Literature / Ghosts of Fear Street

The ghosts of fear street, they'll haunt you forever!

Ghosts of Fear Street is a spinoff of the Fear Street series that lasted from 1995 to 1998, with 35 entries total. Like the original series, it deals with people dealing with scary situations in the town of Shadyside, most centering around a cursed street known as Fear Street. However, it is more like Goosebumps, as the protagonists are grade school-age children and the threats they face are more fantastical than the more restrained supernatural threats of the parent series. Outside of the setting and a few references here and there, it doesn't connect to the main series too strongly due to being for a younger audience. Although similar to the main series, some books will reference other ones at times.

Despite it being branded as being by R. L. Stine, it was ghostwritten by various authors, although Stine was usually the editor. One of them, the sister duo of Annette and Gina Cascone, went on to do their own scary kids book series. In 1998, there was an attempt to loosely adapt the series for TV, but only a pilot episode was made.

This series provides examples of:

• Academic Alpha Bitch: Emily from How To Be A Vampire is always talking down to her little brother Andrew (the protagonist) about how much smarter and more sophisticated she is for reading more advanced books than he does. Even when she agrees to help cure his vampirism, she makes it clear that she is only helping him because she thinks having a vampire brother would be embarrassing.
• Alien Episode: Body Switchers from Outer Space and Caution: Aliens At Work.
• All Just a Dream: Don't Ever Get Sick At Granny's reveals that the main character's dream of being tortured by his grandmother while being sick is actually from the mind of a dog.
  • Most of the events of The Creature from Club Lagoona were just a virtual reality game Tad was playing.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Go To Your Tomb... Right Now! features a girl named Luanna being trapped as a stone carving on the door to the titular tomb. She later does the same thing to Jack after he regains his memories as the evil Jacobus.
  • I Was A Sixth Grade Zombie gives us a look at what it's like to be brainwashed from the point of view of the victim, with Valerie coming this close to throwing herself off a movie theater balcony and being unable to tell her parents she's been hypnotized despite her best efforts.
• Bad Future: I Was A Sixth Grade Zombie involves time travelers from a future era where their bodies have grown so quickly they're unable to properly fix the finer features of the machines keeping the damaged ozone layer in check.
• Baseball Episode: Field of Screams, in which a kid on a losing baseball team travels back in time to when the team was better...but also on the day the team all died in a tragic accident.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Maggie in Monster Dog wants a big mean dog to scare off the big dog a local bully has. She gets a dog that eventually becomes fearsome but proves to be a threat. Beforehand, she grew to like the dog just how he is.
• Big Brother Bully:
  • Steve in Stay away from the Treehouse.
  • Well, Big Sister. Kelly from Attack Of The Aqua Apes.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: A common occurrence in the series.
  • Nightmare in 3-D: A boy unleashes a giant, invisible praying mantis from a magic image poster. After getting rid of the mantis, he receives another poster, this time sheltering a tarantula.
  • The Bugman Lives!: A girl disturbs the slumber of a scientist who turned himself into an insect/human hybrid and planned to do the same to her. Because he wanted his daughter to have a friend.
  • Go To Your Tomb... Right Now!: The tomb in the title includes a maze that is guarded by two giant golden roaches and a giant golden fly.
  • Horror Hotel Part II begins with the main character traveling into a cave-like realm populated by spider-like insects as big as dogs.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Quite a few considering the nature of the series, but the standout example has to be Bess the Babysitter from "The Tale of the Blue Monkey"
• Blob Monster: The Ooze, which is a creature accidentally created by the protagonist and his new chemistry set.
• Chekhov's Hobby: Early on in I Was a Sixth Grade Zombie, it's mentioned that Mark is good at burping. This proves useful when it turns out that burping breaks the mind control he is put under.
• Christmas Episode: Fright Christmas and Parents from the 13th Dimension.
• Continuity Nod:
  • While familiar Shadyside landmarks like Pete's Pizza, Dalby's Department Store, etc. pop up, the stories (which were intended for a younger audience) tended to avoid directly referencing the main series, with about the only books to do so being the Horror Hotel two-parter (the protagonist and his family are distantly related to the Fears, and Simon Fear and his daughter Julia—whose death by premature burial is brought up—are both name-dropped during an Exposition Dump) and Tale of the Blue Monkey (which also brings up the Fears). They also get briefly mentioned in Attack of the Vampire Worms.
