The Shadyside of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books isn’t the best place to live. It seems like people are always getting murdered or disappearing, there are scary stories about Fear Street and weird noises in the Fear Street woods. The past never stays buried—sometimes literally—and as if human violence wasn’t enough to contend with, every now and then there’s a ghost, monster, or other boogeyman that wreaks havoc on Shadyside teens. So it’s unsurprising that they look forward to a weekend away every now and then, which in the winter often includes hitting the slopes, like in Ski Weekend (1991) and Truth or Dare (1995). The promise of fresh powder and new friends is alluring, but they never seem to actually do much skiing, their new friends might just be out to murder them, and by the end of the trip, they actually find themselves missing Shadyside and homesick for Fear Street.
The title of Stine’s Ski Weekend feels like a bit of a bait and switch: there’s no skiing at all and the events of the book actually take place when the teens get stranded and snowed in with strangers, with most of the action taking place on a Monday and Tuesday. But they are on their way home from a (somewhat) successful ski weekend, which is arguably the catalyst for the horrors that follow, so there’s that. Shadyside teens Ariel, Randy, Doug, and Shannon hit the road and the slopes, traveling to a Vermont ski resort a few hours from home. It’s a pretty good weekend until Saturday night, when Randy tells them all that he actually has to be back in Shadyside for a basketball game on Sunday and they’ll all have to leave early Sunday morning so he doesn’t miss it (which is admittedly pretty crummy planning on his part). Ariel is angry about this sudden proposed change in plans, complaining that “we had planned this weekend for so long. What right did Randy have to suddenly insist we all drive back early on Sunday so he wouldn’t miss his stupid basketball game? … If we went back early, we’d lose a whole day of skiing. Staying at Pineview was pretty expensive and the rest of us wanted to stay and get our money’s worth” (5). Ariel and Randy get into a screaming fight in the lobby of the ski lodge and he stalks off, leaving a note at the front desk to let them know he has decided to take the bus back to Shadyside (given later events, this does seem potentially suspicious, though unresolved. He’s probably alive and well in Shadyside, but who knows?).
Ariel is angry and lonely, but she doesn’t stay lonely for long because a strange, handsome boy named Red comes over in the aftermath of the fight to see if Ariel is okay, and just like that, the group is a foursome again. Red is a total stranger but there’s just something about him. As Ariel reflects, “There are certain people like that, I think. People you meet and right away you know you’re going to like them” (6). The four of them spend the rest of the weekend together and when it’s time to pack up and head home, Red catches a ride with them since they go right past his hometown on the way back to Shadyside. While the company is good, the drive itself is a nightmare: there’s a huge snowstorm, Doug’s car has no heat, and Doug is a terrible driver, sliding all over the road and laughing at his friends’ fear. After a near-miss with a truck, Doug’s car stalls out on the side of the road and won’t start again, leaving them stranded in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, Red spots a big house just up the hill and proposes they hike up and see if they can find shelter there. As he reassures the others, “I grew up around here. I just remember when I was a kid how friendly everyone was … No one would turn us away in a storm like this” (19). They figure it’s worth a try and sure enough, Lou and Eva—the married couple who live in the house—welcome them in, though it soon becomes apparent that the teens might have been better off freezing in the car.
Lou is an intense guy, loud and domineering. At first he seems hospitable and welcoming, but things quickly become tense, particularly when he and Doug start trying to one-up each other with tough guy machismo moves. They trade hunting stories while Lou shows off his gun collection, and their second day there, Lou challenges Doug to a wrestling match, then nearly breaks the boy’s leg. He drinks beer all day every day, screams at Doug for not following directions when they’re hauling a broken branch off the roof of the porch, is constantly ogling Shannon, and hits his wife Eva when they get into a fight, leaving her with a black eye and bruised face. Weird stuff is also going on outside: when Doug goes to check on his car, it has mysteriously ended up on its side halfway down a ravine, even though he’s sure he parked pretty far back from the edge, and at one point, Ariel looks up to see a man in a blue ski mask staring in through the window at them before he disappears into the storm. There is a Jeep and a snowmobile in the barn, which seem like pretty good options for getting away from the house, but the Jeep won’t start and Lou tells them the snowmobile doesn’t run. Odd clues also start adding up that seem to suggest that this isn’t really Lou and Eva’s house—Eva doesn’t know where to find the tea in the kitchen, the coats in the closet are too small for Lou, Red finds some framed photos in the dresser in his room featuring another couple—and the teens start to wonder whether Lou and Eva are squatters who stumbled upon an empty house or if they may have done something terrible to the people who really live there.
