I don't know if it was exposure to Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians when I was in 7th grade, or reading Stephen King's The Shining in 8th grade, or seeing John Carpenter's The Thing in high school, or all of the above. What I do know is I'm a colossal sucker for the "group of people stuck in a place they can't escape due to bad weather with a killer on the loose" trope. Throw a half-dozen or more people into the same building, bring down a blizzard with gale-force winds, start up the body count, and I'll willingly strap myself into the ride. I don't care that it's been done to death, I don't care that it's been done better, I love this 'pressure cooker' situation and I'll give anything using it a shot (bonus points if your characters are trapped in an abandoned hospital, asylum, school, or other suitably-creepy venue). Fresh off my kick of reading Alan Dean Foster's novelization of The Thing, and deep into my 'read every YA novel written by R.L. Stine' phase, I rummaged through my library to find something satisfying and turned up this morsel.
It was just what I needed.
The Harker family's one of the richest in Shadyside, so when she gets an invitation from Dara Harker to stay at the family's luxury countryside condo for a fun ski weekend, April Leeds isn't about to say no even though she doesn't really know Dara all that well. Besides, it's not like it's just the two of them. Dara's parents will be there, of course, and she's invited April's best friend Jenny, and Jenny's boyfriend Ken. Dara's ex-boyfriend Josh from Cumberland High has also joined the group. Five friends, two chaperones, and one alpine weekend they'll never forget...assuming any of them survive.
It doesn't take long for plans to unravel. There's a forty percent chance of snow, and the slopes are currently so bare the ski lifts aren't even running. Dara's parents have to cancel at the last minute, so there's no adult supervision. What's more, the group walks into the house to discover they aren't alone. Dara's condominium is a time-share, and a confused Tony Macedo and his girlfriend Carly Rae (no, not that one) thought this was his family's weekend, so they snuck up to the place for a little date-night action. Tempers flare, but everyone agrees to keep their secrets on the down-low. Tired from the trip, bored from lack of snow, and chilled from the cold wind and open floorplan, the group settles on a game of Truth or Dare around the crackling fire, and it doesn't take long for one simple question and one innocuous answer to derail the fun: Josh blows up at Dara, Ken realizes April saw something she shouldn't have last summer, and suddenly slumber isn't going to come so easy for the group of seven. The last thing April sees before going to bed that evening is Dara putting on her coat to grab some more firewood.
The next morning, Dara and Josh don't show up for breakfast. Dara's Jeep is missing, there's no sign that either of them even slept in their beds, and that 'forty percent chance of snow' has turned into a one hundred percent chance of a blizzard. What's more a search of the house uncovers an angrily-written note from Josh asking Dara to meet him outside that evening so they can discuss something.
The group finds Dara's frozen body out back, a hatchet buried deeply between her shoulder blades. With no means of transport, freezing temperatures, and the phone lines down from the ferocity of the storm, the group realizes they're trapped in a nightmare. What's worse, when Josh shows back up, he convinces April he didn't kill Dara...which means one of the people she's trapped inside with is a cold-blooded murderer.
Truth or Dare is a lot of fun. Like I said, I'm a total sucker for the "group of people who are stuck in one place and can't leave" theme, and even though I guessed the killer's identity before Stine's reveal, I applaud his misdirection skills. Seventeen-year-old me wouldn't have seen it coming.
My only real complaint is the page count (146 in my paperback) doesn't give Stine any room for extra details or character building, and the conclusion, when it arrives, wraps everything up far too quickly. This isn't uncommon in the Fear Street series, but I still think the climax suffers for it. Otherwise the rest of the story is just fine: the condo becomes suitably claustrophobic as the teens all realize the danger they're in, and the overall body count is quite small. The story never feels gratuitous like a slasher, although Dara's death is awful and April can't help re-living the moment of discovery once she makes a significant realization. I burned through it in a couple of hours, and it kept me entertained. One does not open a bag of Doritos and complain about not getting a five-course meal. If all you're in the mood for is a light snack, Truth or Dare is like snapping into a Slim Jim--and I'm totally cool with that.
Four frozen-stiff fingers out of five.
Unintentionally Funny Moment:
Learning that Ken once dated a girl named Barbara. Really, Mr. Stine, of all the names you could have gone with, you picked "Ken" and "Barbie"? Whether it was intentional or not, I had a good chuckle at that one.
Crossover Moment:
On page 6, Jenny uses the phone in the limousine to call her friend Corky Corcoran, just to brag she's calling on a phone in a limo (cut her some slack, car phones were items of luxurious technological wizardry in 1995). Corky's the main character in Fear Street: The Cheerleaders, one of Stine's spin-off series. The more of these I read, the more compelled I feel to compile a list of these innocuous name-drops.
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Pretty sure I have not read this one but I used to love the Fear Street books. The Halloween ones were always my favorite.
At some point, I'll have every last one of them read/reviewed up here. I was going to try for chronological order, then realized I don't own them all, so scattershot method it is! :)