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Fear Street, where your worst nightmares live

Welcome to Shadyside, a nice, seemingly normal town. The town consists of your regular teen hangouts, including Pete's Pizza, Fear Lake, and the Division Street Mall. All the students go to Shadyside High. Yep, it's a picture-perfect town... Except for the curse.

That's right, a curse! Years ago, the Fear family was cursed during the Witch Trials, and that curse has lived on through the ages, destroying lives and driving people insane. And by 'people', that is every teenager who ever lived in Shadyside, and anyone who comes in contact with the Fear family.

The protagonists of the books are usually well-to-do teenagers who deal with threats both supernatural and completely human. Since most of the books all take place in the same town, it isn't unusual for characters from one book to be mentioned in passing in another.

Over 150 books have been published, either written by R. L. Stine or ghost writers. After the Seniors series, the series lay dormant until the Nights trilogy in 2005. It was then brought back again in 2014 for another ongoing series, although there hasn't been a new one since 2019.

Tropes for Ghosts of Fear Street go here. A film trilogy based on the series was released on Netflix in July of 2021. Tropes for it can be found here.

This series provides examples of:

  • Abusive Parents: The killer in First Date had a father who would often get drunk and beat him. His mother left him, taking his sister with her, leaving him to deal with the father on his own.
  • Accidental Time Travel: In Haunted, it turns out that the ghost of Paul has been thrown back to when he was still alive, which is why Melissa has no memory of supposedly killing him.
  • Aesop Amnesia: Reva Dalby excels at this. Three Christmases in a row she goes through a life-threatening ordeal, promises to start acting like a better person...and then by next Christmas she is still the same spoiled brat she was last year, only to go through another ordeal.
  • All-Stereotype Cast: Trapped starts out almost exactly like The Breakfast Club
  • Alpha Bitch: Notable examples being:
    • Reva Dalby's the most well known example, being a rich and haughty young woman who tends to treat everyone around her like garbage. While lots of kids want to attend her parties, it's clear no one at Shadyside High actually likes her that much.
    • Trisha Conrad from the Fear Street Seniors is treated like a Lovable Alpha Bitch because she's rich, popular, and supposedly sweet, but this is an Informed Attribute. Trisha's a manipulative little backstabber who tends to date boys that already have steady girlfriends, and yet somehow has the nerve to be offended when she gets cheated on. She can also act rather nasty to people beneath her social class, such as Mary O'Connor (whose boyfriend she stole).
    • Alicia Bainbridge and Joanna Kershaw from Circle of Fire are rivals fighting to be the most popular and influential girl at their boarding school. Joanna's seemingly successful in murdering Alicia, until it's later revealed Alicia was killed by Mia Saxton's friend Clara. By that point, Joanna's left the school after she goes Laughing Mad.
  • Always Someone Better: Valedictorian Kenny Klein to both Marla Newman (who wants to be valedictorian) and arguably Ty Sullivan when they're summer camp counselors together. Both of them eventually come to get along better with him.
  • Amusement Park of Doom: Fear Park, an amusement park that was built in the Fear Street Woods after some of the land was swindled out of Nicholas Fear's possession. Nicholas and his son Robin put a curse on the land so the park would fail, starting off with the workers hired to clear the trees chopping each other up with their axes. Every attempt at reopening the park results in grisly "accidents" thanks to Robin's magic.
  • And I Must Scream: The elderly servant Miss Matheson in Faces of Terror? She's actually a woman in her twenties and the villain's ex-fiancee. He tortures her by creating busts of her face, and with his magic uses those creations to suck the life out of her. But he never finishes any of the busts, so the process is never completed.
  • And Now You Must Marry Me: In Bad Moonlight, it turns out the band Danielle is in actually a front for a werewolf cult that has been grooming her to be a werewolf bride for the leader, Kit. She's able to defeat him before the wedding is complete though.
  • And Then John Was a Zombie: And then Trisha Conrad was a Fear and Jennifer Fear wasn't.
  • Annoying Younger Sibling: More common in Ghosts of Fear Street than the regular, such as Baby/Barbara in Hide and Shriek, although the main series has a few like Cliff in Bad Moonlight.
  • Artifact of Doom: The Fear Family has a silver pendant decorated with five blue jewels which is the source of their power, dating back to ancient Ireland. It has the words "Dominatio Per Malum" carved into it, which translate to "Power Through Evil".
  • Asian and Nerdy: Matty Winger and Phoebe Yamura, though Phoebe is also captain of the cheerleading squad.
  • Asshole Victim: Much more frequent in Fear Street Sagas.
    • Jade Feldman and Ty Sullivan are very prominent examples from the Seniors books.
