote. i remember reading this and thinking "she uses all of her brain but she doesn't even know that the 'most people only use 10% of their brains' thing isn't true?"

shit ideology you got there😬

is there a drinking game for every time a fear street character says this?

19

chrissy just loves finding new ways to torment amanda. like it's scary but it's also so funny

also i had never noticed how much the word 'shrill' was used to describe amanda's voice (only when she's upset though)

20

Okay, literary analysis time. Amanda has shown through various incidents – the tallness/levitating incident, and now this – to have trouble perceiving events properly when in distress. During these times, she screams in a shrill voice that was mentioned to be unfamilar to her. She hears Chirssy's voice inside her head. She passes out a lot. And one of the main things in this book is how everyone thinks she's crazy. So maybe this story is really supposed to be an 'unreliable narrator' type of story, where we truly don't know whether any of this is happening, or if Amanda is delusional. I never really thought about it like that when I first read it, and it doesn't seem like the type of thing that would happen in cheap 90s teen horror, but it's not like the theory isn't supported by anything.

21

there are so many myths and misconceptions in this book. but it was written before these things could be easily disproved online, so whatever

why? just leave. get the kids and leave.

22

amanda is yelling "oh!" and "hey!" way too much and i think it sort of... i think that maybe the author saw a lot of horror movies and noted that people yell a lot in those and then just tried to translate it over to book form without considering why people yell in horror movies. the sound of screams and cries evokes something that can't be replicated in text form. also, yelling in horror movies fills the space where dialogue normally would be, whereas books don't need every scene to have dialogue, since books contain words no matter what's happening in them.

23

...they can at least test for DNA on the knife, right?

24

the chapter titles have been getting increasingly comedic

25

...okay

she will break them with her mind, if she's still alive

26

you will regret your kindness

now that's WAY too merciful

27

not the kind of story where i was expecting a cat to save the day

sure, okay. at this point, whatever

28

ok... so everyone believes amanda now, and even accepts the fact that chrissy has powers?

unkillable

BTW, this book has some really funny reviews on goodreads

[creeposterribleliveblogs]

One Evil Summer (chapters 1-9)

i remember reading this book when i was 13 and having to stop myself from laughing out loud in the middle of class (not that much in the way of "class" happened during the times i was reading this, though). i remember a lot of this book but there's a blank space in my brain between the intro and climax; i don't remember what happened to build up the tension. also i think there was a boy character who was in the story but i remember almost nothing about him or his scenes, despite me remembering references to specific media, characters' outfit descriptions, and the names of side characters who were mentioned only a few times (e.g. the bakers, kyle)

well okay! here we go!

oh, dave. i guess that was his name.

i had never looked at the publication date before, but this makes a lot of sense. it's a very early-90s kind of book.

1

i remember this intro scene way too well. along with me remembering word-for-word the first chapter of a bad fanfic, and nearly the entire script of a movie, i'm starting to think i had perfect memory when i was 13. (or, well, almost perfect. i couldn't be bothered to remember about dave.)

the bar is on the ground, but at least she's using the word 'psychopath' to refer to people with actual mental health problems instead of just anyone she considers slightly rude. that's more than can be said about 2000s YA literature.

i always remembered this bc who would paint a wall mustard yellow unless they wanted the patients to suffer and get worse lol

2

i find it incredibly funny that she lives on fear street but nothing bad happened there and the actual horror took place somewhere else

this book sure likes yellow

this is such a real part of car rides in the summer

i never understood people who think being asked questions is the worst thing ever. well, i sort of understand now, but i didn't use to

idk much about children but i always thought this seemed wrong. the 'th' sound isn't usually said by accident, is it?

taking birds on vacation?

can one attend summer school at a different school....? idk. i don't know much about summer school

in what way?

lol

3

all day???

i... don't remember this part 👀

4

they... wouldn't have met... if he was her teacher...? i'm starting to think dave isn't as smart as he seems

she is bonding with dave very quickly. i guess she has to since we can't be stalling the plot

signature R.L. stine thing, yelling "oh!" when experiencing deathly terror. i don't think most people do that irl, though. "oh" is more of a benign surprise type of noise

6

he survived a car crash with no damage?

i think this book was the first time i read about a cat dying without becoming extremely upset. and i think the trick was being mentally guarded against it. knowing it was a trashy horror book, i didn't develop any emotional connections to the characters, not even the cat, which helped me feel less upset during this scene.

by the way, is it just me, or are orange cats more likely to die in books compared to other cats? almost every dead fictional cat i know is orange.

just in case you still thought she wasn't evil

i love this bc it serves no purpose other than making her creepy and otherwordly. what benefits are there to levitating half a foot off the floor? just scaring people. that's it.

7

i've never understood characters who were so sure of their own sanity. who see something impossible and insist it's definitely real. who can't even consider the possibility, no matter how small, that they are having a delusion.

oh ok. good job amanda for considering that your perception may not be infallible

8

amanda is yelling too many exclamations alone in the middle of the night

9

apparently people really did use to refer to their peers by full name. seems weird these days

i can never forget this scene. most iconic scene in the book to me (well, tied with one later scene)

[fyavanwa]

1. Mockingjay and One Evil Summer I love the cover of One Evil Summer for the Katniss/Buttercup reunion. One Evil Summer is about a babysitter who gets powers and murders, the bird could represent the unleashing of her powers...

2. Saint Anything and The Roanoke Girls The Roanoke Girls has a few important scenes at an old carousel. And it’s cover could work well for Saint Anything and how Sydney feels about her place in the family.

3. Those Girls and American Girls Both girl books with generic girl covers, this is an easy swap. Those Girls actually focuses on more than one girl while American Girls is really just one girl’s story, so this might make a little more sense.

[whosebob]

Perfectly evil, moi!