The Haunted Burial Ground (Sweet Valley Twins) vs. Halloween Party (Fear Street)

The Haunted Burial Ground, a Sweet Valley Twins Super Chiller by Francine Pascal, published in 1994, focuses on a wildly irresponsible journey to plan The Best Halloween Party Ever (TBHPE) ™. Sociopathic Twin Jessica decides that it is absolutely essential to throw TBHPE and convinces her vapid cult (The Unicorns) to join her in this madness. Nepo Baby Unicorn, Lila Fowler, agrees to ask her real estate developer father about using one of his particularly eerie properties for said party. Alas, said property would be far too dangerous, but worry not, he has some other haunted property that would do the trick, so long as the girls commit to cleaning it out and doing some mild-to-moderate construction on the property. You might be thinking- aren’t these girls 12 years old? What are their credentials? Are they unionized? Should they really be doing construction work on a dilapidated shack that may or may not be condemned? Great questions. Fortuitously, our girls have been working for some sort of knock-off Habitat for Humanity program, so we are to believe that they are up to the task, sans adult supervision, no problem. We’ve already demonstrated that pre-teen girls are ace detectives, so why should I doubt their construction prowess? (Note: I’m now on my fourth book for this blog, and I’ve already stumbled upon my second problematic real estate developer. I guess we’ve got to resist the man any way that we can.) Now the book is called “The Haunted Burial Ground,” so I begged my lucky stars that this was not going to be some sort of aggressively stereotyped “Indian Burial Ground” tale. No such luck. Spoiler: Ultimately, it is revealed that the house is built upon a Native American burial ground. While there are many clues that this is the case scattered throughout the text (including a new Native American girl in school who is having visions from her ancestors about the importance of protecting the land following a séance, and our construction team uncovering various artifacts, including arrowheads and even a human skull (I’m telling you, this is really messed up), during the clean-up), the confirmation comes from the discovery of a burial pot on the land… and then… the entire building collapsing during TBHPE™ due to the ancestors’ displeasure with an incredibly loud party at their resting place. That said, at least one adolescent construction worker attributes the structural failing to the fully unregulated renovation: “I told you we needed more reinforcement on the walls.” Ultimately persuaded by the evidence that the property is, in fact, on a Native American burial ground, the real estate developer decides to turn the property into a nature preserve and education center to teach about the Native communities that lived on this land.

This book is a mess. While I appreciate the nod to education and preservation in the final pages of the book (which, to be fair, emerged as a product of the efforts of a Native American student and the Good Twin™), the book was largely built off of stereotypes of Native communities that were caricaturized to make for a creepy book and does very little to acknowledge broader harms committed against Native people both historically and by modern actions such as those described in the book. (Side Comment: Last post, I had alluded to Katherine Applegate’s incorporation of social justice themes into middle grade fiction. While I don’t think they hit it out of the park, I do think the Girl Talk book The Ghost of Eagle Mountain (ghostwritten by Applegate) attempts to critique the problematic trope of using Native folklore as a horror prop. I also think this blog post, which is a long form review of this book, does a really nice job identifying resources that elevate the voices of Native Americans in talking about these issues: https://sweetvalley.online/sweet-valley-twins/super-chillers/sweet-valley-twins-super-chiller-7-the-haunted-burial-ground/). As if this all weren’t bad enough, there’s also a really icky subplot where we are supposed to celebrate that a high schooler with the coolest band in town is flirting with 12-year old twin Jessica (“as if she were at least 14”). Beyond my social concerns, the book’s pacing is also just really off. This whole book is a literal build-up to a Halloween party that ultimately only gets seven pages of content (much of which is taken up by stereotyping Native communities and predatory behavior).

Somewhat uncharacteristically for SVT (I think, I’ll need to assess this hypothesis through further reading), this book had an almost Goosebumpsy level of pranking, including quite literally the core prank from the Goosebumps 2000 book Headless Halloween where a character pretended to be a headless monster. All the pranking sure set me up for the other read for this post.