    • Somewhat Deconstructed in The Secret Bedroom: Marci Hendrix is a massive bitch to Lea just because Lea accidentally spilled food on her new shirt once (and even apologized immediately). After meeting Catherine, who seems at first to be a benevolent ghost murdered by her evil parents, Lea plans to scare her into not picking on her anymore. Unfortunately, Marci falls to her death while trying to run away, which Catherine tries to play off as an accident only for Lea to quickly realize she was Evil All Along. That said, Lea still feels really guilty about the whole thing, and the book ends with the implication she will feel that way for some time.
  • Babysitting Episode: Don't Stay Up Late.
  • Bad People Abuse Animals: In spades. It's not uncommon to have a protagonist be sent a random dead animal. And much like the slasher films of the 80s, if the protagonist has a named pet, don't expect that pet to live through the book.
  • Beach Episode: Sunburn, High Tide, One Evil Summer, Party Summer and the Goodnight Kiss duology.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted in Faces of Terror and The Perfect Date. Averted and justified in Dance of Death, since the villain can't drain the youth of women whose beauty has been damaged.
  • Became Their Own Antithesis: Cally from 99 Fear Street starts out as a cheerful and kindhearted girl. After she dies, she becomes a Vengeful Ghost filled with malice and hatred, who's only joy seems to come from Schadenfreude, such as terrifying Brandt and hurting his friends.
  • Becoming the Mask: The truth behind Sarah Fear, the member of the Fear Family whose death was a large plot point in the Fear Street Cheerleaders trilogy. Or rather, Jane Fear. The woman who would've become Sarah Fear, Sarah Burns, switched her identity with her best friend Jane Hardy, in order to get out of the arranged marriage to Thomas Fear. Jane was willing to comply because she wanted to get married. Unfortunately, Sarah, in Jane's identity, died in a boat accident, which would've claimed the actual Jane's life if they hadn't switched places. So, Sarah Burns returned as a vengeful spirit, the Evil which plagued the Shadyside High cheerleaders, to haunt Jane and ruin her life. Jane resorted to sacrificing herself in order to trap Sarah's spirit inside her corpse. No one was ever aware of the switch, so Corky Corcoran and the cheerleaders all assumed that the Evil either WAS Sarah Fear or was responsible for killing her. The truth didn't get revealed until The Evil Lives!
  • Bit Character: Not all of the Shadyside Senior Class from Fear Street Seniors is listed in the Yearbook entry, which does make some sense since there's no way the books could've covered an entire 12th grade class over the course of 12 books. But it's a little disconcerting when students are suddenly mentioned in the later half of the series despite having never appeared beforehand. The seniors mentioned but never given a yearbook entry are: Jon Milano, Anita Black, Samantha Harper, Joey Allen, Caitlin Lemonda, Gina Quinlan, and a girl named Zella.
    • Although to be fair, some of those characters might actually be juniors who just hang out with the seniors.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Trisha Conrad has her moments.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Several books end with the protagonist surviving and the villain defeated, but it's not a completely happy ending.
    • The Secret Bedroom: Lea defeats Catherine's ghost with help from the spirits of Catherine's parents, but Lea must live with the knowledge Marci's death happened because she let Catherine free.
    • College Weekend: Chris is revealed as the killer and is defeated, but he kills Josh, Tina's boyfriend. The book ends with her having to some air, with the knowledge that she can never wish away the memory of this weekend.
    • Fear Hall: The Conclusion verges more to a Downer Ending. Chris and Melanie live, but Hope dies in front of them because she wouldn't let go of her imaginary friends while Mary and Margie are still dead.
  • Black-and-Grey Morality: Usually the case when there is a Villain Protagonist or if the protagonist is driven by revenge. Heart of the Hunter is a good example of this trope as both sides of the story's conflict do questionable and outright evil deeds.
  • Black Dude Dies First: Shandel Carter is the first to die in The Thrill Club.
  • Black Widow: In Door of Death, Jake Fear's wife Cassandra Ryan, who bilked him out of his belongings and revealed to him that she'd been slowly poisoning him since day one. Jake dies and becomes a vengeful spirit hellbent on punishing those he's deemed "cheaters" on Halloween, and Cassandra gets off Scott free.
  • Bland-Name Product: Wizards & Dungeons in The Surprise Party.
  • Blended Family Drama: The Stepsister has Emily's father getting remarried, thus leading to a stepfather and the titular stepsister, along with a stepbrother. Despite their efforts, none of them really get along at first, especially with Jessie being suspect of being a killer. Turns out Emily's sister Nancy was the real killer, and the others start to get along in the end.
  • Blessed with Suck: Margaret Fier has the power of Psychometry, which the people of her town are both afraid of and are willing to use to their advantage should the need arise.