The Fear Street series is full of violence, but generally speaking, guns don’t play a huge role in the books. People fall and hit their heads, drown, get trapped in burning buildings, fall off of cliffs, and have all kinds of accidents, but there’s not much gun violence. In Ski Weekend, Stine is really intentional about addressing the dangers of guns in irresponsible hands. Lou has a case of guns in the living room and tells the kids “I keep ‘em all loaded … Just in case” (30), though the potential dangers he’s worried about go undefined. After they’ve been trapped in the house for a couple of days, Red tells the others that he heard Lou and Eva talking about how they’re planning to rob the kids and leave them stranded, and they decide they need to make a run for it. Red is confident he can get the Jeep running and as the teens head out to the barn, Doug grabs one of Lou’s guns in case they need to defend themselves. If Lou pursues them, he’ll almost definitely be armed, so this makes sense, but Ariel is still anxious about it, particularly when she sees the nervy excitement on Doug’s face. She’s worried, thinking “I hated guns. I hated being in the same room as guns … I hated seeing Doug walking toward me with that loaded revolver in his gloved hand. And I hated the look on his face. The look that said, This is cool. This is exciting” (103). And she’s right to be worried because when the group sees a man in the barn, Doug shoots without thinking and they’ve suddenly got a dead body on their hands. While their first suspicion was that the man was Lou trying to stop them from escaping, when they turn on the lights they see “another man, someone we’d never seen before” (111). It doesn’t take long for them to recognize the man from the photographs Red found, identifying the dead guy as the real owner of the house, and when Lou shows up in the garage to see what all the noise is, he tells them they’ve killed Eva’s brother Jake.
Everything seems to be falling apart, but Ariel’s close attention to detail saves them all when she realizes they are part of an intricate scheme, being set up to take the fall for a murder Lou committed. Ariel has her sights set on being a doctor and follows her sneaking suspicion that something isn’t quite right down into the cellar to get a closer look at Jake’s body, discovering that he was dead long before Doug shot him. But now that there’s a convenient gunshot wound and Doug honestly believes he killed Jake, Lou’s hoping the cops won’t take a closer look. There’s some serious sibling rivalry at play, with Lou and Eva angry that Jake took what they see as more than his fair share of the family inheritance. But the puzzle is even more complicated than that, because Red is Eva’s brother too and has been setting Ariel, Doug, and Shannon up since the moment he met them at the ski lodge, leading them step by step to the house where they could be trapped and framed for murder. Ariel puts the pieces together, Red confesses his role in the plan, and things don’t look good, as Lou says “So you’ve figured everything out, huh? … All of our secrets. You’re just too smart. Too smart to live, maybe” (139). And if Lou decides to kill them, there’s really nowhere they can go and no opportunity for escape. Their salvation is almost inadvertent, coming not through any action or ingenuity of their own, but through Eva’s crisis of conscience, which prompts her to call the police, ending the nightmare and finally getting the teens back on the (now plowed) road to Shadyside.
