As much as I love ‘90s teen horror novels (and I do!), they aren’t anyone’s idea of great literature. The plots are often formulaic and the characters are pretty static, rarely experiencing any significant change (except when they become ghosts, werewolves, or some other mythical creature). These books were released at breakneck speed at the height of ‘90s teen horror’s popularity—R.L. Stine published close to seventy Fear Street books between 1989 and 1997, and Diane Hoh turned out the entire twenty-nine book Nightmare Hall series between 1993 and 1995—so it’s no surprise that nuance and subtlety are often lacking. But every now and then, there are glancing overlaps between these teen horror novels and classic literature, which is central to both Richie Tankersley Cusick’s Overdue (1995) and Carol Ellis’s The Body (1995), where books serve as both clues and warnings.
In Cusick’s Overdue, Kathleen works at the town library and hates it. Her co-workers are a friendly but mute young man named Robin and the acerbic librarian Miss Finch, who is hated and feared by the young people who come to the library. Kathleen often treats Robin as a kind of blank slate, projecting her own thoughts and fears onto him since he is unable to speak for himself, which makes getting a clear sense of his identity and motivations challenging. But there doesn’t seem to be much mystery to Miss Finch. As Kathleen thinks in the opening chapter, “Everyone made fun of Miss Finch; rumors about her had been flying around Fremont for years. Ever since Kathleen could remember, Miss Finch had lived alone, without family or friends, and she’d always looked exactly the same—stern and cold and mean” (4). Miss Finch runs the library with an iron fist and Kathleen is shocked when Miss Finch tells her that she’ll be going to a library seminar and leaving Kathleen in charge. It’s Kathleen’s spring break but she doesn’t have any plans, which conveniently clears her schedule, but it still seems like an awfully big responsibility for a high school kid.
The spring break doldrums and the day-to-day work of the library are the least of Kathleen’s problems though. The first night she’s in the library on her own, a mystery person drops a stack of vandalized books on murder and torture through the library bookdrop, with the pictures all cut out. While Kathleeen is reeling from this macabre discovery, a strange young man bursts into the library, introducing himself as Alexander Hodges the Third, a student at the nearby college working on a local history project, and Kathleen can’t decide whether he’s potentially dangerous or an appealing romantic prospect.
Then people start getting hurt and killed around Kathleen, with classic novels appearing at the scene as a kind of clue or dark joke. Pretty soon, Kathleen is sure that someone is following her and her life is in danger, but no one believes her and the books that serve as clues keep disappearing from the scene before anyone else can see them to corroborate the existence.
After Kathleen finds Dante’s Inferno mixed in with the defaced murder books, someone sets Kathleen’s house on fire while she sleeps. Kathleen and her friends Bran and Della have to stop and change a flat tire on Bran’s car the next day and along with the tire iron and spare in his trunk, Kathleen finds a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—right before Bran and Della get hit by a truck (which takes the place of Anna Karenina’s train). Bran put himself in the truck’s path to push Della out of the way, but Della still bears the brunt of the impact; Bran sustains some moderate injuries, but Della ends up in a coma.
Kathleen and Bran have been friends their whole lives but now that he’s grown up and apparently pretty hot, all the girls at school want him, and aren’t above harassing or bullying Kathleen to get her out of the way. Two of these mean girls, Monica and Vivian, offer Kathleen a ride as she’s walking to go visit Della’s parents after the accident and when they have Kathleen trapped in the car, they pump her for information about Bran and tell her they don’t think the accident was really an accident at all, saying they had heard “That you were driving … That you drove right into the path of another car. That everyone got hurt but you” (108), before making the not-so-helpful suggestion that “You must feel really weird … With Bran and Della both in the hospital” (109). As a result, Monica is a less sympathetic victim when she turns up nearly dead outside of the library, with half of her face burned with acid, and a copy of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera in her lap. Robin is murdered, impaled in an unused wing of the library, whose death is foreshadowed by the corpse of an impaled bird hidden on a bookshelf, with a page torn from a book of nursery rhymes, including a poem that reads “Come hither, sweet robin, and be not afraid, / I would not hurt even a feather” (94), threat masquerading as reassurance. Then Vivian disappears and Kathleen looks around for a book that might offer a clue, torn between Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped that she finds in the library bathroom and a copy of Sleeping Beauty that someone left in Bran’s hospital room. After being shaken down by a small boy who yells at her for taking his copy of Kidnapped, Kathleen ultimately concludes that Sleeping Beauty is the answer and “‘Vivian’s dead,’ she said flatly. She could see Bran looking at her, his face a mixture of bewilderment and fear” (183). Presumably, Kathleen’s suspicions are correct, but Vivian’s body doesn’t actually turn up by the end of the book.
