Fear Street: The Sleepwalker - Things FINALLY Get Spooky!

Well...sort of.

We're back with another Fear Street tale, and this time we actually get a little taste of the supernatural! Mayra has taken a summer job working for Mrs. Cottler, who is paying her $5 an hour (doesn't seem like much, but remember that this was in the late 80s when minimum wage was around $4 an hour) to cook for her, do some light housework, read to her, and other chores as needed. Mrs. Cottler has a black cat, tons of weird trinkets and talismans, and a drawer full of black taper candles. An obnoxious neighbor stops by, drops his handkerchief, and the next thing you know he's fallen and broken his hip.

In case the reader is too dense to figure out where all of these clues are leading, Mayra is soon convinced that her employer is a witch. More than that, Mayra had a strand of beads break her first day at work, and Mrs. Cottler kept them to restring them - and immediately after that, Mayra starts sleepwalking.

At first she ends up in her yard, and then she walks all the way to Fear Street - which happens ot be where Mrs. Cottler lives. The third time, she manages to walk into the lake in the Fear Street woods and almost drowns. Clearly Mrs. Cottler is trying to harm her, right?

Not exactly. We're going to get into the real culprit in a bit, but first let's talk about Mrs. Cottler. It is eventually revealed that she is a well known professor of occult studies (they have those?!) and all of the weird objects and the books on witchcraft in her library are all a part of her decades of study.

Sure Jan.

Mrs. Cottler's cat, Hazel, is no ordinary housecat, and is written with a personality that is basically human. Mayra catches Mrs. Cottler deep in a trance holding the neighbor's hanky. It's pretty clear that there is something spooky going on with her, even if she's not causing Mayra's sleepwalking problem.

Maybe it's "Big Neck." Yep, there is a character that Mayra keeps encountering who she has never seen before, but every time he sees her, he is immediately filled with rage. Stine makes a point to talk about this guy's neck over and over and over again. It's a little creepy, and not in a witchy/sleepwalky way, but in a I-didn't-know-neck-fetishes-were-a-thing way.

He's important, but first we have to talk about Walker. The magician. Yep, her new boyfriend is a magician. Don't worry, if you're tired, I'm tired too. There is a lot going on here.

Walker is sort of standoffish and strange to Mayra all the time. He is an awkward and shy guy for the most part, and his biggest obsession is becoming a famous magician. He is always trying to show her a new card trick he's been working on. Outside of magic he has very little personality, so it's odd when Mayra finds him at the Division Street mall with non other than teenage skank, Suki Thomas!

That's right, y'all! Suki is back, and once again the only thing we fear about her is that everyone (or at least all of the female characters we've encountered so far) think she's a trashy slut, and she dresses a little bit punk. I believe Mayra calls her "the trashiest girl in school" or something similar. Stine is clearly working through something in his treatment of Suki, and I'm hoping we'll eventaully get to see a better side to her in a future book. #JusticeForSuki

It turns out that Mayra's sleepwalking has nothing to do with Mrs. Cottler's not-witchcraft and instead is a result of Walker having hypnotised Mayra so that she would forget that he is a car thief and a hit and run killer. Yep, that happened.

Right before starting her job, on one of their early dates, Walker stole a car at the mall and was joyriding with Mayra in the car when they crashed into another car that went over a cliff and into the river. There are a lot of random bodies of water and the mapping of Shadyside is a little hazy, so it's best to just go with it. Mayra ran to the edge and saw someone emerge from the water - Big Neck!

It turns out that Big Neck (whose name is Cal, but Big Neck is easier to remember - his only character traits are having a big neck and lots of rage) and his brother went in the river, but only Big Neck made it out. He had seen Mayra standing up on the road and assumed that she was the driver. Mayra remembered all of this after she went back to the lake in the Fear Street woods and jumped in to get away from her ex-boyfriend, Link. Who has been low key stalking her, and she has been low key liking it. More on him later (Jesus this book feels like a lot!).

So in a totally brilliant plan, Mayra gets Walker to meet her at the lake at night to trick him into admitting he hypnotized her, and it works - and then he admits that he's been dating Suki and everyone knows it, and then he full on tries to kill her!

And why did is he doing all this? Because he doesn't want Mayra to call the police and ruin his chance at becoming a famous magician. Ahh, to be young and have a dream!

He is trying to drown her in the water when out of nowhere Hazel the cat shows up and goes all Pet Sematary on him so that Mayra can escape to the house and call the police. While she's waiting, Walker breaks in through a window and threatens her with Mrs. Cottler's meat cleaver, and when Mayra tries to escape through the front door - there's Big Neck! He heard everything and now knows that Walker was driving, not Mayra, and subdues him just before the cops arrive.

This makes it easy for Mayra to reunite with her former boyfriend Link, who just happens to be Mrs. Cottler's nephew. She also makes up with his sister Stephanie, who she had earlier caught casting a spell with Mayra's scarf and piles of chicken bones. This one is a lot.

I love that we are starting to get some of the supernatural elements that would become much more prominent in later books in the series, but this one was a little all over the place. There are so many red herrings and dramatic moments - I didn't even mention Mayra's best friend being run off the road by Big Neck because she was driving Mayra's mom's car, breaking multiple bones! - it's hard to keep track of it. I really thought that witchcraft was going to be the ultimate explanation, so kudos to Stine on the effective fakeout, but it just was just a little much.

Fear Street books tend to be a little uneven in that some of them build up a slow creep with lots of suspense, and some just throw crazy shit at you from page one. This one definitely fall closer to the latter end of that spectrum.