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2025 Nostalgia Re-readathon | Fear Street Saga Trilogy #3: The Burning
The End…and the Beginning
Simon Fear thought changing his name would stop the evil. He was wrong - dead wrong.
After generations of unspeakable horror, it is up to Daniel and Nora, brought together by their fateful love, to unite the feuding families. But is their forbidden love strong enough to withstand such awesome evil?
Poor Nora - desperate to tell the truth and bury the family curse...before it buries her.
Well this was a major disappointment! After a decent middle book, this last book of the trilogy reverts back to type and we’re rushed through basic outlines of a story that could’ve been much more interesting, if the author had bothered to take the time to actually write it.
We start with Simon Fear, who has traveled to New Orleans for some strange reason. He claps eyes on Angelica Pierce at her debutante ball and decides that he will marry her, no matter what. Angelica isn’t very angelic – she seems to be a horrible, catty gossip – and she has two well-born suitors, so why would she even give a poor nobody like Simon the time of day? After Simon thwarts a would-be mugger with his magical pendant, he decides to unlock the old Fier family dark magic to get his way, and proceeds to murder both of the men standing on his path to Angelica. He has a moment of conscience and confesses this to her, but she reacts very strangely. She tells him that he wasn’t the one who killed her suitors, she was! Even though she has heretofore so no malice beyond being bitchy to her social equals, she tells us that she’s “practiced the dark arts” since she was a child, and decided that Simon was the man for her. For the cherry on top of the cake, they murder her wealthy father and then take off with all his money to start life over again somewhere in the North.
Twenty years later, in 1865, the Civil War is winding down, and the Fear family has set up shop in the village of Shadyside, where they are more prosperous than ever. Simon and Angelica have 5 children, but they seem to have little use for them. Angelica is falling into random trances and reading tarot cards, convinced that she is at the mercy of “the spirits.” Simon uses his daughters like pawns, try to curry favor with the town bigwigs. The eldest, Julia is a plain jane, but the other, Hannah, is beautiful and charming (and inexplicably blonde). There’s also a new maid in the house, one Lucy Goode, whom the girls quickly believe is trying to kill them.
Actually, Julia is trying to kill her sister, whom she is apparently ragingly jealous of, though until she wraps her hands around her throat and tries to strangle her, she gives no such notion in her bit of narrative. Hannah ends up killing Julia in self-defense, and stuffs her in a coffin of a servant who is being buried that day. When Julia is missed around the house, Simon goes out in search of her and finds her buried with the servant, but with marks on the coffin lid that imply she was buried alive. He spots the Goode name on a handy dandy list of servants and declares that Lucy is responsible for Julia’s death, and take a sword and goes looking for her, striking the first young girl he sees. Joke’s on him, though, because he ends up stabbing Hannah to death right in front of her younger brothers, the servants, and the screaming Angelica. He’s informed that Lucy left earlier that day after Hannah accused her of Julia’s menacings.
The final section opens with Daniel Fear arriving at the spooky old Fear mansion 35 years later, in 1900. He has been invited by grandparents he heretofore did not even realize he had, and hears frightening stories about aunts he never knew existed died at the mansion and that it was closed up soon afterwards. His father, Joseph, was the youngest child and was sent away to school at six years old; he never returned or spoke of his childhood. Daniel is 18 years old when he is invited to meet the legendary Simon Fear, and when he is greeted by a lone servant and lead through the dark, mysterious mansion, he wonders if he made the right decision to come.
Turns out both Angelica and Simon have gone completely nuts following the deaths of their daughters, but Simon wants to hand off the amulet to a living Fear so that he can carry on the family mission of “power through evil!” It’s not until he meets and falls immediately in love with local village girl Nora Goode that he learns the full story of his ancestors, and how he might be able to break the spell and end the curse forever. He and Nora do manage to marry, but when he brings Nora to the Fear mansion on the night of Simon’s 75th birthday, and Simon sees that his precious family amulet is around Nora’s neck as the newest member of the Fear family, all hell truly breaks loose. The fire from 75 birthday candles on a cake, along with thousands of candles lighting the cavernous ballroom of the old mansion, set the place on fire. Nora experiences the visions that all wearers of the amulet have – of Susannah Goode burning at the stake, along with all the horrendous deaths that have occurred since then. She flees the mansion, but Daniel and his grandparents are trapped inside and they all burn to death.
