Point Horror: Nightmare Hall: Sorority Sister (Diane Hoh)

I actually tried to read this book like three times and kept putting it down because it was so hard to weed through. Basically a bunch of new pledges move into the sorority house at Salem University and that really doesn’t make sense. How the heck do they have room for all those girls? If they only pledge 5-10 girls each year, which is a conservative estimate, that’s still 20-40 girls living in the same house and that seems like a whole lot to me.

Anyway, you don’t really need to know that many girls because only a couple are mentioned. There’s Maxie, our main gal and Tinker, another new pledge, Cath, the new pledge who appeared in the first Nightmare Hall book and Erica and Candie, two older girls.

When the book first opens, Erica is freaking out because someone stole her jewelry box and everyone tries to find it. Then a messenger shows up at the door and the package he brings, has her jewelry box in it. Then the ring Candie’s boyfriend gave her disappears and the same company delivers it.

A bunch of the girls’ moms are coming to town because they were all former sorority girls and someone tosses rotting food on top of the catered dishes. Maxie tries to tell her boyfriend Brendan and best friend Jenna, but neither cares because she keeps blowing them off for sorority stuff. Jenna is especially pissed because Max up and moved out of the dorm room they shared and keeps forgetting to call her back.

A doctor stops by the house and asks to use the phone, but it turns out that he’s not really a doctor. He puts ants all over the house, which scares all the gals. Then Candie’s mom’s hairstylist shows up. Candie’s not there, so she offers to fix up Maxie. She starts acting weird, talking about all the stuff that happened at the house, even though no one’s supposed to know.

Maxie tries to run and ends up throwing herself down the laundry chute because the woman blocks all the exits. She sprains her ankles, the woman disappears and the other girls show up. Brendan tries to convince her to quit and move back in with Jenna, but she’s too busy coming up with random theories about the killer.

She thinks it might be someone who hates the sorority because they didn’t get in. Then she suspects Brendan because he isn’t happy about her blowing him off and she also suspects Jenna. She further suspects Brendan when he tells her he has to skip out on a frat party to take his friend to a birthday party a few hours away and then finds out that he didn’t do it. It’s basically one big game of who did it.

Then nearly every girl in the house gets food poisoning, or some type of poisoning. Only the girls who ate dinner that night get sick, but the cops can’t figure out what happened. Cath hurts her arm when someone ruins their initiation for her and she drops out of the sorority. Still, they can’t miss out on the next big frat party! Maxie decides to talk to Erica and finds that she left the party with Candie. She immediately decides that it’s suspicious and Erica must be behind everything.

So Maxie sneaks around the house and gets attacked by the real prankster. Big surprise, it’s Candie. Erica is now tied up in the basement and Candie has set the house up to explode, based on something she saw in a movie. Does anyone else have a bad feeling about this? The girls start fighting, but help turns up at the last minute.

It turns out that Candie resented her mom for loving the sorority so much. Apparently her mom was hot shit on campus and never wanted to leave. She married Candie’s dad and they had to move to Pennsylvania for a job, but she never let him forget how much she hated leaving Salem and her “girls”. Eventually he ran off and then her brother left too. Candie hated how much her mom loved the sorority and I can kind of see why, because her mom sounds fucked up. She planned on blowing up the sorority house, to make her mom forget all about it.

The whole thing is all fucked up. It really doesn’t make sense. Candie somehow managed to dress up as several different men and women and no one realized it was her, even the people she lived with. Hoh tries to explain it by saying that Candie was a big actor in high school, but there’s no way she could learn how to do this kind of makeup. Then again, I’m starting to realize that none of the Nightmare Hall books make any sense.