Tagline: Welcome back to the most terrifying dorm on campus!
Back tagline: A special message from R.L. Stine…
Summary: Dear readers:
I hope you’ll join me for the conclusion of FEAR HALL. I think it’s one of my scariest finishes ever!
Where will Hope go now that her secret has been revealed? Does she realize that her friends aren’t real friends? Does she know who the vicious killer really is? Are there more shocking surprises in store for her?
Find out the answers in FEAR HALL: The Conclusion. I had so much evil fun writing it, I scared myself!
First impressions: Another boring cover. He’s got another bold claim there about it being one of his scariest finishes. We’ll see about that, Stine. Now that we know Hope’s mental state and her vow for revenge against the three Ms in the last book, I’m hoping this’ll be better to read. Let’s find out!
Recap
Roll call:
Hope – Our troubled protagonist who’s dating Darryl.
Angel and Jasmine – Hope’s two roommates/additional personalities that have no purpose in the book.
Darryl – Hope’s abusive boyfriend/additional personality.
Melanie, Mary and Margie – The nosy girls across the hall that Hope can’t stand.
Chris – A new male resident of Fear Hall.
We begin with Hope who gives us a recap of the previous book’s final chapter. Once a policeman spots her, Hope and her imaginary friends, minus Eden who’s dead [As far as being imaginary goes] run down the fire escape stairs to flee from the police. One manages to grab her, but luckily Darryl’s there [Apparently he just appears and disappears at Hope’s will lol] to fight him off and eventually Hope decides the best thing to do is to jump over the railing:
I fell for a lifetime. Or for a second or two.
And I died before I hit the ground.
But guess what? She didn’t die before she hit the ground at all, it’s just one of those classic fake-out cliffhanger chapter endings I’m sooo0000oo0o0000OOOooooOo0 fond of [Read: Not fond of at all], and she lands hard on her feet and keeps running with Jasmine and Angel. They finally stop to talk when Jasmine realises they didn’t do anything wrong and they discuss what they’re going to do now. Hope argues that with the three Ms telling the police she was crazy, there’s no way anyone would believe them about Darryl being the murderer [Poor girl is still so delusional. It’s really sad :(].
Hope leads the girls to an old abandoned sorority house as they decide the little bit of money they have between them is enough to tide them over for now. Hope enters the house to make sure it’ll be a suitable hide-out, but someone grabs her neck from behind [!!!]. It’s just a black cat that pounced on her though [Another fake-out lollllllllll kill me], which she names Lucky as she has a full one-sided conversation with it [I wonder if it’s real or another personality?].
The other girls come in and Hope tells them they’re gonna live here before Darryl appears and says he’ll take care of the three Ms. Hope has a hissy fit even though she wants them dead [So what’s the problem?], and tells Darryl to leave, since he’s essentially ruined all their lives and he’s ‘”too much trouble”‘. As you can imagine, Darryl doesn’t like this:
He moved past me, walking heavily. Stepped up to the black cat, my new pet. Lucky. Lucky the cat.
Without breaking stride, Darryl swung his leg back and kicked the cat. A sharp, lightning kick.
The toe of his boot caught the cat under its stomach and sent it flying off the floor—into the front window.
[Omg that poor cat. I actually laughed though hahaha]. The cat’s OK, thank god, and as Darryl storms out of the house, he promises Hope she’ll never get rid of him [Fuck off, Darryl].
Hope then notices the picture hanging above the fireplace. It’s of a man standing with Hope’s mother [Another hallucination, surely?] and prompts some memories for her. First, she remembers her only time at summer camp when she was 12, and Mum would address her letters to ‘Buttertubs Mathis’, still determined to humiliate her from afar:
Dear Buttertubs,
Are you getting enough to eat up there? Don’t dive into the swimming pool. You want to leave some water in it for the others…
[This mother is the worst. Why have kids if you’re gonna treat them like this? Poor Buttertubs Hope].
Then Hope remembers senior year when she was dating Mark [Who was mentioned once in The Beginning, but never elaborated one. TBH, forgot all about him hahaha]. Hope’s mother was such a cow that she never let Hope have alone time with him; she always stayed in the room with them and listened to their phone calls [No sexy time under her roof!]. Mum even came up with a new game for them all to play – ‘it was called Let’s-All-Count-Hope’s-Chins’ [Omfg I can’t]. Eventually, Hope decided to sneak out to attend homecoming with Mark, but somehow her mother knew about her plan and handcuffed Hope’s wrist to her own for the night.
