Superstitious by RL Stine

I read RL Stine's debut adult fiction novel.  I'm pretty sure this is the only adult fiction novel that he wrote, and your about to find out why.  As a background on the author and his other works: enjoy this lovely blog, it's one of my favourites.   Maybe you should read that before reading this, or read a few entries.  Or a Goosebumps book if somehow you don't know who this guy is (you're lying to yourself).  Reading a Fear Street book before looking at this post or Blogger Beware will just make you sad, because a lot of them are actually pretty well written (okay, so my favourite Fear Street book rips off of a Stephen King book really badly but...) Maybe just look at Blogger Beware quickly, because this post is just going to depress you.

What is this book about?  Hell if I know.  No, it makes a somewhat coherent story, but there are so many plot holes and red herrings--I just Wikapedia'd this monstrosity and apparently it took RL Stine four months to write.  Good job, champ!  Good job editing.  Good job misspelling racist (true story, on page 123, he spells it "rascist").  Also, notice how Wikipedia summarizes this story in about three paragraphs--that first little paragraph is about 250 pages of the book, for real.  So you read that summary, because this is just going to be a best-of quote collection.


"Charlotte Wilson stares up at the ceiling.  Pale yellow light from the street filters through the venetian blinds, spreading a shadow pattern of lines over her head.  Bars, Charlotte thinks, prison bars.  The guys beside her stirs.  She hears him muffle a burp.  His after-dinner burp, Charlotte thinks bitterly.  I was dinner" (Stine 1).  1.  These are the first few sentences of the entire book.  It was here I knew that I was doomed.  2.  Gross.  3.  Venetian is supposed to capitalized, champ.  4.  You italicize thoughts, or put a line in front of them, or do something to personalize them and indicate that they are thoughts.  Good job with third grade, bud.

"'Do you smoke?'...'No.  That was just steam coming out of my ears'" (Stine 1).  If you give me ten minutes I could find exactly which issue of Mad magazine he stole this joke from.

 "Professor Liam O'Connor... Liam.  So foreign.  So interesting" (Stine 2).  Uh.  Liam isn't really a rare name, not even in America.  I have a cousin named Liam.  There are major characters in Pokemon named Liam.  O'Connor would be a dumb name to get excited about too, but... Liam!?

"She suddenly feels old... I should try Rollerblades.  Why haven't I tried them?  Maybe they would change my life" (Stine 5).  They're Rollerblades, not a damn elliptical machine or plane tickets to Peru.  ****This book has just been confirmed for having been written in 1995!!!****

"'He was hung like a hamster'" (Stine 16).  I have entered hell.

"He had turned too, turned to face her, the salt shaker gripped in one hand" (Stine 17).  I need a goddamn drink.  "Gripped"?  And let's repeat "turned"! Let me write a good alternative: "Still holding the salt shaker, he had turned to face her".  Try and think of your own!

"Frankenstein's neck" (Stine 22).  ...Did his neck have bolts in it?  OH WAIT.  That was Frankenstein's monster!

In the manner of the esteemed Troy, here is the first Memorable Cliffhanger Chapter Ending: Ch 2/3: "He took a step.  Two shots rang out.  With a choked gasp, he clutched his chest.  His eyes rolled up in his head, and he started to slump to the floor" (Stine 23).  Don't worry!  The shooters in the bar just sound like shotgun cracks and he was playing it off!  The main character, Sara, admits that she was fooled.  The lack of bullet holes would have probably tipped me off, though.

On page 28 RL Stine says an infant is eating "macaroni noodles". .................................................................................................................................................................................. They're the same goddamn thing.  That's like saying a dog-puppy or a whitey-cracker (I had to).  They are literally stand-ins for the same thing.  Either would have been acceptable on its own.

"Just because you're tall and black doesn't make you Michael Jordan" (Stine 29).  I actually marked this because I thought it was actually good.  Is it any surprise that the black cop has all the best lines?

"Her catlike green eyes locked on his... He loved her for her forehead.  And her feline green eyes" (Stine 32).  ..................................................................................................................................................................................................

"He tried not to stare at the pointy twin V's poking through the purple sweater" (Stine 40).  Unless if they're the nips of Mecha Godzilla, that is not possible.  Also, I might mention now, EVERY woman at all times wears a tunic sweater dress thing.  Except when they're having sex... No, probably then too.

"Was that an actual wink?  Or did she blink?" (Stine 41).  Protip: if it was one eye, it was a wink.  If it was both, it was a blink.