The attacks keep piling up and the books keep disappearing, until Kathleen comes face-to-face with a decidedly unhinged Miss Finch. The library seminar was all a ruse to allow her to slip around under people’s awareness, attacking teenagers, committing murders, and leaving books behind as a series of clever—if temporary—clues. In true literary fashion, when Miss Finch explains her motivation to Kathleen, she tells it like a story, beginning “Once upon a time, there was a girl who fell in love with a handsome young man” (192), who just happens to be Kathleen’s father. He chose Kathleen’s mom over Miss Finch, she has pined for him ever since, and now that Kathleen’s parents have divorced, she figures she might just have a chance at the “happily ever after” she thought she’d lost, but she wants Kathleen out of the way first. Miss Finch doesn’t necessarily want to kill Kathleen and as she tells Kathleen, her plan is to “get rid of the other young people around you. A rash of teenage killings? People would think it’s some serial killer who hates kids and your father would send you to live with your mother” (194). Problem solved, with the dead teenagers collateral damage in Miss Finch’s quest for her lost love. Her reputation actually works in her favor in this instance, as Miss Finch tells Kathleen “No one will ever suspect me. I’m the mean town librarian, away at a seminar. I’m just plain old Miss Finch, someone to laugh at, someone to get rid of” (195).
With Bran, Alexander, and Kathleen trapped in the library, Miss Finch leaves Kathleen one last clue: Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, which is definitely the least well-known of Miss Finch’s macabre clues. But Kathleen has read How Green Was My Valley and comes to the terrifying realization that the library is set to explode. Miss Finch has turned on the gas in the library kitchen stove, swiped the knobs, and tied the boys up in the basement, but Kathleen perseveres to get all three of them to safety just before everything goes sky high, with Miss Finch choosing to go up in flames with her beloved library.
While Kathleen has to piece together a range of titles and clues that Miss Finch leaves in her wake, in Carol Ellis’s The Body, there’s just one book that’s the key to everything: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Melanie Jacobs is new in town and looking for a part-time job to make a little money when she answers an ad looking for a reader. When she arrives at the house, she finds out the person she’ll be reading to is Lisa Randolph, a girl her own age who had a mysterious accident that has left her mute and largely immobile. Like Kathleen’s relationship with Robin, Melanie tries to find a way to communicate and connect with Lisa that doesn’t rely on talking, as she pays attention to small details like the widening of Lisa’s eyes and small movements of her fingers and hand.
After her first shift reading to Lisa, Melanie asks her friend Trina for the story. Lisa fell from the cliffs near her family’s house and as Trina tells Melanie, “Nobody knows exactly what Lisa was doing … Maybe she went for a walk and slipped or something. Or maybe she was sleepwalking” (42). The only one who can tell them what really happened that night is Lisa. As Lisa keeps attempting to communicate with Melanie, it seems like she’s trying to tell this secret, which someone else clearly wants to keep undiscovered.
Suspects begin piling up as Melanie gets closer to the truth. There’s the handsome boy who takes care of the grounds at the Randolph house, Jeff Singer, who is also new in town and a bit of an enigma. Lisa’s boyfriend Garrett seems protective and territorial when it comes to Lisa. The rest of Lisa’s friend group includes Neil, Kim, Heather, and Rich, and there’s some serious drama between Neil and Kim, particularly when Neil starts flirting with Melanie. Garrett appears devoted to Lisa and her other friends often come visit the Randolph house, though they’re clearly uncomfortable. There was another mysterious stranger in town around the time of Lisa’s accident, a hiker named Peter, but no one knows what happened to him: Neil punched him in the face in a fit of jealousy over Kim, Lisa invited him to camp on her family’s land, Lisa had her fall, and he just kind of disappeared.
Melanie can’t trust anyone, but she does start to pick up on some clues when Lisa starts to signal her at key moments in Jane Eyre. Melanie chooses this book because Lisa had already started it before her accident, evidenced by the bookmark partway through. When Melanie reads of Mr. Mason coming to Thornfield Hall—“a tall, fashionable-looking man, a stranger” (64, emphasis original)—Lisa lifts her hand slightly, stares at the book, and then “raised her eyes from the book to Melanie’s face” (65), hoping she’ll get the hint. And she does, as Melanie realized it’s “A message. Lisa’s using the book to try to tell me something” (65, emphasis original).
