Rating: 
Summary: Not Bad, Not Great
Review: This is popular author R.L. Stine's debut in the adult fiction world as he is most famous for his "Goosebumps" and "Fear Street" series, which are both aimed at kids and teenagers. As with Stine's previous works, he is not a master of the craft with intricate plots, great characters, and development. Stine writes novels that are mostly plot driven, leaving out a lot of character development and details. This is great for a reader that is not looking for the latter but readers that do enjoy this stuff should seek entertainment with a different book. Sara Morgan is a woman that lives in a college town and is seeking work, so she takes a job with the dean of students at the university. She then starts seeing a professor at the school, Liam, an Irish born guy that believes in superstitions. Meanwhile, there are many gruesome, terrible murders taking place in the town and an investigation is started. This novel takes you into the affair of Sara and Liam and parts of the investigation. If you are looking for a thriller that is very involved with the police investagations then this book is not for you. As far as Stine gets with the police stuff is taking you to the scene of the crime and describing lots of gore. Stine's writing is very easy to read though it does come off as very childish at times. This is an easy book to zip right through because of this, but for readers looking for entwined and detailed writing should look somewhere else. One of the problems I had with the book was the lack of depth. Everything in the book was presented very quickly and Stine never dug deep enough to make the reader feel involved with the story on an emotional level. Instead of getting in touch with major plot events in the book the reader will be pulled into graphic sex scenes, which may be a bit much for certain readers. In fact, much of this book reads like an erotic novel do to the amount of sex and how Stine describes it. I wasn't bothered by this but I am certain that more sensitive and younger readers may. Furthermore, the characters in "Superstitious" are not developed much, leaving the reader with a feeling that gives off a type of incompleteness. I like to read about characters that are well developed and make you care about them, but that was just lacking here. Sara is a likeable character but she just comes off as being too good. There is not much to identify with Sara. Overall, "Superstitious" lacks the depth to make it great. This is an enjoyable novel that can be read very quickly as it has short chapters and is easy to read. If you're looking for a quick little beach read, this will be good for that. Happy Reading!
Rating: 
Summary: Wow
Review: The opening of this book is excellent.. the story, the plot, the suspense.. everything.. I could not put this book down, except when I had to sleep, and I took it to work and school with me. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of stories that grab you, intrigue you, and ultimately scare you, with an ending that makes you say.. "Wow.." Also to fans, and soon-to-be fans of R.L Stine who have read his fear street books, and so on... His entrance into adult fiction is applauded
Rating:
Summary: Best Book Ever
Review: This is the best book I have ever read. I could not put this book down, all I did was eat and read. There is no way anyone can come close to making a book as good as this one. Everytime you turn the page there is always a new twist. I will always remeber this book, it is diffently #1 on my list!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: "Superstitious" Review
Review: Remember "Goosebumps", or the "Fear Street" series, because I used to love reading them. R.L. Stine was one of my fabourate authors, and I was crazy about his books. Then came a time when I moved on and started reading adult novels, that was a time when Stephen King became my favourate auther. Since I stoped reading kids books, I was happy to hear that R.L. Stine was publishing a novel for adults. I bought it, read it, and was not impressed. This book is a waste of time, and the story is just stupid. Maybe if it was well writen, it would be more enjoyable, but its not. The story is about a girl named Sara Morgan, who falls in love with a professor named Lian O'Conner. Liam seems like an every-day guy, exept he believes in every superstition. Then there are the murders on campus, and no one knows who the killer is. (spoiler) After a lot of guessing, you final find out that Liam is superstitious because he has demons inside of him, and each time he lets a superstition slip, a demon gets lose and kills someone. The author is good at keeping you guessing, but while reading this, you don't feel like guessing, you just want to finish the book and be done with it. I recomand that you stay away from this book and stick to better authors, like Stephen King.
Rating: 
Summary: Goosebumps on Steroids. Thank You & Goodnight.
Review: Stine's gift is merely his presence and the familiarity of his name. At the time of Superstitious' inception, he was all but omnipresent, what with his cash-cow Goosebumps series and his B-level legacy in the annals of YA suspense. I've no problem with a Youth/Young Adult horror author testing the King/Koontz driven waters of adult fiction in the same genre. Stine's sometime rival and (I feel) literary superior, Christopher Pike, has made several successful trips to the same place, most notably with the haunting, meaningful The Season of Passage. However, Stine's writing lacks the depth and humanity that keeps me stalking the YA shelves for Pike's work over a decade after abandoning the Fear Street saga.