Oh, also, in the girls' apartment there is a "Jim Morrison and the Doors" (Stine 57) poster.  RL Stine keeps up with the kids.  (Who refer to that as a sign that they're trying to stay young.  This might be acceptable if we don't assume the story was set in 1994/95--because if that's the case, Jim Morrison would have been dead by the time they reached college anyways.  Or, hell, even born.  So it's not legitimate.  Still listening to Pink Floyd is also signs for holding on to one's youth desperately.  Because no-one over the age of 24 listens to Pink Floyd.  No-one.)

"Sara still couldn't get over the fact that she was seeing someone prettier than she" (Stine 64).  Wow, Sara's kind of a bitch.

"To Chip, even a small roadblock was a roadblock" (Stine 66).  That's because it remains a roadblock, regardless of its size.  As you've just shown us.

"Why am I thinking?" (Stine 74).

"Chip tosses his head, lets out his warning groan" (Stine 74).  Bonus points to RL Stine who made a not-obvious-at-all connection between coming and waves crashing on rocks at the beach.

On page 89 RL Stine decides to make thoughts italicized, as our main character was attacked by a "dark creature" (Stine 88) which was another memorable cliffhanger--it turned out to just be a golden retriever jumping on her.  Because yellow is difficult to see.  Let it be known that I have a yellow dog and I have let him out at night with no lights and he's still pretty easy to spot if your eyes are used to the dark (she was walking so I assume she could see).  If she had a fear of dogs that would make sense but yeah it's hard to confuse a dog with a person or even a coyote or anything like that is my point here.  RL Stine lives in the city, though, so maybe he doesn't know that...?

"Dripping wet? ...I'd rather see you dripping wet, Liam" (Stine 104).  I just vomited.  By the way, this was said by Liam's landlady, after snorting some coke.  She is the most eighties woman you will ever find in a book that was written after the eighties.  (All I've really ever read from the eighties are Stephen King books and the Madeleine L'Engle books.  I honestly can't think of a book that just screams "I was written in the eighties!")  Case in point: "Liam is hot-blooded.  Like me" (Stine 105).  No self-respecting human is going to reference Foreigner outside of--well, apparently they're from the seventies, but tell me that's not a band that made eighties stadium rock.  My point: unless if you're quoting your favourite episode of ATHF, just... just don't.
"Tonight I want some Irish in me, Liam" (Stine 105).  Oh CHRIST.
"Why not just forget the damned book and put your tongue in my mouth?" (Stine 110).  You can't tell me that this is the coke.  You can't.

"I wouldn't hurt you, Milton thought.  I know I'm big.  You could be on top, Devra.  He pictured her on top of him... He loved redheads.  He imagined the soft rhythmic slap of their wet bodies, her creamy white butt bouncing, bouncing in the air, slowly, slowly" (Stine 120).  Suddenly I am no longer interested in sex.  Ever.  Again.  PS. This is the dude I figured was Hulk Hogan, if that little snippet didn't ruin your lives my addition certainly did!
"I'd have to tape her mouth before I fucked her.  I really would" (Stine 121).  Wait I'm sorry!  I didn't mean to start a smear campaign against Hulk Hogan--

"And then he exploded without warning, with tiniest of cries" (Stine 166).  Oof, that must have hurt.

"Sara gazed around the bright, crowded barbecue restaurant.  Pink and blue, 1950s-style Formica tables.  Paper placements on the table declaring the restaurant's name in script letters formed in a rope lariat--TEXAS.  Ten-gallon Stetson cowboy hats on the walls.  Cattle horns over the mirrored bar.  Country music on the jukebox against the wall.  The smoky aroma of chicken and ribs floating out from the open pit kitchen in the center of the room.  What could be more beautiful, more romantic?" (Stine 170).  Anything and everything.
"So what if her face got sticky and the thick, red barbecue sauce dripped down her chin?" (Stine 170).  Is this... Is this supposed to be erotic?

Also, yeah, Liam is Irish.  He moved from Ireland in the seventies, which is portrayed as Ireland in the 1840's.  Or Oklahoma from 1901.  I don't know a lot about Ireland, but I'm sure that even in the seventies it wasn't that bad.  Anyways, the father tells Liam that they're moving to Illinois.  Liam's reaction: "Rory's father pronounced the S.  What kind of a word was that? Liam wondered.  What language did they speak there?" (Stine 178).  Not faulting him for saying the S.  Apparently that's how you're supposed to say it (or maybe you're supposed to say the S in Arkansas?  I've been corrected on one of the two before...).  And it is a weird word.  But on the next page, we learn that Liam knows that it's in America.  Aw hell no.  I don't care if he's like eight.  That's ridiculous.  If you had asked me what Irish people spoke at that age, I would have known to say English.  I mean, come on.  I mean, yeah, maybe it's confusing cause "American" isn't a language name like England or German or whatever, but neither is Irish...