  • As mentioned above, there are a few books that make a nod to other ones, such as when the protagonist from Fright Knight appears in Why I'm Not Afraid of Ghosts and mentions his experiences with ghosts. Additionally, a few of the books will have a character mention some Fear Street stories they heard, usually referencing other books in the series. Pete from Hide and Shriek in particular is mentioned a lot.
• Cool Old Guy: Grandpa Howie from the Horror Hotel books is well-versed in the supernatural and at one point casually repels Colin Fear's spirit. However, he's not exactly perfect and at one point casts a spell that accidentally makes him swap bodies with his grandson.
• Covers Always Lie: The cover of Attack of the Vampire Worms depicts the worms as giant worms with teeth. In the book, they look like normal worms that suck your bleed like leeches.
• Denser and Wackier: While the main series focused on murder mysteries and occultism, with maybe the occasional werewolf or vampire, this series featured things like mad science, aliens, robots, more fantastical portrayals of magic, etc.
• Ethereal White Dress: Miss Gaunt from "Who's Been Sleeping in My Grave" dresses completely in white and wears a heavy veil to hide her rotting face.
• Evil All Along: Jack Meyers discovers he's Jacobus, the evil son of an evil spellcaster, living with false memories and a fake family because his dad feared Luanna would get her (rightful) revenge on him for his horrible treatment of her.
• Evil Tainted the Place: Fear Street. The last third of I Was a Sixth-Grade Zombie is set hundreds of years into the future, and even then the area is still sparsely populated due to still having an inexplicably creepy and melancholic atmosphere and vibe.
• Exact Words: The bad luck curse in Tale of the Blue Monkey can only work on a person if the blue monkey doll is given to a person after being told it's a gift. Just saying the phrase "This is a gift," no matter how it's intended or if the person knows they're getting the doll, and then giving the doll to someone is enough to make it work. The kids in the story get tricked into accepting the doll this way, then use it to their advantage to give the doll back at the end.
• Fattening the Victim: Parents from the 13th Dimension features a girl who realizes her "perfect family" in the other dimension are lizard people that have been discretely fattening her up by feeding her rich food like chocolate cake and pasta with heavy alfredo sauce.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: Body Switchers from Outer Space, where a klutz gets the chance to switch with the popular kid, who turns out to be an alien. There was also Horror Hotel Part 2 where the protagonist switches with his grandpa.
• Gender-Blender Name: The female protagonist of Hide and Shriek is nicknamed Randy, short for Miranda.
• Grand Theft Me: This is how Pete from "Hide and Shriek" operates. If he tags a kid during hide and seek on his birthday, he will inhabit their body for the next year. In the sequel "Hide and Shriek II", he steals the body of the protagonist, but thanks to some quick thinking on their part, he ends up inside of a dog.
• Gypsy Curse: Eye of the Fortuneteller is about a girl named Kelsey who insults the ghost of a powerful and evil gypsy named Madame Valda. The enraged Madame Valda proceeds to curse Kelsey, making it so that she will spend the rest of her days being tormented by illusions of her greatest fears unless she can find some way to break "The Fool Card Curse."
• Halloween Episode; Who's Been Sleeping In My Grave? and Halloween Bugs Me.
• Here We Go Again!: Said word for word at the end of Stay Away from the Treehouse.
• Horror Hunger: The Boy Who Ate Fear Street (until it's explained that Sam is a robot whose programming went haywire after he ate something that upset his digestive system).
• In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: The full title for the series is "R.L. Stine's Ghosts of Fear Street". This was likely done as a cheeky way of acknowledging that these were ghostwritten and he is only the creator.
• Jackass Genie: Gene in Three Evil Wishes. He grants wishes poorly due to either incompetence or hidden malice and purposely neglects to inform his summoners that one of them will have to take his place in the bottle once he grants all Three Wishes.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Carly from "Fright Knight", while she spends most of her time being an Annoying Younger Sibling she saves Mike's life multiple times during his fight with the wizard and the two of them have an Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other moment in the end.
  • Sharon from Revenge Of The Shadow People may be rather arrogant, as well as somewhat cowardly, but she still does care about Vinny, as she saves him when he gets turned into a shadow person.
• Jerkass: Derek Boyd from Halloween Bugs Me has spent years harassing Greg Dreamer by making everything between them a competition.
• Kid Detective: Valerie of I Was A Sixth Grade Zombie takes it upon herself to discover why her classmates are acting strange and spending all their time at the mysterious, cube-shaped "clubhouse" without any outside prodding.
• Living Shadow: The concept behind Revenge of the Shadow People, which has shadow creatures that sap the energy of people and turn them into shadows.