Stine’s Truth or Dare similarly features a group of kids trapped by the snow, far away from help or rescue, and left to their own devices. In this case, a new girl at Shadyside High, Dara, invites some of her classmates to a weekend at her family’s vacation home, which is near some ski resorts. Dara sends a limo to pick up her Shadyside friends April, Ken, and Jenny, along with a boy they don’t know named Josh, who Dara used to go to school with before her family moved to Shadyside. Ken and Jenny are a couple and “have been going together for so long, they finish each other’s sentences … They even fight like an old married couple. They yell at each other and call each other all kinds of horrible names. Then they kiss and make up and act as if nothing ever happened” (3). Dara meets the others at the house but before too long, they discover that they’re not alone: Dara’s family shares the house with another family and their son Tony decided this would be a good weekend for a cozy getaway with his girlfriend Carly. There’s a good deal of tension, both between Dara and Tony and between Dara and Josh, which leaves April wondering just who this mysterious new girl is and how much they can trust her, but it soon becomes a moot point as the snow piles up and no one’s going anywhere.
Dara has a pretty mean sense of humor and when she proposes that the group play a game of Truth or Dare, it doesn’t take long for things to take a dark turn. As April reflects, “It seemed like a really good idea at the time … a good way to break the ice, to get to know one another … We had no way of knowing that a simple game would lead us to so much horror” (22). Dara jumps in with hard-hitting questions right off the bat, asking Ken “What is something you did that you’re really ashamed of?” (24). (The answer: grabbing a ten dollar bill that fell out of a little kid’s pocket at the comic book store and keeping it, even after the kid discovered it was gone and started crying). When someone asks Dara who, in her experience, is the worst kisser and it seems like she’s going to name Josh, he gets really upset and charges at her with a fireplace poker. She teases him, calms him down, and makes up with him, but Josh makes it clear that “I don’t like to be made fun of. I really don’t” (30). When the question comes around to April, Dara asks her “what secret do you know about someone that you wish you didn’t know?” and with no thought or hesitation, April blurts out “I wish I didn’t know about the girl on Sumner Island” (32). This is a cryptic confession, but April doesn’t elaborate or answer any follow up questions, already kicking herself for having said too much and spoken too freely. Her big secret is that over the summer, she saw Ken making out with a girl on Sumner Island, where his family was vacationing and April was working as a mother’s helper; Ken didn’t see April and April never told Jenny what she saw, which leaves her feeling guilty on multiple fronts, though she has tried her best to forget all about it.
Things are off to a bumpy start and as the snow continues to come down, they can’t actually make it to the ski resort to hit the slopes, though the group is determined to make the best of it. But when they wake up the next morning, Dara and Josh are both missing. They think they hear knocking on the back door, but no one’s there and there are no footprints in the snow, ratcheting up a bit of suspense, but it turns out it’s just the unsecured door of one of the ski lockers blowing in the wind. When Ken and April go out to close the door, however, they get more than they bargained for when Dara’s frozen corpse tumbles out. April is horrified as “Dara’s blue eyes stared up at me accusingly. Her mouth was frozen open in a wide O of horror. Of pain. The snow whirled around us. Holding us in place. Freezing Ken and me. Freezing us like Dara. Stiff. Terrified” (66). Once they recover from the initial shock and are able to take a closer look, April finds a hatchet buried between Dara’s shoulder blades, removing any question about whether or not she was murdered.
Josh is gone and obviously the prime suspect (why else would he steal Dara’s Jeep and head out into the storm?). The teens’ suspicions seem validated when they find a note from Josh in Dara’s room that seems to set up a late-night meeting, written in red ink and telling her “I have to talk to you … I won’t take no for an answer … Meet me at midnight. Alone!!!” (77). It all seems pretty straightforward and their next fear is that Josh will realize he left the note implicating himself behind and will come back to kill them all in order to keep his secret. And Josh does come back, but it doesn’t go quite the way anyone anticipated. April hasn’t recovered from the shock of finding Dara’s body when she comes face-to-face with (what she thinks is) another one, when she looks out the house’s glass door and sees “Josh’s frozen body. Snow-covered. Wide-eyed … Josh’s frozen body was pressed against the glass” (87). She’s still struggling to process this discovery when Josh blinks, revealing that he’s not dead, just almost dead from exposure after wandering around in the blizzard for hours because he got the Jeep stuck in a snowbank. He’s shocked to discover that Dara’s dead and they all think he killed her. He says he didn’t write any note, though Tony in particular is all for tying Josh up rather than hearing him out. April has some doubts of her own when she discovers that Dara was wearing April’s coat when she went out that night, which makes her wonder if she was really the intended target and Dara just collateral damage, which draws her attention—and suspicion—to Ken, who wants to make sure his secret Sumner Island girl stays a secret.