"'These finger prints--they're not human'" (Stine 204).  That would make them paw prints.  Also, it's a cookbook.

"His words were cut off by that fat purple tongue that flung itself from his open mouth.  The tongue uncoiled, purple as a jellyfish, forked at the end... It flicked at the mirrored wall, at least three feet long now, fat as a salami, rutted and splotched, it spewed from his open mouth.  Battered the mirror wetly... The tongue waved and curled like an octopus tentacle" (Stine 229).  HOLY GOD.  I have seen enough hentai to know exactly where this is going.
(But in all seriousness, a little foreshadowing would be nice.  This happens about 150 pages before the end of the book.  And this tongue thing is preceded by Liam's eyes changing colour, so RL Stine could have easily done a little bit of foreshadowing.  That tongue is a demon's tongue, by the way.  They crawl out of his throat and kill people?  And the only way he can do that is by having a male heir, which somehow his wife can't produce?  Yeah, he's married to the girl he refers to as his sister and marries the main character, Sara.  (Even though he says he's fallen in love?  Uh?)  We find this out because Sara walks in on them putting another notch in the headboard, as they say.  And then Liam kills her--as in his fake sister.  I kind of wish it was a gross incestuous relationship, that would be sort of interesting.  But... Look.  Don't read this book out of curiosity, please.  I don't want to be responsible for that.

"You're not staying with him, Sara. No way you're staying with that phony" (Stine 266). Sara's stalker ex-boyfriend confirmed for secretly being Holden Caulfield.

"'We haven't done much. Mostly stared at corpses, then stared at photos of corpses'" (Stine 272). Big black cop, only guy with awesome lines.

Also--believe it or not, I didn't realize until nearly the very end that the title was referring to Liam's superstitions. We don't really see them until they get married in the last hundred or so pages, and the main character thinks they're dumb. If he fixed the book so it was more the last 150 without the crap at the beginning, the story would be... Okay. It would drag less, at least. It's more like two books pushed together. But my point is. Better titles could have been chosen, or this story could have been written better.
Oh and he's superstitious because if people do things that cause bad luck those purple-tongued demons crawl out of his throat and kill people? Or something?

"Maybe I'm premenstrual, she thought, sipping coffee" (Stine 279). FACT CHECK WITH YOUR WIFE, BRO. Trust me, girls KNOW when they're PMSing.

"Maybe he's gay, Garrett thought, snickering. Maybe he's got a thing for big, black cops" (Stine 283). These parts with Garrett are beautiful.

Also Sara vents to her best friend about Liam's fanatical adherence to superstitions, all I can say to which is, maybe you should have waited for more than three months to marry him? I mean, I'm no marriage counselor, but that was just stupid. If nothing else, I've learned from this book not to marry quickly, because your husband might be full of demons that are described in the most ridiculous manner. Like, I'm pretty sure one of them is just Trekkie Monster.

"I should have never told her all this, Sara thought unhappily. Never. First Mary Beth made jokes about it. Now she's taking it seriously" (Stine 296). That bitch.

"Three?  Three?  Four?  Three plus four?"  (Stine 300).  That is seven!  Addition is fun!

"'I think I have the flu or something'" (Stine 314).  OR, Sara, you could be pregnant because of all the unprotected sex you're having with your husband.  How does this thought not even cross her mind?  It was my first reaction.

Also, Garrett has one last badass moment--he gets attacked by a demon and it rips off his ear.  He proceeds to stick his hand down its throat, through his stomach (I assume) and rips out a "sausage-shaped organ" (Stine 318).  F--k yeah, Garrett.  I don't know what organ that could be, or how you pulled it out through its stomach, but f--k yeah.

Sara decides to give Liam a second chance after realizing Liam killed her stalker ex and found the corpse's hand and later finding Liam in bed with his "sister".  Um...


The next note is the very of the book--Sara wakes up in the hospital after the action unfolds, completely fine--and her nurse is please to tell her that her baby is fine too--yes, the cliffhanger/twist end is that she is pregnant!  Oh, that's what all those references to the flu were about??  And unprotected sex makes babies??  Well, DAMN.  That twist ending totally surprised me!





Quick Summary:

Late-Eighties References:
The landlady has a coke problem. Also she paraphrases a Foreigner song. They're eighties as all get out, no matter what Wikipedia lists as their forming and album dates.