• Lobotomy: In Body Switchers from Outer Space, the society the aliens are from is given a form of this as an extreme punishment for misbehaving. Their minds are wiped and they become smiling empty husks.
• Lovable Jock: Subverted with Chad from Invasion Of The Body Switchers. While he initially helps out Will (the nerdy and clumsy protagonist) when he's getting bullied and lets him borrow his body using the body-switching machine, it's all a trick so he can steal his body, as he's an alien but wants to stay on Earth.
• Mad Scientist: Doctor Diller (who is splicing different animals together to try and create the Ultimate Lifeform) from Monster Dog.
• Magic Mirror: The plot of the unreleased last book The Funhouse of Dr. Freek involved a kid suddenly receiving an evil doppelganger from a funhouse mirror.
• Mind Screw: Don't Ever Get Sick At Granny's. What starts as a story about an insane grandmother who uses bizarre treatments for her sick grandson turns into a fever dream-induced Random Events Plot that makes "I Live in Your Basement" (from the original Goosebumps series) look coherent... and then it's revealed that the entire story is told from the mind of a dog.
• Monster Clown: Spell of the Screaming Jokers is about a bunch of kids tricked into playing with an enchanted card deck that unleashes a bunch of evil-looking jokers. The jokers attack the kids by stamping a card suit on their arms, and once they've gained all four the kids turn into jokers too.
• Never Trust a Title: While it's obvious that The Boy Who Ate Fear Street won't involve the entire street being eaten, it does imply Sam will eat big things and possibly even his friends. Instead, he never eats something bigger than a sponge.
• Non-Malicious Monster:
  • Subverted and played straight in Why I'm Not Afraid Of Ghosts. Sibling ghosts Robbie and Dora enjoy scaring people since they think it's their job as ghosts, but they are vehemently against killing people and are horrified when they think they killed someone. With Shawn, it's played straight as he had no intention of scaring Oliver and tried to warn him about Robbie and Dora because he thought they were evil.
  • The ghosts in Stay Away From The Tree House just wanted to be reunited.
• Number of the Beast: Amusingly referenced in Camp Fear Ghouls where the address of where they meet up is 333, which is half of 666.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Attack of the Vampire Worms is a subversion, because the word "vampire" is only used once in the book to describe the worms. They feed on blood and are capable of completely draining living creatures, but they don't turn others into vampires. Instead, their victims become extremely sensitive to sunlight but this can wear off over time. If a person is completely drained of their blood and then forced to eat one of the worms, they lose all skin pigmentation and, while becoming functionally immortal and eternally young, can only survive in darkness.
  • The vampire in How to be a Vampire is mostly traditional but uses a few lesser-known pieces of lore as having the power to turn into a wolf and the uncontrollable need to count.
• Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: The titular Ooze in The Oooze makes anyone who touches it stupider.
• Revealing Continuity Lapse: In Don't Ever Get Sick At Granny's there's a scene where Corey's sister Meg sneaks into Granny's house to rescue Corey through some kind of secret passage. When Grandma comes in and spots them, she isn't at all surprised to see Meg, and even notes that's she's brought some water for her too. The absurdity of this situation does not go unmentioned by Corey, and it turns out at the end it was All Just a Dream.
• Sea Aping: Attack of the Aqua Apes has the titular apes, which don't work as intended. This disappoints the kids so they try to use water from Fear Lake. This goes as well as you'd expect.
• Shout-Out:
  • Tale of the Blue Monkey is about a creepy-looking monkey doll that brings bad luck to its owners. It sounds similar to "The Monkey" by Stephen King, and one of the foreign covers even has the monkey doll holding cymbals (even though it doesn't in the book), but the blue monkey doll's powers can be transferred from one victim to another and need to be activated by a certain phrase.
  • Field of Screams is about a kid who finds himself in the body of a baseball player from 1948 thanks to time travel and has to prevent an infamous incident where the Shadyside Baseball team all died. If that doesn't ring enough bells, then the kid makes the inspiration clear by mentioning a TV show about a guy who can only move on if he changed the history of the person he traveled into
  • In Body Switchers from Outer Space, the protagonist's father works on a cartoon called Judo Jabbing Mutated Coyotes.
• Sore Loser: Derek Boyd's obsessed with beating Greg Dreamer at just about everything, so he takes it incredibly poorly when Greg finally beats him at something.
• Surfer Dude: Horror Hotel Part II features a guy who helps out the local monster club and looks, talks, and acts like your stereotypical surfer... even though he hates water.
• Title Drop: "The mantis was my private nightmare. A nightmare in 3-D"
  • "This time I would be face to face with the creature of Club Lagoona.
• Tomato Surprise:

