Fear Street: The New Girl

I've decided to start reading through my collection of Fear Street and Christopher Pike books. Gotta love a good, strong hit of nostalgia!

I was obsessed with Feat Street as a kid - I had no problem earning my Book It pizza certificates and meeting the book report quotas as long as RL Stine kept pumping out new spooky tales - and pump them out he did! In my current collection, I have 84 different volumes, and while my collection covers most of the bases, including offshoots like Fear Street Sagas, the Cheerleaders series, and various Super Chillers, it is by no means complete. Christopher Pike was another favorite, but I'll save that gushing until I read one of his classics.

I've been wanting to revisit this series for a while, and since one of my goals for 2026 was to carve out more time for reading, I figured this was a good time to get started. And what better place to start than at the beginning: the first Fear Street novel, The New Girl.

What I always liked about the Fear Street books is that I remember them having a range of surprise endings: sometimes the situation could be explained through misunderstandings and human deception, but sometimes there was something legitimately supernatural happening. This mix of resolutions kept you guessing. After all, if every mystery gets solved like Scooby Doo, with a rubber mask being ripped off to reveal the creepy caretaker or the frustrated neighbor, then you start to look for clues as to who is behind all of the mischief. When the ghost story could actually involve a real ghost, it's much easier to get swept away and just enjoy the tale!

The New Girl is a ghost story of sorts - Cory Brooks, talented high school gymnast, sees a new girl in school and is immediately smitten with her. He finds out that her name is Anna Corwin, and that she just moved to Fear Street, a rundown street in Shadyside where strange things seem to happen. The first book does a good job of dropping a lot of early lore that will influence the series, including the burned-out mansion once owned by Simon Fear, but doesn't get so bogged down in exposition that we lose the story.

Cory is obsessed, and Stine does a fantastic job of capturing the single-mindedness with which a teenager can pursue something that they want. He starts to alienate his friends, including his best friend Lisa; Lisa clearly is mooning over him and he is absolutely oblivious, another fairly accurate depiction of the male teenager! He starts slacking off in gymnastics and even skips class to try to learn more about and spend time with Anna.

Cory isn't going to let a little thing like Anna being dead get in the way of their budding romance.

As he's drawn closer and closer to Anna, Cory meets her older brother Brad who tells him that Anna is dead. He and Lisa do some research at the library and find articles from Melrose, the town where the Corwin's lived previously, that seem to confirm her death. So how is she floating through the hallways at school, teasing and luring Cory closer and closer? And who is sending threatening messages to Lisa, telling that she'll soon be dead too?

I won't spoil the ending because I think it is actually very well crafted, but I will say that this first outing falls on the more spooky but not supernatural side of resolutions. As sometimes happens with young adult fiction, especially of the time, there is a big reveal and then suddenly everything is just fine and people are moving on; a little bit more detail in the conclusion would have been welcome, but all is put right and Cory finally figures out that Lisa is into him. Frankly, Lisa, I think you could do better, but you can't fight young love...

A fun little aside: most of my Fear Street/Christopher Pike collection I tracked down on the third party market, but I did have a few books that were salvaged from my childhood that never made their way to a rummage sale or thrift store. This was apparently one of them - when I opened the front cover, I saw my childhood best friend's name written right inside the front cover! I like to believe that we traded books at some point, but just in case I did apologize for any decades-old thievery that might have occurred!