Superstitious Cassette Abridged

Rating:
Summary: Best Book Ever
Review: Stine's gift is merely his presence and the familiarity of his name. At the time of <i>Superstitious</i>' 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 <i>The Season of Passage</i>. 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.