I looked around myself. I was at a High School. That much was obvious considering the approximate ages of the people who surrounded me, several of whom were wearing varsity jackets. The sign outside the building said Shadyside High. Something about the place was...off. I think it was the fact that the girls and boys who were making their way into the building were dressed in things I hadn't seen since my early childhood. Either everyone had decided to go retro, or I clearly wasn't in Kansas, er, California anymore.

Hoping that I wouldn't be arrested for trespassing on school property since being in my late twenties meant I really didn't have any business there since I was not a teacher or other school employee, was too old to be a student by about a decade, and too young to be a parent by a roughly equal amount of time, I went inside the building in order to get some answers as to exactly where the hell I was.

Much to my surprise, I learned at the office that it was 1991, and I was A) Expected, B) Apparently a transfer student, C) 16 despite the fact that the last time I was in 1991, I was in the 2nd grade and D) the latest sucker from out of town to move to Fear Street.

All too soon, I was being shown around what was to be my new school...

"...and that's Lea, and her boyfriend Don, the ghost that used to live in Lea's house killed Don's ex-girlfriend Marci, but that's okay, she was a possessive bitch who controlled Don's every move, played mean tricks on Lea, and spread lies about her. Over there is Mayra and her friend Donna. Myra's ex-boyfriend Walker dragged her on a joyride in a stolen car, and they killed someone. He hypnotized her so she would forget the incident, and for a while she thought some witch had cast a spell on her. Everything's fine now, and she's back with Link..." my guide said as she pointed to a couple of teenage girls dressed in current fashions that fortunately hadn't really survived the next year, much less the decade intact.

As I listened to this litany, I found myself thinking ...and I used to read these when I was ten? What the fuck was I thinking?

&!&!&!&

Author's Note: Today, or yesterday morning rather, I found a bunch of Fear Street books at the thrift store near my house. Remembering how much I liked them when I was a kid, I cleared out the entire goddamn shelf, getting like twenty of them for like five dollars. After doing so, I happily carried what I considered to be a steal home. Then I read two of them one from 1990 and one from 1991...

What had happened to the wonderfully frightening and suspenseful stories I remembered? What had happened to the drama that had kept me turning page after page for days on end?

In those two novels I read, I found what had to be just about every last Mary Sue cliche I had been warned about, and had seen on occasion before hastily clicking the back button several times lamenting the time reading in hopes of it getting better had wasted. The sad thing was, these were canon.

This one-shot is dedicated to the child who so loved these stories and had collected a sizable number of these books, and the adult who just wishes that the monster or the ghost or the psychopath would just kill the "heroine" already so she wouldn't have to hear about her whining about her boy troubles for another five chapters.