Fear Street Super Chiller #11:
Silent Night 3
© 1996 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Bill Schmidt.
Sequel to: Silent Night
& Silent Night 2
Spoiler-Free Review
Silent Night 3 was definitely the weakest of the three books. As much as I enjoy reading Reva’s mean girl shenanigans getting her almost murdered several times over, it would have been better to have her show some growth. Her and Pam should be trauma bonded at this point, so it was a tough sell when Reva claimed credit for Pam and Willow’s scarf collection. I also found Grace’s character insufferable from the jump. I think her presence was intended to be Reva’s attempt at being nice, but she was so grating I was distracted by any such subtleties concerning her. The ending was predictable, and it was truly implausible that all of the murders didn’t stop the fashion show. I can tell why Stine likes writing Reva’s character. You can really tell the books Stine has enjoyed writing, even when the book itself isn’t the greatest. Silent Night 3 was one of those. The story may have been forgettable, but it was at least very entertaining to read.
Score: 2.5
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Observations & Spoilers
Silent Night 3 has Reva Dalby returning home from her first semester in college. She brought her roommate Grace with her. Grace is obsessed with and terrified of her abusive ex boyfriend Rory. He immediately calls her when they get into Reva’s house because he seems to have a supernatural ability to know where Grace is at all times. That or it’s a red herring and he doesn’t actually exist. I’ll give you a wild guess which one it turns out to be.
Meanwhile, Pam and her friend Willow took one craft class at their community college and ended up making a bunch of scarfs they want to sell at Dalby’s. Reva is shocked when they gluten out to be really good. She convinces her dad to sell them, but she tells her Daddy that she made them. The scarfs will be carried Dalbys under her new Reva Wear label, and Reva gets to run the fashion show to introduce them.
A boy Reva had been dating at college shows up to surprise her, but she claims not to know him and get him arrested. Then she starts hiring models for her show. She gets to pick two and has to hire the model they have on retainer of the third. She hates Tammi, but she isn’t going to let it ruin her show. She also hires Liza and Ellie. She gets the hots for Liza’s boyfriend Grant and promptly starts trying to break them up.
Grace is freaking out about Rory and even gets beat up by him, with a black eye to show for it. Then Tammi gets murdered and propped up as a mannequin on the fashion show stage. Reva gets a threatening phone call which she uses caller ID to report to the police. It turns out to have been Daniel, the boy she claimed she didn’t know when he showed up at her house. Turns out he was just mad and wanted to threaten her, and has a solid alibi for Tammi’s murder.
Reva’s daddy finds out about Pam and Willow making the scarfs and sets things right. Reva goes into damage controlled and tries to play innocent. Meanwhile she’s going on dates with Grant and convincing him to not feel bad about cheating on Liza. Then Liza gets murdered in the same way as Tammi, but no one notices until the fashion show has started and Liza’s body is on the stage. When Reva seeks comfort from Grant he is too torn up about cheating on Liza to spend any time with Reva.
Reva picks up the phone and hears Grace on the phone with Rory; but there is no one on the other line. It’s just an automated wake up call service. Reva calls Grace’s mother, who tells Reva to go to the police right away. Rory is dead, he died in a car accident that Grace caused. Grace then attacks Reva and reveals that Rory (meaning herself) has killed the two girls to punish Reva for being mean and ruining her fashion show. I feel like there were smarter ways of going about teaching Reva a lesson, but clearly Grace is not well.
Reva is saved from Grace by her little brother, and the police come to take her. She begs her daddy to let her go forward with the fashion show even though 2 of the 3 models have been murdered on the stage. Daddy relents. The big day comes and Pam walks in on a dude she’s never seen killing Reva. Only it turns out not to be a Reva, it was the other model Ellie who had red hair. Reva walks in and identifies the guy as Grant. He felt so bad about cheating on Liza he decided to murder Reva, but he got the wrong person. Pam and are a manage to tie him up with one of Pam’s scarves, and Ellie starts breathing.
In the end the fashion show was canceled and Reva has learned the same lesson for the third year in a row. Reva Wear is no more, but Pam and Willow will continue to design stuff and sell it at Dalby’s under their very uncreatively named Pam/Willow label. Pam hints at giving Reva a scarf for Christmas. THE END.
I think there was a way that Reva could have shown growth buts still be spoiled. To have her be this aggressively rotten after the last two books ended with her an Pam making up, it was hard to wrap my head around Reva’s shitty behavior towards her cousin. After almost getting murdered two christmases in a row you would think something would have changed. I wish Stine had gone about finding new ways for her to be selfish; or playing nice but being greedy as soon as no one was looking. Anything less reckless than what she did to Pam and Willow would have been more plausible.
Reva also needed to be smarter. I get she’s selfish, but Sine could have made her more cunning and manipulative. Or he could have made her so ignorant of her own privilege that she thinks she’s actually being kind. I really wanted a mean girl with more depth. There’s also the fact that all of this would have been undermined if Pam had gone straight to her uncle instead of Reva. Or made a point to thank him personally for approving the scarves. The entire plot relied on Pam deferring to Reva for way too long.
Silent Night 3 was the weakest of the unofficial trilogy, but it was still fun to read because Stine clearly had fun writing it. I just wish it had a better plot.
Score Card
For the scoring of each book, I decided to rate them based on five criteria worth 1 point each.
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: .5
Reva falling back into the same old tired sctick was a bit of a disappointment. The scarf thing was a tad silly because all Pam needed to do was go directly to her uncle in the first place.
Execution: 1
Pacing was good but the twist was obvious. I was only ever annoyed by Grace and a few too many fake scares.
Character: .5
I can see why Stine loves writing Reva, I just wish he could have given her more depth and sophistication. Grace was done terribly.
Intent: .5
Since I figured out the twist I was mostly just annoyed by it. It wasn’t particularly scary but it was entertaining.
Originality: 0
Stine has already done everything in this book, and he has often times done it better.
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, Silent Night 3 is:
Ranked 37th of 79 in the overall Fear Street series,
& 7th 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 #12: High Tide
Also, be sure to check out the latest from my Pulp Horror blog series:
Christopher Pike’s The Wicked Heart
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