99 Fear Street The House of Evil: The Second Horror

Cally is all up in the attic, watching a new family move into “her” house. Brandt is the teenage and only son, who’s moving in with his parents and his cat Ezra. Both of his parents are researchers and they’ve bee living on some remote island for awhile. Now they’re moving back to civilization because he has some weird “condition” and they want to give him a chance at a normal life.

Brandt’s dad starts hanging up these ritual masks and deadly spears around the room. Suddenly one of the spears impales the poor cat and he dies pretty fast. He gets over it pretty fast though because one of his neighbors shows up. Abbie is cute and hot, so he gets all distracted.

Then he meets this other hot girl Jinny and they start bonding, even though she already has a boyfriend. Her boyfriend Jon starts ribbing him a lot and convinces him to try out for the basketball team because he’s tall and the coach says they need tall guys. He lies and tells his mom that he’s on the student senate because he doesn’t want her worrying about his condition. I guess she has a right to worry though because Jon trips him, he hits his arm and gets this incredible bruise that spreads all over his arm.

Brandt makes a date with Abbie for Sunday, but then forgets and makes a date with Jinny’s best friend Meg for the same day. Jinny comes over to the house and is all freaked out because she’s heard all the stories about the place. He leaves her alone for five seconds and she ends up getting slashed. She swears that a glass broke in mid-air and she’s rushed to the hospital.

He starts getting followed by this shadowy figure, but blows it off. He seems more concerned when he thinks it’s following Jon then he does when it’s following him. After breaking his date with Abbie, he goes over to Meg’s house and they watch a movie. Jinny shows up, has a confrontation with Meg and storms out. Meg blows it off because Jinny already has a guy.

Some other random shit happens too, like a psycho raccoon attacking. Then Brandt finds a journal, which belonged to Cally. He reads through it, thinking that she seems like a cool girl and someone he’d like to know. Then he starts finding new entries written, which rant against Jinny and threaten Abbie.

Abbie shows up and he’s worried about her. He should be, because a huge suit of armor falls off the wall and lands on her. His mom is all like, “but we used three bolts”. Yeah ma, I think it takes more than that. Then he starts hearing the voice of a little boy and freaks out because it’s Cally’s little brother James. He starts tearing out the walls and eventually finds his decomposing body and the skeleton of the kid’s dog.

His dad is actually kind of relieved because he thinks all the weird stuff was caused by a poltergeist. Now that his body was found, everything will stop. Ok dad. Jinny and Meg come over with a plate of brownies because they’ve apparently made up. To up the gross factor, they made the brownies a week ago for a bake sale and are just now giving them to him.

The girls hang out for awhile, but Jinny is kind of uncomfortable there. Gee, you think? Meg acts like it’s not a big deal and also points out that Jinny and Jon are happily dating again. Brandt starts showing the girls these deadly blow darts and explaining how they work, when his dad calls him outside. By the time he gets back, the girls are laying on the ground with darts in their throat. The horrible doctor tells them that he’s not sure if they’ll be okay but they should be okay when they wake up. Does that make sense?

Once he gets home, he finds another threat against Abbie, who conveniently shows up. As he’s warning her, she quickly shifts into the ghost of Cally. Yeah, that totally doesn’t make sense. She’s decided to make Brandt stay with her forever and promptly finds a hatchet, which she slams into his head. Brandt blinks and then to her shock, slowly gets up.

He explains that his weird condition is that he’s actually dead. Some man tried to kill his dad with poison powder, but Brandt stepped on it instead. His dad got the medicine man to bring him back to life, which involved stealing the life force/soul of some random drifter. Cally gets all excited, but then the dark shadow pops up.

The dark shadow is actually the drifter, who wants his mother fucking soul back. He grabs a necklace that Brandt always wore, which contains his hair and bones. Brandt’s body kind of shrivels up and dies, while Cally watches and screams. The book ends with her watching them load his body into a hearse and take him away.

Wowza. I didn’t remember him dying at the end, but I remembered the whole zombie thing. For some reason I was thinking that she stabbed him and then he walked away from everything. I didn’t remember that he actually died.