The day after, Hope was grounded for two weeks, which is when Jasmine, Eden and Angel first started appearing [Poor girl. So lonely that she conjured up some friends and genuinely thought they were real people. I guess her mind was too fragile to question why she was allowed guests if she was grounded??]. Back in the present, Hope rips down the photo and tears at it til her fingers are bleeding.
We now move to Melanie’s perspective [Oooh, this is new], who’s in her dorm room with Mary while Margie’s at the library. Mary’s getting ready for swimming practise, but Melanie’s gonna miss it due to having to take a French test that she missed last week, because she’s been sooOOO0oo00o00OooO0oOo freaked out since Hope disappeared a week ago that she had to see a psychologist several times [Why’s she so traumatised? Nothing happened to her... ].
Conversation turns to Hope’s murders, and with the police no closer to finding her whereabouts, Mary’s scared to walk alone to the swim centre across campus. Melanie kindly offers to walk her before she heads to her test, but Mary declines because she knows Melanie needs to study [OK, the Ms seem really nice? Hope must have just mistook their concern for her wellbeing for nosiness, the idiot], and off she goes:
I felt a little guilty. Mary looked so scared. I think she really did want me to walk her to the pool.
I should have. Maybe I could have helped her.
But I had no way of knowing that I would never see her again.
[Oooh, someone’s gonna die!]. We’re now following Darryl’s POV [Another new narrator! Will Mary and Margie get their own chapters too?]. He’s up in the balconies in the swim centre watching Mary as she practises. He’s been stalking her all week so he could learn her schedule [Has nobody noticed Hope lurking around campus?], and now he plans on killing her today. It’s his way of getting revenge, not only for Hope, but for himself, because he thinks it’s the three Ms’ fault that Hope wants nothing to do with him. He believes killing the Ms will get him back in Hope’s good books [We’ll see about that], and his only regret is that Melanie’s not here to witness Mary’s final swim [The more deaths the merrier, but I also like the Ms and I don’t want them to die :(].
While the swim team continues practise, Darryl sneaks through the empty locker rooms to the jacuzzi and pours 6 litres of bleach into it. Why, you ask? Because Mary likes to relax in the jacuzzi after swimming to help with her muscle cramps [But what if she decides that today she doesn’t want to? Or what if someone else joins her?].
Darryl then hides nearby as the swim team comes in, ready to watch his handiwork in action. Sure enough, Mary’s the only one to stay behind for the jacuzzi [Lucky for Darryl. Unlucky for Mary], and Darryl watches as she lowers herself into the jacuzzi:
“Ohhhhh! Help me! Somebody—help!”
She thrashed the water. She raised herself up, but appeared to fall.
She screamed again. “It burns! Oh, help! It burrrrrrns!”
Her face flamed bright red now.
The water splashed and churned.
She pulled at her hair with both hands. “Help me! Somebody! I’m burning! I’m burning!”
[…]
Then I saw one hand grab the railing, and she pulled herself out.
Her eyes were wild. She held her head with both hands. And staggered over the floor.
Her skin—her arms, her legs—were red as fire.
Squinting through the lockers, I saw the skin on her arms start to peel.
[Oof, that’s a horrible way to go and Mary didn’t deserve this :(]. The swimming coach runs in and tries to help, but the chapter ends with her looking directly at Darryl [!!!].
We then switch to Hope’s perspective again as she’s awakened from her nap on the couch by Darryl pounding on the door. She lets him in and he fills her in on Mary’s grisly demise, dying on the floor from her chlorine burns [Poor Mary :(]. Turns out after being spotted by the coach, Darryl barrelled straight into her and knocked her in the jacuzzi, but he doesn’t know if she died too [Part of me hopes she survives because she was just an innocent bystander, but at the same time, more deaths are always good, ya know?].
Hope isn’t impressed so she kicks him out and says she really means goodbye this time [I thought I’d hate switching between Hope’s personalities in this book because we obviously know Darryl and Hope are the same person, but I’m actually not minding it too much! Now that we know Hope’s mentally ill, it’s a lot more interesting exploring the different personalities]. Back in the lounge room, she finds a note that says ‘“I’m coming for you, Hope”’ [Is this imaginary? Did her mum write it?].
The next two chapters are from a new character’s perspective [Do we need more characters? And where the hell are Jasmine and Angel? We haven’t heard from them in a while], named Chris. His apartment building had a fire and everyone had to be vacated, so he’s moving into the second floor of Fear Hall. It was apparently converted into a boys’ floor last week, so he’s not going to be the only guy there at least [Lol are they moving guys in to make the girls feel safer? Because men are stronger than women, right? I hope there’s a logical explanation for this all girls’ dorm to be taking on boys all of a sudden.]. We also learn that Chris is a super shy sophomore who hasn’t had any luck with girls yet, but maybe that’ll all change in his new building [Please can we get a love square between Chris, Hope, Angel, and Jasmine?].