There are alternating moments of viseral strength and creative prowess in this tepid and try-hard adult debut. He demonstrates at least a pretense of nerve in the death scenes--of which there are many, and bordering on gratuitous--and his stories have always been at least conceptually alluring. Superstitons throughout history and their relevance in modern society is solid subject matter, and--with the right imagination and structure acting as vessels holding and guiding the blood--could have added up to a blistering supernatural tour de force, with harrowing undertones of classic psychological terror. Unfortunately, Stine is not up to the challenge, and it shows. He bumbles through what should be complex scenes and seemingly mad-libbed plot developments like a poor man's John Saul, and with all the strength and vibrancy of a loaf of bread submerged in salt water (Thank you, Scott!).
The cast of "characters" are so bland and garden-variety uniform you could conduct a roll call based on their stereotypes (even their names are predictable and flavorless as a day-old wad of Bazooka...I've forgotten most of them). Liam is devastatingly handsome, smart and fit as a whipcord, with a swanky accent and a measured handful of quirks/intrigue to distract us from his potential dark side. Sara is disarmingly beautiful, disgustingly virtuous, and overplays the damsel in distress like a lobotomized Lois Lane. His colleague is a leering hulk of a skirt-chaser with a penchant for lethal weapons. Her best friend is a selfless wisecracker, visibly overcompensating for being the runner-up in beauty's sad scheme. His sister is an overbearing, sugarcoating busybody. Her former lover is an overindulged, sociopathic creep. One might theorize that Mr. Stine plucks his characters from fortune cookies, but I'm more inclined to think he scrapes them from the insides of his nostrils. Whatever you find there is virtually guaranteed to be monotonous, unpleasant, and often downright disgusting.
His writing style could tactfully be called an acquired taste, but I'll just come right out and say it's a hard one to acquire. There's no texture or flow to it, only a half-assed stream-of-semiconsciousness framework of words, fragments and paragraphs leading us clumsily from point A to point B. There are no insights or poignance or anything approaching an overall theme, just cause and effect, action and reaction. Instead of following up an intense event with an equally intense description of the charcter's emotional distress, we get simply. "No." A strong narrative and taut, stylish prose often creates the backbone that supports the whole show, but in this brittle networking of juvenile dialogue and superficial observations, a weak plot and weaker characters only suffer further. Everything cringes desperately under the thumb of the original idea, and there it all falters and dies with barely a whimper, much less a bang.
I can forgive a work of fiction for being all style and no substance when I'm in a generous mood, but Stine's entry into the arena of adult horror has neither...no style, no substance, no soul, no point. He's too scared of his own potential and those pesky necessities like originality to effectively scare the likes of us. Mr. Stine can still feel free to take a tentative place beside JK Rowling and act as an effective literary springboard for the youth of the world.
But for my buck and its bang, Stephen King is still horror's annointed one.
Rating:
Summary: Not Bad
Review: As a fan of Stine's Goosebumps book series as a kid I decided to give Superstitious a chance and found I actually kind of liked it, there are problems of course, but Stine pens what I'd compare to a good slasher flick. I would advise that you reed this novel around Halloween time, it seems to fit into that time frame quite nicely. Overall I would say that Superstitious is a pretty good read and could be used especially to capitalize on the atmosphere of one of those cold and dark fall afternoons.
Rating:
Summary: The best book ever!!!!!!!
Review: I read this book and I found it spectacular!!! I may be only 13 but when I read an excellent book I know that I do. It is great in the middle of the book and the ending is twisted and surprising! I think that the ending would have to be the best part to me.The only thing that is bad about this book is that once you start to read the book you can't put it down, you just have to keep on reading! So if you haven't read this book yet I strongly recommend that you do read it.
Rating:
Summary: A Pretty good read.
Review: This is Stine's first attempt to write an adult (non Goosebumps) book. Over all, he did a pretty good job. It's obvious that Stine took the time to research the many superstitions and what they mean, and how to fight them off. The problem is that there's almost to many supersitions that are covererd. I found myself annoyed at times reading about them. I wanted the story to move along. Sara is involved with a professor that takes superstitions very seriously. Sara is then swept up with the prof and his sister and all of superstitoins and rituals that they go throught. As if this isn't enough for Sara to deal with...there's savage, brutal killer on the college campus that targets women. And what this killer is savage and violent. Sara is soon trapped in the world of superstitions, in which she can't excape. Over all this is a pretty good book. This is also a very violent and a gore filled book. Over all if you like horror and like Stine, then I suggest this book. Is this a fantastic book? No. Is this a decent book? Yup. If you like gore, then you may like this book.
