Fear Street: Cat (R.L. Stine)

It's been awhile since I did a Fear Street recap, so enjoy!

Marty is the star of the Fear Street basketball team. Along with his friends Dwayne and Barry, people call them the Three Musketeers or the Stooges. During basketball practice, he notices the stray cat that lives in the gym. Gayle, the star school reporter, did an article on it and asked someone to step up and adopt it but no one ever did. The cat streaks across the floor and almost trips someone.

A few minutes later, Marty trips over the cat himself. He hurts himself bad enough that he has to miss the next game but not so bad that he can't run around with his friends. Dwayne nearly trips and falls off the bleachers, so Marty grabs him and accidentally throws the cat over the side. Gayle and her friend Riki, who Marty went out with a few times, completely freak out. Gayle accuses him of trying to hurt the cat on purpose and say he killed it before they both storm off.

The next day, Marty tries to talk to some random girl, but she gives him a dirty look. During his first class, he notices that all the girls keep glaring, frowning, or just staring at him. The reason becomes clear when he finds posters hanging all over school from the Animal Rights Club that shows abused animals with his picture in the center. The coach is so worried about everything that he decides Marty should go up against the club at the Student Court.

A cute girl named Jessica badgers him in front of everyone. His friends all step up on his behalf, but Gayle is one rager of a bitch. She tells everyone that he not only threw the cat over the bleachers but that he also spiked the cat, threw it around by its tail, and then joked about the murder with his friends. When the court reaches a decision, Marty sees the cat under the bleachers and tries to point it out but it disappears. They find him not guilty of murder but guilty of animal abuse, and I want to scream. He gets sentenced to 30 hours of community service in the animal shelter.

Jessica tracks him down later, apologizes, and says she's glad that he was found not guilty. They spend some time together until Riki walks by and glares at him. He then hears a cat meowing only to find out that it's a group of senior girls making fun of him. Riki calls him later that night, screams at him about how he was so mean to her in the past, and shouts about how he stood her up once and lied to her to go out with some other girl. When he finally gets off the phone with her, he hears what sounds like a cat trying to come through his bedroom window.

It's actually just his buddies stopping by to see if he wants to grab a bite. They sit around talking about this girl Kit who all the guys have the hots for before heading home. A bunch of cats come out of nowhere, which makes them take off running. The next day, Marty goes to the animal shelter, and the same thing happens again. All the cats flip out and hiss at him until someone else comes in and saves him.

Marty finally gets a date with Kit. After stopping by The Corner for an after school snack, they go to her house and she asks him to come inside for a few. It turns out that she has a ton of cats. They all walk into the room and stare at him until he makes up an excuse to leave, claiming that he's super allergic to cats. They go out a few more times too.

To get back at Gayle, which I frankly cannot blame him for, he and his friends pull a prank on the club. They sneak a bunch of rats into the room, which causes all the members to start screaming and running away. Gayle threatens him and warns him that she'll pay him back. That night, he gets a call from someone who just meows repeatedly on the phone. Marty thinks it's probably Riki and that she's just jealous that he found someone else. Dude, two dates does not a relationship make.

Cut to the night of the big game. He sees Riki sneaking around but everyone says she's just there to unnerve him. After they win, big shocker, the guys all celebrate in the locker room, but Marty sees Gayle sneaking through the gym and decides to follow her. He sees her go in but not come out, and when he goes in, he finds Dwayne's dead body in the center of the court.

Surprisingly enough, people get over this pretty fast. The coach asks them all to wear a black arm band at the next game, and Marty breaks down because he doesn't know if he can play without one of his best friends. Barry snaps at him that they all want to play for Dwayne, which cheers him up a little.

After he and Barry make up later, Barry asks him for a ride home. He waits around for a bit and stops by the gym, where he sees a body on the floor. Just as he starts to freak out, he realizes that it's just a bad. He does, however, find that Barry's been hooking up with Riki behind his back when he catches them together. There's really no explanation as to why they didn't tell him they were together either.

He heads to work that night and gets left alone with the cats. They all keep staring at him before the cage doors all come open. All the cats start attacking him, and he naturally freaks out. His boss shows up to save him and says that he must have opened the doors himself because he was the only one there. She also claims that he was the one attacking the cats and not the other way around.

Marty is so upset that he decides to swing by Barry's house on the way home. The place is completely dark, so he just opens the door and lets himself inside. He trips over something in the dark, flips out because it's so obviously a dead body, then discovers that it's just a rolled up carpet. All he finds is Barry and Riki making out on the couch.

After trying to tell them what happened and just seeing looks of confusion, he leaves and goes home to bed. His mom wakes him up early the next morning because there are cops downstairs. The cops ask him what he did the night before. Though he thinks something happened to his boss, it's actually Barry. Apparently, someone murdered Barry and they found him covered in claw marks.

There's another boring day at school before he goes back to the shelter. Left alone once again, the cats get super quiet and stare at him before howling. Kit then shows up and reveals that she's actually a shape shifter. She was the cat from the gym and was secretly in love with him, which is why she hung around all the time. After he “killed” her, she came back to get back at him. Kit killed both his friends and now wants to kill him. They have a huge fight that ends with her about to kill him when a huge dog from the shelter attacks and kills her.

Marty ends the book with talking about how he lied to everyone. He didn't tell them about Kit because he knew no one would believe him. He just said he was attacked by a cat and the dog saved him. Cut to the big championship game. He's just about to make the game winning shot when he sees two big green eyes staring at him from underneath the bleachers and starts screaming.

This one was kind of “meh” for me. Marty isn't exactly the most likable person to begin with, and then it's pretty obvious that Kit is behind everything, so I wound up skimming a lot of it.