Fear Street Super Chiller #10:
Goodnight Kiss 2
© 1996 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Bill Schmidt.
Spoiler-Free Review
In my six years of reading and reviewing Fear Street books, I have seen a wide range of quality. There have been some fantastic reads, and there have been some real clunkers. I really want to write a balanced review of Goodnight Kiss 2, but everything about it felt phoned-in. It was almost like the plot felt like an afterthought. It didn’t help that the lead character, Billy, was a complete idiot. He spent the book hellbent on getting revenge on the vampires without once ever coming up with a coherent plan for doing so. Having him as the only POV character got really tedious. There were some good ideas at play, but they all felt squandered. The twist at the end felt equal parts lazy and cruel. There is a nostalgic part of me that remembers loving this book in fifth grade. That part of me has been trying to find some positive things to say. The best that I can come up with is that at least the vampires didn’t go overboard with referring to blood as “nectar” like they did in the fist Goodnight Kiss. I wish the book had focused on an entirely different narrative for Billy, which is to say I wish this had been an entirely different book. In the end, Goodnight Kiss 2 was as tedious to read as it has been to review.
Score: 1
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Observations & Spoilers
I’m tempted to put as much effort into this review as Billy put into his revenge planning. By that logic, I would have to spend the next few paragraphs convincing you that the book is bad and insisting it be destroyed, while offering no evidence or plan of action. I won’t succeed because you’ll be too busy trying to party.
Goodnight Kiss 2 opens with a prologue featuring someone named Diana killing a vampire using a beach umbrella. We then cut to Billy, who is spending the summer in Shady Hollow with his friends Jay and Nate. Billy had spent the previous summer there and vampires had killed his girlfriend. He spent a year in a mental hospital as a result, and now he wants to get revenge on the vampires. His plan is to convince his friends that vampires are real without showing any proof. His friends understandably tell him to shut the fuck up.
Meanwhile, a new vampire named April (of book 1 fame) (but who is obviously Diana under an assumed identity) makes friends with two vampires Irene and Kylie. The three form a bet to turn a boy into an eternal one first, because who doesn’t love a sequel with a rehashed plot? April gets Billy, Jay, and Nate to try out for a play about vampires that the small beach town is randomly putting on. It was a really odd choice for the plot and didn’t really do much of anything.
Billy takes a liking to the star of the play, Mae Lynn. They go on a little walk that night and Irene is mad that her food seems impervious to her allure. Billy is woken up in the middle of the night because Mae Lynn is missing and he was the last person to see her alive. They find her body on the beach with 2 puncture holes in the neck. Billy is questioned but not arrested, and is never again brought up as a suspect. The next day Jay is tired and sleepy. Billy immediately suspects that April is a vampire, since those two had been hitting it off. Jay won’t hear any of it though. This is where Jay and Nate start getting really sick of Billy’s shit.
At rehearsal Mae Lynn is recast. Because the show must go on! Even when it’s a community theater production about vampires. Then, our aggressively heterosexual group of six goes out after rehearsal. April runs into someone she knows from home and gets awkward about it, she excuses herself and leaves with him. Irene continues to be frustrated with Billy ‘s aloofness, but all he can think about are vampires. Later that night, another body is found. It’s April’s friend from home, and there are two bite marks on his neck. For Billy, this is now definitive proof that April is a vampire. Actually, I don’t remember if Billy considered this proof, because the twist ending would make even less sense if he did. But I’m not going back and checking it.
Another night while the squad is out, some random dude abducts Nate’s little sister. Billy recognizes him as the vampire who killed his girlfriend. Billy chases him down and saves Nate’s sister. The vampire is injured but turns into a bat. When Nate and Jay show up, they get mad at Billy for bringing up vampires again. The whole execution of this scene was sloppy. This was the first and last time that this vampire shows up. I used to write scenes like this in my Fear Street knock-off series I started when I was ten.
Irene take Billy to vampire island at night, which is suspicious as hell but he’s so fixated on April maybe being a vampire that he misses the one who’s trying to turn him into one. She keeps getting interrupted from drinking, though. The next night, after rehearsal, Billy finds the play director Mrs. Abramson, dead and wrapped in part of the scenery. We never find out if the playhouse hires a new director, or if this vampire play they were trying to produce is more cursed than Macbeth. That’s because Billy catches April at the theater right after finding the body. This further convinces him that April must be a vampire. This again defies the logic of the twist ending.
Billy finally convinces Jay to let him prove that April is a vampire. The plan relies on it raining and a lot of things going exactly right. It is not a good plan, but this is Billy we are talking about. They end up keeping April out past sunrise in the basement of the theater, and then surprise her with the sun by opening the door. She does not burst into flames. It turns out April is really Diana. April was Diana’s cousin and best friend. April killed herself by stepping into the sun because she couldn’t stand living as a vampire. So Diana has dedicated herself to killing them all.