Rating:
Summary: If I could, I'd give SUPERSTITIOUS zero stars
Review: As a former fan of his YA books, I felt compelled to try this book when it first came out. This book is a huge dissapointment. SUPERSTITIOUS follows several people all in a small college town who are connected to each other through the college and through the brutal murders that have just started. There's Sara Morgan, a grad student who marries prestigious prof. Liam O'Connor, and Garrett Montgomery, the detective investigating the murders, for the main characters. Along with them is a handful of other characters, most of whom are unimportant--they are introduced briefly the sole purpose of being killed off later in the book. First, the plot. The main ideas around which the book was constructed were generally a good ones, but the plot wasn't expanded very well or explored to the fullest--it was lousy. Along with several unimportant characters, Stine killed the plot's potential. Stine seemed to be taking the easy road out on this one.
The charachters were not very well developed. Most people in this book seem to be in their twenties, and no character is very realistic. Stine tried too hard to get into the mind frame of this age group--it's somewhat obvious when reading the charachter's thoughts and dialogue; he doesn't do a very good job. The characters also do not reach their full potential--when given an option of doing two things, they'll pick the less interesting one--sort of an easy way out. The dialogue was not too bad, but not without its flaws. Stine also tried to incorporate adult themes into the novel (sex), and while these scenes could have also been much better, they were extremely bad. I don't mean this in the raunchy sense, either--Stine is neither Marquis de Sade nor Brett Easton Ellis. The sex scenes are very badly written, and essentially all the same. And occasionally an 'event' during one of these scenes will be in the wrong place entirely (this only happens once or twice). Stine should really stick to YA--really. The grammar/style of writing is a whole other story. I can see how this sort of choppiness (lots of fragmented sentences) can be used in the right places for effect, but Stine does it all the time. Some writers can pull this off and do it amazingly (try Janet Fitch's WHITE OLEANDER for a perfect example or just a great read), but Stine fails miserably. For example: "'[Dialouge here],' Garret insisted. Too defensive. He scolded himself." The book doesn't flow, making it very frustrating for the reader. That was my major problem with this book--good writing can make a reader forget character or plot flaws, but bad writing makes those things more prominent and more irritating.
Also, I have a (very) short list of other problems not mentioned above, just in case you aren't convinced yet: 1)characters do unrealistic things in certain situations/come up with unrealistic answers to simple problems (whereas, like I mentioned above, they'll opt for the easy road in a more complex situation);2) a vocabulary worthy of Stine's YA books--much repitition of the same words, no really good use of description;3) characters will repeat actions several times throughout the book, and instead of developing the character, it stops the character from advancing, ie, learing through its mistakes and growing; 4) Stine doesn't stay with one verb tense--he'll go from gerund to present tense to preterit and over again. And when charachters are remembering or talking about a situation in retrospect, it is always in the present tense instead of past tense. The short version of the above: save yourself the time and money: DON'T BUY THIS BOOK. If you really feel compelled to read it, get it from the library or a friend and brace yourself for dissapointment. If you're really looking for good horror, try a master, like King, who knows what they're doing.
Rating:
Summary: Superstitutions
Review: I am from Blaine Minnesota.
I love reading R.L. Stine books. I haven't read this one yet I just wanted to get in on the action. Anyway I read one of his books called, Well I forgot the name of it. Anyway it was about A girl who was rich and she was an only child, and she had a cousin who wasn't rich and the girl and her friend had made some scrafs in one of the girl's classes and so the girl decided to visit her cousin about selling her scrafs that she had made. I know the book had to do with plastic dolls, and the girl that was rich had a best friend who she had invited to her house from college to stay with her because she couldn't go home. She said her boyfriend was going to kill her. But the thing is she killed her boyfriend. So the girl is suspose to be going crazy and the rich girl dosen't know. Why don't R.L.Stine write books about other people other than white people. I mean Black people also read his books were the one who probably reads them the most anyway. But this book was really good. My little sister has so many book by r.l.stine that I don't which one to read first. I used to read them alot when I was 14 and 15 But then I guess I slipt away from them for a little while.
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