April pulls on the first coat she can find and tries to make a run for it. It’s Ken’s jacket and when April finds a red ballpoint pen in his pocket, she’s sure he wrote the note to deflect suspicion from himself after he realized he killed the wrong girl. She becomes more certain that Ken’s the killer when he chases her down the road, tackles her, and drags her back to the house. This time April grabs Jenny and the two girls escape together on skis and April feels a surge of relief: “We’ve escaped, I told myself. Jenny and I have escaped from that frightening house, escaped from Ken” (129). They make it to the nearby resort and hop a ski lift to get to the ranger station up the mountain.
But April’s nightmare is far from over, because Jenny’s the one who killed Dara and she still wants to kill April. When April confessed “I wish I didn’t know about the girl on Sumner Island” (32), she was thinking of Ken’s secret, but Jenny has a secret of her own. Not only does Jenny already know about Ken and the girl from Sumner Island, but she killed the girl and now she’s sure April knows all about it and is threatening to spill the beans. Ken and Jenny may have been together forever, but after the summer ended, Ken didn’t want to break up with the Sumner Island girl, whose name was Barbara. When Jenny couldn’t convince Ken to stop seeing Barbara, she went to see Barbara instead, and she tells April “I tried to talk to her. I—I don’t know what happened. I just went there to see her, to talk to her” (137). But the talk didn’t go well. Jenny tries to explain that “It was an accident! … It had to be an accident. But she was dead. Barbara was dead. We fought. And I killed her … I saw her perfect green eyes roll up. I saw the blood seep from her scalp and spread through her perfect black hair. I killed her. I’m not even sure how. But I killed her” (137-138, emphasis original). Jenny says she didn’t mean to kill Barbara, but at least once it was done things could go back to normal, Ken would stay with her, and she could get on with her life. Until she found out—or at least thought she did—that April knew her dark secret. Murder leads to further murder, first out of jealousy, then mistaken identity, and now to cover up what she’s done.
There may not have been much skiing during the teens’ ski weekend, but it does prove integral in April and Jenny’s final confrontation: Jenny pushes April off the ski lift, but it’s nearly to the disembarkation point and she only falls a couple of feet. Jenny then comes at April with a ski pole, trying to stab her. April tries to calm Jenny down, walking toward her as Jenny takes compensating steps backward, putting her right in the path of the ski lift, where she gets clocked in the head by an arriving bench, which allows April to tackle and subdue Jenny. Ken and the police belatedly run to the rescue, Jenny is taken into custody, and April wryly notes that from here on out, “maybe we should stick to Trivial Pursuit” (146), which seems a bit flippant in the face of a murderous best friend and a near-death experience, but maybe she’s in shock.
Both Ski Weekend and Truth or Dare are books about skiing that feature almost no skiing at all. But they have plenty of snowy terror, murder, mayhem, and deception. Being snowed in with no means of escape can be stressful enough, even before dead bodies start turning up. In both books, mystery and horror commingle, as the characters find themselves confined with people they don’t know and can’t trust, as Ariel and her friends try to determine out Lou, Eva, and Red’s motivations in Ski Weekend and April tries to figure out what Dara, Josh, Tony, and Carly are capable of in Truth or Dare. In Ski Weekend, the “stranger danger” warning holds true: the friendly guy they just happened to bump into at the ski lodge was setting them up all along, while the people who welcomed them in out of the storm planned to frame them for murder. But in Truth or Dare, while April tries to figure out the motivations of the strangers around her, it’s her best friend who’s trying to kill her. In Ski Weekend and Truth or Dare, nowhere and no one is safe. Whether they find themselves in a ski lodge or a home, the hazardous weather outside is matched by danger within those walls, and no one is above suspicion.