The villagers of Shadyside have always given the Fears a wide berth, and they continue to do so even now, allowing the mansion to burn for days until the fire puts itself out. Nora is hauled off to the loony bin and spends all night writing out the history of the feud, only for her nurses to chuck her manuscript into the fire. They tell her that the mansion has been pulled down and that a street will run through the creepy old property instead, bearing the name of the last owners: Fear Street.
The end.
So, all in all, we learn that a lot of people needlessly die over the centuries, but we never learn what the evil powers are, or where they originated; we never learn about Angelica’s particular flavor of occult; we never learn how the Goode family seems to resurface after the death of the last known member in Book #2, and we never learn the fates of the other branches of the Fear family tree, which are just hanging around out there. And why did the village of Shadyside decide to pave a road through there? Automobiles were in their infancy!
It was 547 pages of cruel deaths, without a cohesive explanation, only a bunch of handwaving “dark magic.” Bleh. So glad I got this from the library!
no subject
Joseph seemed just fine once he noped out of the immediate orbit of the amulet of doom (I will be cackling over "power through evil!" for the rest of the season, btw.), to say nothing of Simon's family prior to Lizzie digging the damn thing up. Also, seriously, anyone in the Fear family who has two daughters needs to run like heeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllllll because their family is DOOMED.
I did like things about this one, though overall it felt like being hit by several anvils wherein Stine seemed like he wanted to brag about how clever he could be. I dug Angie being way more into the dark arts than Simon (him thinking to himself how he couldn't deprive the women of NOLA of his presence made me howl), and then Simon one-upping her with murdering her father. Bold, dude. Bold. But also no fucking way would her father have let her run around with Simon to begin with. Wait, things I like. I liked that Angie's weakness was tied to her tapping into the occult and not, y'know, having the actual vapors or something. I really liked the visual of all the Fiers/Fears/Goodes killed in the feud coming out during the final (heh) fire. The Lucy fakeout? Loved it.
But fuck there were some things I just couldn't handle. Where the hell did all of Simon's wealth go? Weren't his parents wealthy? I'm not saying their fortune, split between Simon and Lizzie, would be enough to impress Angie's father or anything, but I feel like he'd still have money to buy nice clothes. Maybe not fancy enough for the likes of NOLA high society but still. Julia killing the dog. The. Fuck. I know it wasn't necessarily intentional, but dude. The fire spreading so quickly and keeping Danny boy from escaping with Nora despite the fact that they couldn't have been standing that far apart at the time.
I'm going to guess that past!me didn't feel the need to replace my busted copy of #3 less for the nostalgia and more because the actual contents of the sago were less impressive than the covers/idea of the sagas.
Also! Not just a road, though that's a fantastic point, but they decided on that road with the mansion fire just barely out. Who thinks that quickly about something they really don't need?
So much potential wasted. But the covers were pretty even if I couldn't tell you who anyone on them was.
no subject
Basically all of this would've been avoided, or thwarted years ago if the newlyweds or newly engaged would keep their mouths shut and just get the fuck out of town instead.
Yeah, if the OG Edward and Susannah had just eloped and left town before their fathers knew what happened, all of this could've been avoided and no evil powers would've had to be unleashed...in that generation, at least.
Joseph seemed just fine once he noped out of the immediate orbit of the amulet of doom
We know who the smart ones were in this family - the branches that escaped unscathed!
I feel like he'd still have money to buy nice clothes. Maybe not fancy enough for the likes of NOLA high society but still.
That irritated me because a "fancy dress ball" is actually a costume or masquerade ball, not a regular formal event. WTF, Stine, what was the point of going to NOLA if you weren't going to get A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G right or invoke the voodoo of it all?
So much potential wasted.
Seriously! What was the point if we don't actually know the origin of this evil? What did Matthew and Benjamin bring back from the old country? WHAT old country, even??
SO glad I didn't buy these, LOL.
no subject
Maybe that's what happened with the Goodes? William had a sibling or a cousin who took one look at the fuckery he and the Fiers were up to and said nope, I'm good (heh) and kept their distance. Any time a kid would question why they didn't keep up with William's branch, an adult would ask if they wanted to die in a horrible gruesome way and scare them away. BONUS points are awarded if the smart branches of the Fiers and Goodes knew about each other and just agreed to keep their polite distance because fuck that curse.
Given how many books Stine was churning out in the 90's, I'd totally buy a ghostwriter. It would explain a lot, especially if he was starting to work on his adult novel anywhere near then. *muse*