Matt and Will, Chris’ new roommates, help Chris unpack as they tell him about the weird things that happen at Fear Hall, like how some guy went to have a bath one time and the tub was filled with boiling blood, and the girl on the eight floor who keeps seeing an old-timey woman’s face in the mirror. Chris doesn’t really believe in all that hocus pocus nonsense though, and goes to have a shower since he’s ‘”so sweaty and sore from unpacking”‘ [Sexy ;)]. But the shower starts pouring out blood [Just like what happened to the other guy Will just mentioned!] and he screams, alerting his roommates who burst in and laugh at him. It was just red jelly, [Chris you silly sausage!], and sure enough the water is running clear now.
That night, Fear Hall has a mixer so the boys and girls can mingle, but Chris goes alone because Matt went to see his girlfriend and Will has to study for a test [OK nerd]. Soon, Chris begins chatting to Melanie and Margie, who apologise for not being in the party mood since their roommate was murdered recently. It’s not stated how much time has passed since her death which is annoying, but they do reveal the coach is recovering in hospital from her injuries [Luckyyyyy!], and it’s mentioned that all three murders have happened within a month [So both books happen in a short timeframe I guess].
The two girls get upset thinking about Mary and return to their room, and with no-one in a partying mood, Chris heads for the coffee place across campus where he eventually notices a girl at the end of the counter:
She had straight dark hair around a round face, and bright red lipsticked lips. She wore an oversized black sweater pulled down over black tights.
[It’s clearly Hope with makeup and dyed hair, but I’m assuming us readers aren’t supposed to realise that. But like, how could you not realise that?]. He strikes up a conversation [I think Chris forgot that he’s shy], but she seems nervous about talking to him and explains she has a jealous ex-boyfriend who may be dangerous [Dazza!]. She denies Chris her number, but instead suggests she could meet him here the day after tomorrow, which he agrees to [They don’t mention a time though??? Is one of them just gonna be hanging around there all day waiting for the other to show up?], and she tells him her name is Karen as she exits the store [Kazza!].
We’re back in Hope’s POV now and she’s just run all the way to the abandoned sorority house, which makes Jasmine and Angel worried that someone was chasing her:
“No. Nothing like that,” I replied, still breathing hard. “No one recognised me. No one is looking for a brunette. They’re all looking for a girl with blond hair. Changing my hair colour with the smartest thing I ever did.”
[OK, Fear Street must be in the same universe as ‘Hannah Montana’ because apparently all it takes to conceal an identity is different coloured hair… ♫ You get the limo out front ♫].
Hope tells Angel and Jasmine about her chance encounter with ‘”the guy of my dreams”‘ [Thank god Stine wasn’t trying to hide that Hope is Karen til the end! I don’t know if I could have coped with that hahahaha]:
“He’s perfect!” I gushed. “I just know he’s the guy for me. I can just feel it!”
[…]
“He doesn’t know my name, either,” I told her. “Not my real name, anyway. I couldn’t tell him that, not with my name in all the papers. But you know what? I don’t even think he’d care if he knew I was the same girl. He’s so easy to talk to. He’d believe I’m innocent.”
[What the fuck do you mean “He’s so easy to talk to”?!? You’ve had one conversation with him and you were barely even part of it! I guess I’ll give Hope a pass here because we know she’s delusional already, and Chris is probably the first guy to show her genuine kindness, so with her history, it makes sense that she’d fall head over heels at first sight. Still though, it’s so weird to me].
Suddenly the gals hear voices outside the house and have to hide. It’s just a real estate agent showing the house to a couple, who are very interested in purchasing it [But where will Hope live?!?]. After they leave, the [disconnected] phone starts ringing and Hope answers it. It’s Darryl, so it’s clearly a hallucination, and he’s just calling to remind her he’s gonna take care of Margie and Melanie and he won’t let her down. [So sweet ♥].
We’re back to Darryl now and he’s following Margie to her job at a dry cleaner’s, fantasising about smashing in ‘her nose—and everything else’ until it’s ‘red and pulpy like shredded newspaper’. He’s been stalking her over the last few days just like he did Mary, and today is Margie’s unlucky day [You’d think he’d go after Melanie first since she’s the one Hope hated the most].