Mid-Nineties references:
Rollerblades! Those are cool, right? Especially at college... right!?
She refers to one character as a "hulk". In a big twist, he was later revealed to not be Hulk Hogan... What a gyp!
Michael Jordan!
Keanu Reeves! (Wait, in 1995?)
 People are excited to be using the internet, but some think it's too hard.
"He still thinks Beavis and Butthead are cool!" (Stine 147). Well, duh. It's 1995.

Memorable cliffhangers:
Three that I marked. I think the end counts, right?


Final thoughts: On the inside cover this book is described as being comparable to Rosemary's Baby and "the best of Stephen King".  I would rather read a goddamn James Patterson book, okay?  Why hasn't Stephen King sued to get his name removed from this yet, or over the third book in The Catalina Chronicles?  Maybe someone should tell him?  And yeah, I made a reference to The Lawnmower Man right there.  This is The Lawnmower Man of books.


MLA Citation Information:  Stine, RL.  Superstitious.  Warner Books, Inc: United States of America, 1995.


Also, the editing apparently went crazy--I've tried to fix it best that I could, but it still looks a little weird...

The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells

Helloooo!  This is going to be a really short post, I promise you that.

So, first of all, there's a little background on Wells by a fellow named Robert AW Lowndes.  (Also, I'm going to mention that this is a really cool edition from the sixties.  Actually, it was printed in sixty five--I find it funny, because of course you know what happened four years later... (And consider--a paltry sixty-eight years after the book was originally published!)
So yeah--a background on Wells.  First of all, Wells was a son of the working class, and of course England was a very classed society in the eighteen-hundreds.  It says that he struggled to escape those boundaries placed upon him, which of course he did, and even at the start of the book itself this is reflected.  The main character, Bedford, was a banker--bankrupt at the start of the story.  He sees that he will probably have to spend the rest of his life as a clerk (low-class work, of course--) unless if he doesn't think of something else.  He decides to go to the country to write a play.  At first when I read that, I was like, how stupid!  But then I remembered that that's sort of close to when Oscar Wilde wrote his plays (like a decade off.  Decade and a half at most), and since Wilde's plays were so awesome, it seemed like a perfectly acceptable idea.  As in, "Oh, Wilde did it?  Well then duh everyone would want to do it."  So yeah...
Another interesting note in the introduction is that of course Jules Verne's works were widely read and very popular, they were only read as fantasies and romances.  Apparently HG Wells made people see crazy scientific explorations and going ons as possible realities.  It also goes on to say that while Verne would have liked the characters in his book, From the Earth to the Moon, to land on the moon, he made that impossible for himself.  I don't know if HG Wells was aware of that and that's why he decided to go one step further, or if he just did for the hell of it, but I guess this is really the first book that dealt with aliens.  Originally I was going to complain at how lame the aliens are, but... Ugh, fine.  HG Wells, you did something novel, amazing and groundbreaking, and you improved on it later, too.  But they're still sort of lame.  (Listen, I read Animorphs, okay!?  Compared to that, this is like... Well.  The opposite of great.)
Not only that, this appears to be the book that CS Lewis refers to in the opening note of Out of the Silent Planet.  He has a little note that says that he's aware of similarities between his and other works, and that some of his ideas are based on other works and so on.    Of course, this means that almost all of my notes are based on differences between the two, though most of them are pretty superfluous and needn't actually really be discussed.  (Things like the fact that the men with the ship in Lewis's first book knew what they were doing, had already completed the ship, whereas Bedford had to urge on Cavor and help him, Cavor still had to make the ship, similarities between the ships, and so on...) CS Lewis is very briefly discussed in the closing paragraph, and he is praised highly because he is pretty awesome, just saying: "It is interesting to compare the career of H. G. Wells and C. S. Lewis, a contemporary author on religious subjects, who examined and wrote about the same human problems as Wells, in his 'Perelandra' trilogy of science-fiction novels.  Lewis lived to see far greater evils than Wells, who died in 1946; but Lewis knew there was no utopia, no simple solution to human ills, and showed far deeper understanding of the human condition.  Wells died in despair; Lewis never despaired" (10).  So I put this down mostly for that last sentence.  The rest is all context.  For whatever reason, that last sentence enthralls me.

