Retro Reading - The Wish

We're going back to Nightmare Hall! I hope you're all ready.

Be careful what you wish for . . .

“Wishes granted, fortunes told,”promises the sign on the booth at the back of the campus pizza place. Inside the booth sits a mechanical fortune-teller called the Wizard. His cold glass eyes give Alexandria Edgar the creeps. Her friends at Salem U think she’s crazy—they’re busy making wishes for the Wizard to grant.

But soon, their wishes turn into their worst nightmares: Alex’s roommate, who wished to look less ordinary, is disfigured in an accident. Another girl who wished to shed a few pounds can’t stop losing weight. As her friends face the consequences of their wishes, Alex suspects that her fears about the Wizard are becoming a reality. And she has good reason to be afraid: The truth is even more diabolical than she could have imagined, threatening the group’s very lives.

I loved all the Nightmare Hall books, but I remember this one as being particularly creepy, probably because I'm weird about puppets and dolls and robots and basically anything that looks sort of human but isn't (including chimpanzees but I don't wanna talk about that). It's no spoiler to say that the big bad villain of The Wish is a mechanical wizard (it's right there in the blurb, after all), who is creepy in the extreme, not least because he's sentient and has magical powers.

The Wish is basically the Monkey's Paw of the Nightmare Hall series. Innocent teens, joking around with the old mechanical fortune-teller, make silly wishes that actually seriously reflect their inner desires. At the start of the book, Julie wishes her face was more interesting. Gabe wishes he didn't have to walk everywhere. Immediately, our group of intrepid college kids are involved in a terrible car accident, leaving Gabe with crushed legs and Julie's face ruined by breaking glass.

This is just the start, as despite the utterly inherent creepiness of the Wizard, and our sensible heroine Alex's innate understanding that something is fucked up here, the group keep going back to the damn thing and making more wishes. Kiki wants to lose weight, and is suddenly struck with a wasting illness that lands her in hospital. Kyle wants peace and quiet and ends up in a coma. Marty wants to get out of his class speech and loses his voice (I guess he got off lightly, really). You see how it works here.

Alex wants to stay the hell away from the Wizard, but her revulsion towards it and her suspicions that someone is actively harming her friends, lands her in danger. Then she witnesses an attempted murder that casts suspicion on several people close to her, plunging her even deeper into trouble.

What Point Horror books do a lot is mix a supernatural explanation with a mundane one. The Wish is no exception. The Wizard absolutely has powers and, for some reason, hates teenagers. But he's also a mechanical toy and can't get out and about to actively terrorise Alex, so of course there's a human accomplice. Hoh does a good job of throwing out red herrings - Julie's twin sister, Jenny, for example, suddenly gets a new lease of life after Julie is hospital-bound. She borrows Julie's clothes, dates a football star, and suddenly seems very unconcerned with her mutilated twin. Is she involved, or just selfish? Or both! Who knows? (Spoiler: she's just selfish and really wants to date a football player).

The reveal of the Wizard's real accomplice ends up being something of a bait-and-switch. We're guided, right up until the last second, to believe it's one character, and then it ends up being another. I don't particularly have a problem with that, as the actual reveal genuinely surprised me when I first read the book all those years ago. Revisiting it now, I found myself laughing at the villain's motivation for attempted murder and stalking, which basically boils down to "I wanna be good at sports."

Kyle and I have a running joke if you're Good At Sports in America, you can get away with anything. The Wish shows that being Good At Sports is worth doing anything, including trying to murder your friends. I don't know how much I believe that as motivation, but Hoh does a good job of showing how important being a big football star is to the boys in this book. They're all former high school football heroes, struggling to keep up with their peers on the bigger college stage, and their self-worth is all tied up in that. So in the context of the book and that framework, I guess you can buy that one particular guy might get desperate enough to team up with a mechanical wizard who really hates teenagers and do his dirty work for him in exchange for being Good At Sports.

Maybe.

Retro Reading

A couple of weeks ago I was feeling sorry for myself. I can't remember why, but I expect I was probably having a flare-up of my wrist/arm/shoulder problems and in a lot of pain, since that's the most common reason I would feel sorry for myself. My usual solution in such times is to buy myself something nice, like a new bag of loose leaf tea or a huge bar of chocolate. This time, however, inspired by a Facebook post, I headed on over to Amazon and searched for "Point Horror."

I must have read hundreds of Point Horror books as a teen. My parents were leery of letting me read Stephen King, but I guess they figured books like The Window couldn't possibly be psychologically damaging.

Eventually I ran out of bookshelf space and sold all my Point Horrors on, and mostly forgot about them. But once I remembered, thanks to said Facebook post, I was suddenly seized with an urge to revisit my childhood favs. It turns out there are a lot available for the Kindle now (sadly, The Cemetery, my hands-down favourite, is not...yet). But a fair few of my most cherished reads are there, including this one:

I absolutely loved the Nightmare Hall books (although they probably left me with a really warped view of American college life). I actually started with book two in the series, The Roommate, which I borrowed from a friend. Then I went back and read the series in order, although you don't really need to. Starting with The Silent Scream does give you the full story on why Nightmare Hall is so-called, though.

Anyway! I snapped this one up to make myself feel better. Then by sheer coincidence I discovered a podcast called Teen Creeps which recently did an episode on this very book. I decided to read the book, then listen to the podcast episode to get that full nostalgic whack. It was really fun to revisit this series, and I'm definitely going to pick up some more. The book is a lot shorter than I remember, but I guess when I was thirteen or so, it probably seemed like a pretty thick tome. I remember really loving the female friendships in The Silent Scream, and I was pleased to find on re-reading that they do hold up. Our heroine, Jess, is smart, relatable, resourceful, and kind. The horror is...well, it's teenaged horror, so it's definitely not psychologically scarring, but some scenes are still pretty creepy even to 33-year-old me. Like Jess finding her clothing drawer full of fucking worms omg, or being locked in a basement that's slowly filling with gas.

The villain, I think, got scarier with time, because I'm better able to appreciate now that a controlling, dominating man is a figure of genuine fear. When I was a kid, the villain's motives and actions seemed a bit lame, but experience has taught me that, no, this kind of thing actually happens. Maybe not the way it plays out in this particular book, but there are guys like him out there, and women are vulnerable to them.

I'm now trying to figure out which Point Horror to revisit next. I remember adoring Help Wanted (but being disappointed that the love triangle didn't turn into some kind of open relationship) and Freeze Tag, but there are a fair few available that I never read, so I'm debating picking up something brand new and seeing if those nostalgia googles affected my feelings on The Silent Scream. We'll see! Now I'm off to nurse my wrist/arm/shoulder, because typing thos post off definitely made it all hurt, which I guess is sort of poetic. Stay creepy!