He bides his time until the owner is busy with customers, then somehow sneaks past the counter to the back room where Margie is working [I find it very hard to believe that no-one in the busy store noticed or said anything, but okeh]. He quickly knocks Margie on the head with a staple gun a few times before throwing her onto the steam press:
I brought down the lid fast.
It let out a long hissssssssssss as it squeezed her, squeezed her…
Hot steam poured out from under the lid.
An arm and a leg dangled limply out of the machine.
I pulled up the lid. Then brought it down and steamed her again.
And one more time for luck.
[It says she was only dazed from the knocks to the head, so wouldn’t she be screaming?? Like, even if you’re totally out of it, you’d feel that pain, right? The girl is completely silent].
Back to Hope, who’s off to meet Chris at the coffee shop. They chat for a while over iced coffees and cookies, and Chris tells Hope/Karen about how his old roommate from his burned down building, Big Al, got out of a speeding ticket one time [It’s completely irrelevant to the story but I just want to point out how fkn stupid it is:
“Al told the cop that it wasn’t his fault he was speeding because he had fallen asleep behind the wheel, and so he had no way of knowing how fast he was going!”
We both laughed.
“And the cop bought that excuse?” I cried. “He didn’t give your friend the ticket?”
“No,” Chris replied. “He just walked back to his cruiser, scratching his head.”
[As if that would ever happen lol]. They go for a walk afterwards and end up kissing, which for Hope ‘felt so good’ [Surprisingly, no description of what he tasted like]. She then gets his number and runs home, where Darryl happens to be waiting for her.
He saw her with Chris, and Darryl can’t allow that to happen again, but Hope stands up for herself, arguing that he can’t control her like that [Good girl, Hope! Although technically, he does control you at certain times…]. Darryl thinks Chris will hurt her just like her old boyfriend Mark did [Lol forgot about him again], which prompts a flashback.
It turns out Hope is a Shadyside gal after all [This explains everything], and was so lonely at Shadyside High, what with being unpopular, shy, overweight and all. Then Mark, who was so nice and caring, came along, and even after her mother stopped her from going to the dance, he still asked her out. She met all his friends on a group date thing and he had his arm around her the whole time:
For the first time in my life, I felt normal. Part of a group.
Part of a couple.
I thought my life had changed. I thought I was in love.
[God this girl falls in love easy. Like I said before though, it makes sense because she’s not use to positive attention and affection like that. Poor Hope :(]. The day after their date, someone leaves a note for Hope explaining that that Mark only asked Hope on a date because he lost a bet with his friends, and was pretending to like her [Do people in real life do this sort of shit? Also, so the date was after he’d already been to her house and hanging out and stuff? Because in the first flashback, she mentioned all that?]. Hope was so upset and embarrassed, she stayed home for a week. Luckily she had Angel, Eden and Jasmine to keep her company, but this is also when Darryl came into her life.
She remembers driving around in her car ‘with Darryl at the wheel’ [How does that actually work though? Like, if Hope was in the passenger seat, and Darryl’s not a real person, who was actually driving the car? It doesn’t make sense for Hope to remember it this way, right?], having such a great time until they saw Mark crossing the road:
Mark never knew what hit him.
The front of the car slammed into Mark’s side and sent him flying. His arms and legs flew out. He hit the pavement on his face and stomach. And bounced a couple of times. I’ll never forget the feel of the bump under our tires as Darryl drove the car over Mark’s body.
First the front tires bounced, then the back.
Then Darryl shot the car into reverse—and backed over Mark. Bump. Bump.
And then we rolled over Mark again. Bump. Bump.
Then we backed over him again. Bump. Bump.
Then we zoomed away, squealing with laughter, laughing till tears rolled down our cheeks.
When Hope snaps back to reality, Darryl is gone, and she wonders if he’ll try to harm Chris [Well he attacked those two other guys and it was Angel and Eden who were out with them, so I think it’s a strong possibility, hun].
We change to Chris’ POV again, who’s playing pool across campus with roommate Will. As they walk home afterwards, they’re almost run over by a car [!!!]. It’s just Matt, their other housemate, wanting to give them ‘”a thrill”‘ [Good one, Matt!].
Back to Darryl again, who’s blaming Melanie for all his problems with Hope. He’s on his way over to Fear Hall now so he can smother her with a pillow in her sleep. Somehow he manages to sneak in all the way up to the 13th floor where Melanie’s room is conveniently unlocked. As he moves to suffocate her in her bed, he realises that it’s not Melanie. Suddenly the girl wakes up and screams, followed by another scream from behind him. This isn’t Melanie’s room anymore!