  • The Boy Who Ate Fear Street: The main character, Sam, is a Ridiculously Human Robot whose programming was thrown off when he ate something his sensitive digestive system couldn't handle, which explains his gross feeding frenzy and why his parents don't have the number to a doctor.
  • Night of the Werecat: Wendy discovers that she and her family are werecats and the reason why she can't have a pet cat is that a real cat would be scared of her.
  • Don't Ever Get Sick At Granny's: The main character's a dog and everything that happened to him in the story was all a dream.
  • Go To Your Tomb... Right Now!: The main character learns he's the son of a powerful wizard and was sent to live in Shadyside with modified memories and a fake family to protect him. He's also evil.
  • Escape of the He-Beast: Jamie discovers that both his entire family and himself were creations of his favorite comic book artist, who wanted to create his very own biggest fan. Jamie is thrilled by this revelation.

• Took a Level in Dumbass: The Ooze is about a substance that gradually drains the intelligence of people who come into physical contact with it.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Sam in The Boy Who Ate Fear Street will only eat white foods, and is especially fond of rice pudding with marshmallows and white raisins. It's because he's a robot and his body's digestive system can only handle mild foods.
  • One of the characters from Parents from the 13th Dimension apparently only eats licorice.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • In-universe, Jamie Kolker is a big fan of Hecula the He-Beast comics even though he's the villain.
  • Robbie and Dora in Why I'm Not Afraid of Ghosts
• "What Do They Fear?" Episode: Eye of the Fortuneteller is about a girl named Kelsey who visits a Gypsy fortuneteller named Madame Valda who curses her to live her fears because she doesn't believe that Madame Valda's magic is real.
• Wicked Toymaker: Tale of the Blue Monkey has a legend about an evil toymaker that cursed the titular blue monkey. The child protagonist assumes that their creepy neighbor is the toymaker when in reality it is their babysitter.
• Yet Another Christmas Carol: Fright Christmas, where Santa Claus is the one to inform the protagonist that he will be visited by three ghosts, and a twist reveals that the Tiny Tim equivalent was the Ghost of Christmas Future.