SLAY RIDE - Nightmare Club Gets Dark
During the 90’s, teen horror fiction was huge. Authors like R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike already had major hits, and Scholastic’s Point Horror was thriving. Recently, I’ve made it my personal mission to collect and read as many of the titles from the decade as possible. This month, for Horror Bound, I’m taking a look at Nightmare Club: Slay Ride.
You can check out the full review series HERE!
The book is the seventh installment of the Nightmare Club series, which ran for eleven titles and was published between the years of 1993 and 1994. The books are standalones, but each of them share the common threads of being set in the fictional town of Cooper Hollow and featuring the local teen hangout, The Night Owl Club—AKA Nightmare Club. Various authors wrote the books. The late Scott Ciencin, writing as Nick Baron, contributed four titles, including this one, Slay Ride.
Similar to many of the books from R.L. Stine’s massively popular Fear Street series, Slay Ride uses the titular setting as a brand rather than having it serve any major purpose within the story. Instead, the plot of Slay Ride centers on lead character Andrea Wanamaker who is being harassed by the high school bully, Tom Markham, and his group of friends. Andrea wants nothing more than the bullying and harassment to stop. Soon a mysterious stranger called The Guardian Angel begins avenging Andrea and knocking off her tormentors one by one.
The subject matter and the way that it is handled is surprisingly dark. I went into the story expecting a fun and campy Point Horror inspired tale, but got something much more serious. Whereas Point Horror, Fear Street, etc. barely even scratch the surface on a lot of similar topics, Slay Ride faces the subject matter head on. With language that is appropriately harsh, the book is a balancing act between YA and an adult novel that features a teen protagonist. The blended tone works well with some of the 90’s teen horror tropes—the “pranks” in Slay Ride are realistic, cruel, and disturbing—but not so much with others.
Slay Ride’s central mystery is the identity of The Guardian Angel. Of course, Andrea suspects several different people along the way—all of them only serving as red herrings to take the reader and Andrea off track. The big reveal at the end seems to come out of left field—a trick that works well within the dramatic structure of most Point Horror titles. Here, the antagonist’s explanation scene makes sense, is timely even by today’s standards, and fits the themes, but if the author had woven the character motivation more throughout the narrative, it would have had a bigger impact.
The high points of Slay Ride are the scenes dealing with the ramifications that bullying and harassment have on Andrea and those around her. Unfortunately, a lot of the book feels like a movie that has been re-edited to fit within the expectations of a specific market. I’m left with the impression that Nick Baron (Scott Ciencin) initially wrote a darkly serious story and the manuscript was reworked to be published under the Nightmare Club banner. For the most part, the blended tone is almost seamless, but in some respects, it falls flat and feels too forced. Admittedly, Slay Ride is the first Nightmare Club book I have read, but I am interested to check out more. I enjoyed Baron’s story enough to read his other titles.
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