Fear Street

Fear Street is a teenage horror fiction series written by American author R. L. Stine, starting in 1989. In 1995, a series of books inspired by the Fear Street series, called Ghosts of Fear Street, was created for younger readers, and were more like the Goosebumps books in that they featured paranormal adversaries (ghosts, vampires, monsters, aliens, etc.) and sometimes had twist endings.

R. L. Stine stopped writing Fear Street after penning the Fear Street Seniors spin-off in 1999. In summer 2005, he brought Fear Street back with the three-part Fear Street Nights miniseries.

As of 2010, over 80 million copies of Fear Street have been sold.^[2]

R. L. Stine is reviving the book series in October of 2014.^[3]

Setting

The Fear Street books take place in the fictional city of Shadyside, Ohio, and feature average teenagers, who are elders to the Goosebumps preteens, and encounter malignant, sometimes paranormal, adversaries. While some of the Fear Street novels have paranormal elements, such as ghosts, others are simply murder mysteries. Although the Goosebumps books have a few deaths, the deaths presented in Fear Street, particularly the sagas, are far more gruesome, with more blood and gore.

The title of the series comes from the name of a fictional street in Shadyside, which was named after the Fear family. Their name was originally spelled as Fier, however after being told that the family was cursed and that the letters could be rearranged to spell "fire", Simon Fier changed it to Fear in the 19th century. The curse survived, however, and Simon and his wife, Angelica, brought it with them when they moved to Shadyside sometime after the Civil War. It all started in Puritan times when Benjamin and Matthew Fier had an innocent girl and her mother, Susannah and Martha Goode, burned at the stake for allegedly practicing witchcraft. The father and husband, William Goode, put the curse on the Fiers to avenge their deaths, bringing misery and death to the previously mentioned family. Although a fire allegedly burned the last of the Fears (preventing a Fear and Goode from marrying), the series features some surviving Fears and suggests that one of the brothers survived. These events are described in the Fear Street Sagas, a spinoff of the main series.

Similar to the Goosebumps series, the characters change in each book, although some characters still live on and are mentioned (or show up) multiple times. Some of the previous novel plots are also mentioned in later books, and some characters appear in multiple stories (for instance Cory, hero of The New Girl is mentioned and shows up several times during the later novels). The plot for the books occur between the late 80's and early 90's, although multiple novels occur within the same chronological year they take place. All books released are also released in the Shadyside chronological timeline it occurs.

Books

The first Fear Street book, The New Girl was published in 1989. Various spin-off series were written, including the Fear Street Sagas and Ghosts of Fear Street. More than 80 million Fear Street books have been sold since 2003.^[2] The books appeared in many bestseller lists, including the USA Today^[4] and Publishers Weekly bestseller list,^[5] and the series was listed as the bestselling young-adult book series of all time.^[6]

References

• Booklists at R. L. Stine's Official Site