Billy feels dumb, because he is, but also because he almost blew April’s cover with Irene and Kylie. He should have also felt dumb because she has essentially been doing the same vengeance thing as him, the main difference being she had actual plans and results to show. Diana suspects that Irene is frustratedly drinking Jay, even though it would cause her to lose their bet. I suppose the desire to win a bet pales in comparison to the thirst for blood. Nate is just kind of never mentioned again after this point? Which was fine with me because I didn’t care.
Anyway, Billy and Diana go to vampire island during the day when it’s cloudy and rainy. After a drawn out passage of wanderings and fake scares, Billy finds the house that their coffins are in. I enjoyed his observation that the vampire’s lives are rather depressing and bleak. Billy has plenty of time to actually kill Irene and Kylie, but he instead decides to hesitate long enough for the sun to fully set so that they can wake up and try to kill him. He ends up stabbing Irene with a stake when she falls on him. Diana saves his ass by showing up in time to tear a board off a window and killing Kylie.
Afterward, Billy and Diana celebrate with pizza. Jay is going home to get better. Then Billy accidentally cuts himself with a knife and doesn’t bleed. He finally comes clean that he got partially but mostly turned into a vampire last summer. That’s why he can go out on cloudy days. He hated what the vampires did to him, so he wanted revenge. But he couldn’t fight the thirst. That’s why he killed Mae Lynn, the one dude who’s name I can’t remember, and Mrs. Arbramson. He then bites Diana’s neck right there in front of the full horrified restaurant.
Ugh. So I really hated this ending for a lot of reasons. For starters, it relied on omission. Billy literally finds all three bodies as our POV character, but conveniently leaves out the fact that he did it. He claims to hate being a vampire but he shows no signs of guilt or remorse for having killed them all. He clearly remembers turning vamp and biting throats because he info-dumps his murder spree to Diana before he (presumably) kills her, too. But every scene had been written in a way that showed him as surprised to stumble on the bodies. To top that off, he uses April’s suspicious activity around the murders to cast suspicion on her. It was written as though he actually suspected April of committing the murders, even though he knew it was him. Ws he lying to himself? Was this his master plan to convince his friends that vampires were real?
The other reason I hated this ending is that Diana was the only solid character in the book and she deserved better than this lame twist. She was the one who figured out who the actual vampires were, and actually slayed two of them herself. She would have been a far more compelling lead character for the book, in my humble opinion. Clearly I was not a fan of this book. I didn’t want to write this review. But I want to finish the Super Chillers, and now I only have three more left. I’m glad that none of them are titled Goodnight Kiss 3.
Score Card
For the scoring of each book, I decided to rate them based on five criteria worth 2 points each.
I then split that in two to give it a rating out of 5 stars. Those criteria are:
Concept: the strength of the overall idea
Execution: the mechanics of storytelling
Character: the protagonists, antagonists, and villains
Intent: does it succeed in being the kind of book it wants to be?
Originality: subversion and reliance on genre tropes
Concept: 1/2
The twist at the end revealed a much more interesting narrative option for Billy, and I wish that had been the focus. A vampire struggling with his new identity (and failing) is way more interesting than a half-baked, poorly-planned revenge story.
Execution: 0/2
The plot in this was barely coherent. The writing felt lazy. This read like a rushed first draft that no one even bothered to copy edit.
Character: 1/2
Billy was an idiot. Irene and Kylie felt like caricatures. Diana/April had some promise and real depth, but her demise at the end was just cruel. She had a far more interesting narrative than Billy.
Intent: 0/2
The intent of this book was to fill a quota and meet a deadline. That’s how it read. By that logic it was a massive success because my dumbass read the book twice.
Originality: 0/2
Just like the first book, it never managed to rise above all of the generic vampire cliches. It had potential for originality, but it was unfortunately never realized.
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, Goodnight Kiss 2 is:
Ranked 13th of 79 in the overall Fear Street series,
& 2nd of 13 among the Fear Street Super Chillers
It should be noted that the series ranking for the Fear Street books on GoodReads is a bit skewed in favor of the later books in the series, most likely due to the drop in popularity in the late ’90s. The books in the latter half of the series have a significantly lower number of ratings, which (I’m hypothesizing) is due to super-fans being unchecked by more critical voices.
Don’t miss the next post in the Fear Street blog series:
Fear Street Super Chiller #11: Silent Night 3
Also, be sure to check out the latest from my Pulp Horror blog series:
Christopher Pike’s The Wicked Heart
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