The second girl manages to grab Darryl, but he smacks her in the face and runs away, down the hall, down the 13 flights of stairs, and across campus. While running, he turns back into Hope, who can’t remember anything from the night or why she’s running [Does she always not remember what she’s just been doing when she changes personalities? Why has this never been brought up before? Like, I get that it’s a different personality experiencing it, but how does Hope usually pick up from wherever any of her other personalities left off and not think anything of how she got there in the first place?] She reaches home and finds the place completely trashed along with a note pinned to the wall by a knife. It reads, ‘“You cannot escape from me”‘ [It’s gotta be one of her personalities writing these].
Even though she realises she’s not safe here, Hope decides to sleeps out on the balcony upstairs anyway [The last place I would sleep], and the next morning she heads out to find another place to live. Along the way, she spots Chris and Melanie together and gets worried they’re talking about her, so she runs away, back to the coffee shop where she first met Chris [???? She really shouldn’t be in public, especially after last night when people saw her in Fear Hall. But I guess she’s not aware of that whole Darryl period anyway]. Naturally there’s a bunch of stare bears in there, so she runs back home where she finds Chris running from the house.
He tells her how he followed her home one night to see where she lived, since she wouldn’t tell him [OK that is not healthy behaviour lol]. He gives her a kiss before asking why she’s living here, and then Darryl arrives! He starts choking Chris while Hope screams for him to stop [Again, I’m confused how she sees Chris being strangled from a different perspective when she has to be the one actually doing it? Like, how does her brain process it that way? Or is that how these sorts of things work?].
Chris manages to break free and is super confused when Hope starts rambling about Darryl’s jealousy. He runs away while Hope calls after him, and with Darryl apparently now gone too, Hope goes inside where she finds another note that says, ‘”There is no escape, Hope. No escape from yourself.”’ She recognises the handwriting once again – it’s her own!
She sits down with the note and ponders over it for the next few hours until Darryl, Angel and Jasmine all appear. The three girls encourage Darryl to give himself up, but he refuses, determined to kill Chris now.
Then there’s a knock at the door. It’s Chris! He wants to come in and talk, but Hope tells him to go away to protect him from Darryl, who opens the door for him… and following Chris into the house is Melanie and four police officers!
Chris is disappointed when Melanie identifies Hope to the police since he really wanted to believe Karen was someone different, but he knew they had to be the same person after she freaked out on the lawn earlier. Hope runs upstairs with Angel, Jasmine and Darryl and escapes to the balcony, with the police close behind begging Hope to let them help her.
On the balcony, Hope embraces her friends in a tight hug, telling them all how they’ve been such good friends:
And my friends and I leaned back. Leaned against the old wooden railing.
I heard a crack.
I heard it break away.
I tried to save myself. I tried to save us all.
But we were hugging so tightly. So tightly.
I couldn’t break free from my friends.
I couldn’t break the hug.
And so the balcony railing gave way.
And all four of us fell.
We’re with Chris for the last chapter, downstairs with Melanie. They look out the window just in time to see a lonesome Hope fall to her death and land on her head with a ‘sickening crack’ [Oof]. The officers agree to take their statements later so Chris and Melanie don’t have to stick around, and as they go to leave, they find Hope’s final note that read ‘”There is no escape, Hope. No escape from yourself”’. The book ends as they marvel at the self-fulfilled prophecy.
Final thoughts
I enjoyed this one better than The Beginning. There was no real twist here, so it was more about Hope’s internal battles. I’m a bit disappointed that nothing ever really came of the whole issue with her mother, but I guess we learned a bit more about why Hope was the way she was. It’s a bit of a downer in the end because Hope was unable to be saved from herself, but I think that was really the only way to effectively wrap up her story.
The deaths were pretty inventive too, but I feel like Melanie should have died since she was the worst of the three Ms, at least from Hope’s point of view. Angel and Jasmine were basically nothing characters in this book, but I guess it’s not like they would have had anything to do anyway.
I mentioned earlier about some situations not making sense, like when Darryl was driving, but now that I think about it I guess it does make sense for each personality in a certain situation to have a memory of it. So with Hope remembering being a passenger when really she must have been driving the car as Darryl, it’s logical she’d have created a memory of it in her mind as Hope, since Hope-as-Darryl would remember Hope-as-Hope being there too [Does that makes sense or have I just thought about it too much otherwise I’m more confused than before hahahaha]. Also, was the cat real or imaginary like everything else? I forgot if it was ever mentioned again after being kicked hahaha.
70 chlorine-filled jacuzzis out of 97!
