CJ Reviews The Lost Girl by R.L. Stine

Title: The Lost Girl (A Fear Street Novel)
Author: R.L. Stine
Publication Date: September 29, 2015
Format: Electronic Advanced Reader Copy
Rating: 3.5 stars

When new girl Lizzy Palmer shows up at school, Michael becomes obsessed with her despite disapproval from his girlfriend, Pepper. After a snow mobile accident, things take a deadly turn when Michael and his friends become victims and Michael makes a connection between these events and something that happened over 60 years ago.

I grew up reading Goosebumps and Fear Street novels, so I couldn’t resist requesting an eARC of this new Fear Street novel when it became available. I was looking forward to returning to my roots with one of the authors who first introduced me to horror, and likely paved the way for my current addiction to science fiction.

I was happy to learn that this still had the exact same style and feel as the Fear Street novels I knew and loved. The pacing was similar, the writing style, the level of suspense and danger. One thing I always loved about the Fear Street novels was that (most of the time) death was permanent, and characters actually died all the time. No character was truly safe, and the danger in these stories were real. That is very much prevalent in this book. Reading it now as an adult, I can see where the writing may not be as sophisticated as some novels – in fact it is fairly simple – but it’s still entertaining and makes for a quick read that can be hard to put down at times.

However, there were two aspects of this novel that I found slightly disappointing. First, if you insert “Winter” for “Summer” you basically have I Know What You Did Last Summer. Kids out joyriding (this time on snow mobiles instead of in a car) think they kill a random person, then he comes back to get revenge. Practically the exact same plot as the movie. There was a slight twist to the tale, but that just leads into my second disappointment. I don’t want to give too much away, since it may spoil the ending, but I’ll just say that the twist ended up being more scifi than horror, which despite my love of scifi disappointed me in this case, since I always liked the Fear Street novels because they’re supernatural horror, not scifi.

Aside from those two factors, this novel was exactly what I was expecting from a Fear Street novel, and I was enjoyed reading it and reliving a little of my teenaged reading habits. If you like Stine and the Fear Street novels, I don’t think you will be disappointed.

The Lost Girl was read as part of ARC August hosted by Read.Sleep.Repeat. You can see more of my ARC August reads here.