I chose to pair this book with Halloween Party, a Fear Street book by R. L. Stine (published in 1990), because both feature Halloween parties in creepy buildings that are in proximity to burial sites (I hadn’t even considered the over-the-top pranking angle!). While not perfect, Halloween Party was much closer to what I was seeking when I chose books of this genre. In Halloween Party, a motley group of teens (seemingly randomly selected to all involved) receive invitations from the very hot new girl to attend an overnight party on Halloween at the creepy estate on the famously haunted street in town (you guessed it, Fear Street). Side comment: I love a good party of seemingly random people story (Clue, House on Haunted Hill, the more train-based Murder on the Orient Express- I just love this trope in all its abundant manifestations). I knew that we were in for a good time, when the only place for the attendees to park was past an eerie cemetery (absolutely no questions about that). Tensions are high at this party for reasons that are a little unclear to me, but things devolve into a classic competition between the Jocks vs. the Wimps (which ends up being a more even match than I might have guessed). Anyway, the new hottie in town orchestrates a series of spoooooky “surprises,” though these “surprises” (read: mostly fake corpses, staged death scenes, and smattering of icky things) are littered by an endless slough of pranks by the jocks against the wimps and vice versa. One of my favorite sources of drama is when two bad boys™, and I mean real bad boys, pissed that they were not invited to the party, roll on in through the front door on their motorcycles (a feat that leaves behind a trail of destruction and many logistical questions). One of the party guests scares off our bad boys by flailing a metal chain at them (or something, the details get a little fuzzy; at this point, I was just riding the messy vibes). Fortunately, the bad boys are not scared off before they get a chance to mock the host for not having booze at the party, demanding the host give them wine coolers (the ultimate bad boy drink). Sadly, no such luck. The house doesn’t even have wine coolers (gasp; weeps in Seagram’s Escapes)! After a bit more drama, the bad boys leave (though I bet this isn’t the last we see of them). The “pranks” continue to escalate and a series of dead bodies that don’t end up actually being dead bodies are discovered until oooh noooo a real dead body is found by one of the party goers. Well, shit! One of the party goers tries to find help but is thwarted by the aforementioned bad boys! Now, this is just some darn bad luck (You’re at a murder party and even the party crashers seem a bit attempted murder-y, shucks!). This is when things really go from bad to worse and (Spoiler) we find out, thanks to having a villain who loves a paper trail, that the assortment of guests wasn’t random after all! No way! A newspaper clipping reveals that our hottie with a body host is actually 28 years old. She chose to impersonate a high school student because her parents were killed in a tragic car accident when she was just a baby. Who was driving the other car, you ask? Great question! The parents of all of the other party guests (who were high schoolers at that time) were in the other car! What a convenient coincidence that all of them proceeded to have kids at the exact same time! Absolutely perfect for a convoluted revenge plot where you stage a Halloween party and then try to simulate a car accident by trapping all of these mo-fos in a room and burning the whole mansion down so that they all suffer just like your parents did! Flawless! Well, she almost got away with it, but one of our plucky party goers managed to save the day by sneaking out via the dumbwaiter! Phew, close call (really taking heroicism to the… next level)! (I mean, one of them still died, but given everything they had going against them, the survival rate was pretty good. We can’t expect perfection in moments such as this!).

If one is trying to start a blog of spooky story comparisons, there is a lot of pressure on the Halloween stories to potentially carry the rest of the year. I wanted these books to be a perfect caramel apple to caramel apple comparison, and ultimately, I think the stories had a lot of common elements. As noted above, The Haunted Burial Ground was drowning in problematic elements. Halloween Party was mercifully much less awful in that regard. One of the main characters was deaf, and I don’t think the depiction of deafness was fantastic (e.g., she had superhuman lip-reading abilities, and the book really liked to emphasize the ways that she was absolutely, positively, in no way even a tiny bit different from anyone else). That said, she was a character with some depth, and my concerns paled in comparison to the heinousness of the other book. Though Halloween Party dragged a bit (I mean how many times can you sit through a dead body fake out in one book? Many, it turns out), but I appreciated that most of the book was actually set at the Halloween party, as opposed to a tortured lead up to the party. Stine is chronically overly reliant on pranks across his books, and while this one was no exception, a Halloween party in a clearly cursed mansion is as good of a place as any to go all in on pranking. Stine is a skillful writer of ambience and the cemetery and manor settings are deliciously creepy. While not a flawless read, Halloween Party was true to the genre and an enjoyable way to spend a couple of spooky hours cuddled up under a blanket during a thunderstorm.

Showdown Winner: Halloween Party (Fear Street) by R. L. Stine by a very wide margin.