Years ago I brought all my childhood RL Stine books back from a visit home for Christmas and read my way through every silly one of them. Except this one! Not sure how it got missed, but I decided to work it into the rotation. And, you know, it was really not that great, even by Stine's standards.

Our hero, Kerry, is a 16 year old boy who lives in the shadow of his football star older brother, Donald. The only problem is, his brother is... gone... and Kerry can't remember anything from the past year except something about a car accident and no one in his family or his town will tell him what happened. One day after getting home from a *really* bad day at school where Kerry accidentally breaks the leg of the star quarterback during football practice, he gets a late night call from a mysterious woman with a sexy voice who introduces herself as Mandy, his blind date. He is excited that something good is happening in his life, even though Mandy is a little odd. But then he starts getting threatening prank calls, his car is violently vandalized, and everything very quickly starts spinning out of control. And then Donald calls....

Kerry is possibly the goofiest character Stine has ever written. He is very excited about the idea of having sex with Mandy, to the point where even after he has seen about a gazillion red flags he still decides to go along with what she says, on the off chance that he might get lucky. He has a one note "hilarious" best friend named Josh, a monosyllabic little brother who is introduced to us drinking beer (he's 14!) and eating junk food in front of the TV, an emotionally distant and overworked cop for a father (who does not seem to care about the beer?), and a mother who just recently left and who he doesn't seem to miss or think about in any way.

There are a couple of good scenes, the best of which is when Kerry goes to pick up Mandy for their first date and gets the house wrong (or does he!) and ends up at an abandoned looking house where the door is eventually answered by a haggard looking couple who he doesn't know, but who definitely know him, and who start yelling and crying at him for some unknown reason. For the most part, though, the writing is choppy and the few suspenseful set pieces are quickly undermined by the cornball dialogue.

The twists are not that twisty, and are pretty easy to see coming, but may fool you if you are 11 or 12, which was about my age when I first read this. And I must have liked it well enough then since I kept it for 30+ years. Still, I don't think this is one I'd recommend even to the 12 year olds in my life. ( )

*spoiler warning*

Wow. It's not often that an RL Stine book really catches me off-guard, but this one was very unexpected. I took it for granted that Donald was the bad guy, especially after Kerry remembered the truth about the car crash... I knew Mandy was strange, but I never put two and two together. She was just a quirky sub-character. I thought. Finding out that she was a *mental patient* who takes on other people's lives, finding out that she was responsible for everything... Wow. Way to go, RL Stine. You finally shocked me speechless. ( )