It’s slow going: Jane Eyre is a long book and Lisa and Melanie keep getting interrupted. Melanie makes the mistake of telling Trina, Jeff, and Garret that she thinks Lisa is trying to tell her something, and after that, it seems like she and Lisa are never really alone. Someone is always watching, listening, or sitting in the library nearby as Melanie reads. Melanie and Lisa persevere however, eventually compiling a selection of quotes that mention dark strangers, the question of “what crime was this?” (136, emphasis original), a “web of horror” (137, emphasis original), and Mr. Mason again, who now “looked so weak, wild, and lost, and I feared he was dying” (137, emphasis original). Melanie struggles to put the pieces together, but still seems to be missing a few.
She finds those last few pieces to the puzzle one rainy day as she’s tromping through the woods. The weather’s terrible and the road up to the Randolph house is closed. Melanie’s worried about Lisa though and refuses to be turned away, driving down a poorly maintained and muddy backroad, where it doesn’t take long for her car to get stuck. As she walks through the rainy woods headed toward the Randolph house, she finds the clues she had been missing and Lisa had been trying to communicate, realizing what had happened. The mysterious stranger Peter had indeed camped in Lisa’s family’s land, evidenced by the remnants of a campfire, his distinctive walking stick, and a terrible smell, “The sweet, sickly smell of something rotting” (164)—Peter came to the Randolph property, but he never left.
As Melanie flees through the dark and foggy woods, she finds the necklace Lisa lost the night of her fall snagged on a tree branch, and comes up short on the cliff edge, “just managing to wrap one arm around a tree trunk” (168). The path Melanie takes follows in Lisa’s footsteps from that fateful night and Melanie realizes that Lisa “had been running back to her house that night. Running in terror. Her necklace caught on a branch, but she didn’t stop to take it off. She kept running. But it was dark, and she didn’t see the cliff edge until it was too late … Lisa hadn’t been as lucky as Melanie” (168). Now all Melanie has to figure out is what Lisa saw that made her run into the night in terror.
When Melanie finally gets to the Randolph house, she, Lisa, and Garrett are there alone in the storm, and it doesn’t take long for the last pieces to fall into place and for Garrett to make his confession, figuring once he’s bragged about what he did, he can just kill both girls. Following his first fight with Peter, Neil is intent on asserting his dominance and making the other guy disappear. As Garrett tells the girls, he and Neil went to see Peter at his campsite and encouraged him to move on, “to pack up and get going, you know?” (178). Peter refused and the other boys attacked him in a show of territoriality and machismo, with Garrett confessing to Melanie that Lisa “wanted to break up with me … the breaking up didn’t have anything to do with Peter the Great. She told me about that before he showed up at the diner. But anyway, I was in a pretty lousy state of mind, and Peter—well, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time” (179). After Neil and Garrett thought they’d beaten Peter, he grabbed Garrett, who picked up a rock and hit Peter in the head with it, killing him.
After this murder, Garrett doesn’t tell anyone about much of anything: as far as everyone else knows, Lisa’s still his girlfriend, because he hasn’t told anyone she dumped him. Neil left the clearing before Garrett killed Peter, and Garrett went back alone that night to bury Peter’s body near the campsite. Neil doesn’t even know the other boy is dead. Garrett figures what other people don’t know can’t hurt him and his secrets are pretty safe … except that Lisa saw what happened in the woods that night and is desperately trying to make sure everyone knows the truth. Garrett fully intends to kill both Lisa and Melanie with another convenient fall over the edge of the cliff, but Melanie’s quick thinking and the opportune arrival of Lisa’s father and a couple of policemen avert disaster and save the day.
In both Overdue and The Body, books within books leave a trail of clues that make sense of the mystery and violence unfolding. Kathleen and Melanie are well-read young women, able to identify the plots of classic literature in Overdue and execute close readings of connected passages in The Body. This awareness saves their lives, while the less literary-minded around them are confused, unable to put the pieces together, and sometimes even end up the killer’s next target or victim because they can’t decode the clues. Knowledge is power and in these cases, knowing classic literature saves these girls’ lives.
