Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509290108
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
R.L. Stine is author of the phenomenally popular "Goosebumps" series of children's horror stories. According to the publicity people at Warner Books, "Superstitions" is his first adult novel. Actually, he's not quite there yet. Just because a book is 390 pages long, costs more than $20 and has lots of sex and violence, it's not necessarily for grown-ups.
For horror fiction, the plotting is amateurishly simple, and things that are meant to be frightening have nothing to do with human experience or psychology. Instead, they're unrealistic and more than a little ridiculous; special effects tricks borrowed from "Elm Street" and other derivitive flicks. The characters' clothes and hair are more carefully described than their personalities.
On the other hand, Stine's prose is filled with unintentional humor. He often runs into trouble when he tries to use characters' eyes to describe action: "His eyes went up to the ceiling as he struggled to remember it" and "His eyes rose up from his shoes to follow the knife."
Sometimes, his characters' eyes even do the impossible: "The blond eyebrows arched as he squinted back at her."
The dialogue is even better:
"`I knew two of them!' Sara exclaimed. `Four murders on campus. And I knew two of them. Chip - and that graduate instructor, Devra Brookes. I met her. I met her at a restaurant. Just before she was killed. Oh, my God, Mary Beth. My God. How can I know two people who were murdered? How?'"
Sara is our heroine, a graduate student who falls for folklore professor Liam O'Connor, described in typical Stine shorthand as a Daniel Day Lewis lookalike. The murders she refers to are sketched in with gory but silly detail. That goes double for the big finish, by far the funniest part of of the book.
by CNB