Oh, I also want to mention that whenever Wells skews a scientific fact that we of today take for granted (remember, this was written in 1901--judging from the text, helium was only just recently discovered at the time of the original writing) I have a little moment of aw, Wells, you are just too cute.  Even though he was undoubtedly nine thousand times smarter than me and more of a visionary than I'll ever be--I mean, his idea of a ship is amazing and all, but I can't wrap my head around it, either because I'm too dumb to understand it (very possible) or because I'm just automatically like funny story, Wells, that is not how we do it at all (possibly).  Anyyyywayyyys.  Yeah. His idea is a sphere powered by strips of cavorite which is an element like helium that can go against gravity.  Or something like that... And I also want to mention that this is something else CS Lewis borrowed from HG Wells in Out of the Silent Planet.  I don't remember if Lewis gets into all specifics, but their ship is a sphere with blinds, though I can't figure out how the control room fits into his ship.  And the blinds in Lewis's book (I haven't read the other two in the series) seem to be more for aesthetic purposes than controlling the ship purposes.


HG Wells also decides it's no worse to go into space than to go on an arctic expedition.  Again, Mr Wells, you are so adorable.

 Also, that word/slang/whatever you'd call it tidbits--originally, the phrase was apparently tit-bits.  (Insert everyone from the twenty-first century clawing their eyes out in disgust.)  That was also apparently a very popular magazine at the time.

One thing that really makes me mad is the fact that Bedford pushes Cavor to make his machine and go to the moon (even though Cavor doesn't really see the point of it all, not really) and then when they've taken off he flips out and begs to be let off.

"It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream" (36).

So they land on the moon and explore the landscape.  HG Wells has a ball making up the strange environment--it seems like a barren tundra, but then the snow melts and strange plants sprout and bloom at amazing speeds and so on--it's actually pretty enthralling.  Anyways, they start searching for food and find some edible fungoid.  The fungoid are actually intoxicants, and Bedford declares that the 'discovery' (the landing, that is) is second only to the potato.  It's hilarious and it's definitely one of the best scenes from the book.  (It's page sixty-five in this edition.)

"Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use" (104).

So the men part ways--the moon people take the two men into bondage, and they break free and kill a few moon people in the process.  Cavor is eventually recaptured, but Bedford finds their sphere and takes flight.  He then begins to bemoan his trip, and seems to view himself as an objective outsider--he "looks down" upon himself.  "I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast where I hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited and rather forcible person.  I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses" (117).  Hehehehe.
He goes on to say how after his little existential crisis, he set himself to "puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth" (118).   Just move along...
On earth he decides he must make a new identity for himself to escape his failings and so he'd never be obliged to explain the occurrences on the moon and Cavor's disappearance and all.  He signs his name as Wells.  He says the name seemed to be "thoroughly respectable" (126).  I see what you did there.

The book sort of ends after that.  I say it sort of ends because Bedford/Well's bit pretty much ends.  He mentions that he received a few transmissions from Cavor, who came into contact with the Mooninites.  The book then switches to the transmissions, sort of as an after note--not dissimilar to the after note in Out of the Silent Planet.  The only thing I have marked is the very last page of it--the people of the moon are apparently completely peaceful (might I mention that, when not working, everyone indulges in what is essentially opium?)--Cavor must explain war to them.  They don't get it, of course it is seen as beastly, and Cavor says rather hopelessly that it can thin the population (the 'Grand Lunar' can't understand its existence, because there is no benefit to be measured from it).  This is unsurprisingly kind of a buzzkill for the moon people. They demand to know how Cavor got there, and I'm not sure whether he explains to the Grand Lunar how to make cavorite (his last message very nearly ends with the fragment "'I was mad to let the Grand Lunar to know--'" [159]) or if they just decide to kill him because he would bring war and pain and death and all to the moon.  I am completely convinced that he was killed either way, though.


MLA Citation Information: Wells, HG.  The First Men in the Moon.  Airmont Books: United States of America, 1965.

This was a pretty good book.  Not phenomenal, but I don't have any regrets about reading it.

Also, for all you film buffs--that famous 1902 film where--well, where the men go to the moon... It's based on this book.  It's called A Trip to the Moon--its famous image is the moon with a face and a rocket sticking out of one of its eyes.  It's mentioned in 99% of all film books, so yeah... It's pretty interesting.  I haven't actually watched it in a few years.

Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen
This post's cryptic lyrics: Freak out in  a moonage daydream, oh yeah!

We're all damned

Tonight is the last night among the living, as tomorrow the novel-writing madness shall begin and I shall kill myself, as I will also have drama club kicking into high gear, I'll have at least two essays and two health projects due and also I'm supposed to do three hours of volunteer work for health class which is kind of BS since I've clocked over 100+ hours over the last four years. Just saying. Anyway, should this be my last post among the living, get a Video Ouija game so we can still talk. God, that baby never shuts up, does it!?