Title: Fear Hall: The Beginning
Author: R.L. Stine
Cover Artist: Franco Accornero
Tagline: The first part of a shocking two-part special!
Summary: “A Special Message From R.L. Stine”
Dear Readers:
Come with me to FEAR HALL. That’s the creepy college dorm built many years ago by the cursed Fear family.
Hope and her roommates live in Fear Hall. Hope’s boyfriend lives there, too. They’re all good students and best friends. Everything is going great… until one of them becomes a murderer!
Now Hope is about to find out that life at Fear Hall can be a real scream!
I hope you’ll join me for FEAR HALL. This story has so many scares, it took me two books to tell it all!
P.S. You’ll never believe what I came up with for the next book…
Initial Thoughts
I only read this story once when I was in middle school, and I barely remembered what happened after I was finished. I did that sometimes, skimming through a book so that I read it but I didn’t retain anything. This didn’t leave much impact on me at first, but I still found and purchased the two volumes as part of my unfinished effort to collect all the Fear Street books. Then, in the summer of 2011 I decided to re-read the Fear Hall books. I remember that summer. I discovered “Jem and the Holograms” and DC Comics was in the middle of their “Flashpoint” event which ended up ruining the DC Universe for six years and counting. Imagine my surprise when I re-read these books and ended up falling in love with them.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a perfect story. It’s basically “Fear Street At College” which Stine already did with “College Weekend,” and Stine’s take on mental instability is… well, it is what it is. But I enjoyed it because I really liked the main characters, Hope and her roommates, and the setting. I’ve re-read these books so many times over the last few years they’re all scruffed up and worn. I practically refuse to put them back on my book shelves. I even got Stine to autograph them at that signing last year.
The story is split up in several parts and is one of those books where the narration shifts between different characters.
[Wing: I’ve never read these before, and am, of course, always leery of how Stine (and the other Point Horror and similar authors) handle mental illness, but I love a good horror at college story. Stine is setting the bar for the next book pretty high with his little introduction note, though.]