  • The Bluebeard: Justin Fear of Dance of Death brainwashes beautiful young women into marrying him so he can drain their energy to keep himself young. He's killed four wives before Madeline Simms put an end to his reign of terror.
  • Body in a Breadbox: Jade Feldman is killed by Griffen and put into a meat locker in Fight Team Fight.
  • Bowdlerise: The 2020 reprint of The Overnight tones down the not so flattering description of Ricky Schoor's weight. Additionally, The Surprise Party changes Meg calling girls in bad horror movies "tramps" to calling them "traitors". It also a removes a line about how Suki Thomas will "do it" with any boy who asks.
    • The reprint of ''Missing' removes a line saying that one character looks like an albino.
    • The 2020 reprint of The New Girl removes the uses of "spaz" and "midget". It also removes a few sexual bits such as someone calling a cheerleader a fox.
  • The Bully:
    • Jade Feldman is a very blatant example in the Seniors books. She's jealous of Phoebe Yamura being the head of the cheer squad and uses Beta Bitch Dana Palmer to try and get Phoebe to quit. This includes harassing Phoebe, switching their names on an important chemistry exam so Jade can stay on, and later gets most of the squad to browbeat Phoebe into keeping quiet about it, and later stages a fake kidnapping as a prank. True to form, when Jade and the others are held captive by Phoebe's actual stalker, Jade goes from being a self-centered jerk to a spineless coward.
    • Ty Sullivan is another example. See Jerk Jock and Who's Laughing Now? below. Most of the other male seniors besides Ty qualify as well.
  • Burn the Witch!: Used in The Fear Street Saga (with it being mentioned that they are only doing it because Benjamin Fier personally insists that all suspected witches be burned) and The Cataluna Chronicles. Averted in The Hand of Power.
  • Cain and Abel: Used frequently.
    • Julia and Hannah Fear. Julia's Cain, Hannah's Abel.
    • Amanda and Laura Goode. Surprisingly, while Laura's a lazy bitch, she turns out to be Abel and Amanda is Cain.
    • David and Marcus Fier. David's Abel, Marcus is Cain.
  • Captain Ersatz: Dierdre and Dana Palmer from Fear Street Seniors are a pair of blond-haired blue-eyed twins with Dana as a stuck-up cheerleader and Dierdre as the friendly smart twin. Remind you of another pair of blond-haired blue-eyed twins?
  • Cartwright Curse: Kenny Klein from Seniors has his girlfriend from the first half of the series brutally murdered, and later had started dating another girl, Marla, right before she fell victim to black magic as a Cruel Twist Ending of her Death in the Limelight.
  • The Cassandra:
    • Trisha Conrad has visions of the future and warned everyone at the start of Seniors the graduating class would die before 12th grade ended. Trisha's vision haunts the students for the remainder of the year as more people died.
    • Fear Street Saga has Nora vainly trying to prevent the tragedies she sees in visions. The trilogy ends by revealing Nora has forseen scores of events that will occur in the other books but, the nurse at the institution she's been placed in burns her manuscript of warnings.
  • Cats Are Mean:
    • Cat focuses on a kid who is complicit in the death of a stray cat that was living in the high school gym, and features him and his friends getting attacked by angry strays. The titular cat turns out to be a shapeshifter with nine lives who murders his friends and tries to kill him, with the ending implying she'll keep trying.
    • Catherine Hatchett of The Cataluna Chronicles could turn into a cat, and the name "Cataluna" means "Cat of the Moon."
  • Celebrity Resemblance: A lot of the books have at least one character who is compared to a celebrity.
  • Chekhov's Gun: At one point in The Boy Next Door, Crystal trips over a hole in the floorboards of her attics. In the climax, Scott falls through it, incapacitating him.
    • Mark in Missing is into archery. While his skills don't come into play, his bow does when Captain Farraday uses it to murder Roger and pin the blame on Mark.
    • Subverted and then played straight in Silent Night 2. Early on Reva tries to use the employee elevator only to be told it is out of order. Later on she remembers this and tries to make the kidnappers use it to fall to their death but it turns out it was fixed. But then Danny uses it and it turns out only the left one was fixed and he uses the right one, falling to his death.
  • Chekhov's Hobby: Chelsea in First Date practices the saxophone. All of that has made her good at holding her breath, which comes in handy when she pretends to be dead to throw off the killer.
  • Class Clown: Matty Winger in Seniors.
  • Cliffhanger: Overdosed. Almost every chapter ends on something dramatic, which turns out to have a completely harmless explanation at the next page.
  • Class Princess: Lisa Blume. Despite being a Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, she is quite a nice person as when Cara in Missing reveals her parents are, well, missing, she offers to let her stay at her place until they are found.. Fittingly, she is best friends with Lovable Jock Cory Brooks. At the end of The New Girl, they become more than just friends.
  • Colliding Criminal Conspiracies:
    • Probably the most notable example is Missing. A corrupt and murderous police officer is after the protagonists' FBI agent parents, unaware that they have been taken captive by a cult that wants to overthrow the U.S. government.
    • And probably the oddest example is Can You Keep a Secret?, which is a werewolf story (there is one on the prowl, and the heroine believes that it might be her) mixed with a Bank Robbery one (the aforementioned heroine and her friends uncover a stash of money that was recently stolen in an armored car robbery).
  • Cool Car: The Cataluna in The Cataluna Chronicles
  • Continuity Nod: There's a few that happen, one example is Halloween Party, where one of the party guests was a main character in The Overnight and briefly refers to the events of the novel.
  • Covers Always Lie:
    • The cover of Door of Death implied that Jake Fier would be a headless corpse. It turned out that the headless man on the cover was really one of the main characters pulling an elaborate Halloween prank.
    • Dance of Death featured a broken mirror and a raven. Neither are mentioned or used in the story.
    • Sometimes the back blurb will be worded in a way that implies that someone other than the actual protagonist is said protagonist. Who Killed the Homecoming Queen takes this further by not mentioning the actual protagonist at all and making it seem like it's only about Tania.
    • The cover of The Best Friend has a Christmas present being stabbed. This never happens in the book.
  • A Crack in the Ice: The eventual undoing of Red and Erica in Ski Weekend and Broken Hearts, respectively.
  • Creepy Child: The main point of Children of Fear and The Hidden Evil. Forbidden Secrets had Lucy, but it turned out she was just an extremely stunted 17 year old who actually hated being treated like a child.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: A franchise staple. Among the more infamous/memorable kills are having your face torn off by a pottery wheel in Lights Out, dying by chemical burn after the killer pours chlorine into a Jacuzzi in Fear Hall: The Conclusion, and an exploding house of mirrors in Fear Park: The Loudest Scream.
  • Cute and Psycho: A good portion of the villains are rather attractive teenagers whose good looks hide some very depraved attitudes, such as Justine Cameron, Hope Mathis, Rosha Nelson, and Mira Block.
  • Cycle of Revenge: The Fear and Goode feud which started when Benjamin and Matthew Fier framed Susannah Goode and her mother for witchcraft, which got the two women burned at the stake and set Susannah's father to swear death on the whole family.
  • Dark Is Not Evil:
    • Usually a twist in the books. Whenever there is a character who is darker and gloomier, contrasted with a character who is much nicer and normal, it turns out the nicer one is really the bad guy.
    • Also noted with some members of the Fear Family who managed to avoid the hereditary evil or avoided being warped and turned rotten. Examples being Emma Fier Reade and Margaret Fier. Richard Fier also seems to have shades of this, being a fairly pacifistic vampire. However that manages to work.
  • Dead All Along: Usually one of the twists in the book. For example, in 99 Fear Street, the Realtor, the exterminator, and the housekeeper all turn out to be ghosts that are a part of the house. In The Second Horror, it turns out the main character, Bandit, died before the book began in an incident that had nothing to do with the house.
  • Deadly Prank: In New Year's Party, a seemingly harmless prank has lethal consequences because of the target's weak heart.
  • Dead Person Impersonation: The New Girl, The Dead Lifeguard, Sunburn, Switched, and The Awakening Evil. Switched is a more convoluted example. Nicole believes that she has switched bodies with her best friend Lucy, and that Lucy had actually killed her parents and switched with Nicole so Nicole would be arrested in her place. The truth is, Lucy had died three years ago and Nicole has not been able to understand that, regularly hallucinating that Lucy is still alive or believing that she herself is Lucy.
  • Decoy Protagonist:
    • The Best Friend 2 starts off with Becka Norwood transferring to Waynesbridge High. It's really Honey Perkins impersonating Becka after escaping from a mental hospital.
    • The Cataluna Chronicles opens with a prologue featuring an unlucky owner of the possessed car who is quickly murdered.
    • Some of the books had a tendency to begin with prologues narrated by the villain, and would then shift from the main character and back to the villain once every few chapters. Lights Out and The Dead Lifeguard are primary examples of this.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: Door of Death takes place in the 1850s and features Jake Fear's Freudian Excuse being that he was manipulated and exploited by his young wife Cassandra Ryan. The problem is, Cassandra was confirmed to be 17 and Jake was in his sixties when they got married. That the story's trying to make us sympathize with a man who married a girl old enough to be his granddaughter (even if the age gap between them wasn't considered much of an issue in the 1850s) can make it hard to feel sorry for Jake, regardless if Cassandra remorselessly screwed him over. It just makes it seem like a shameless teenage gold digger took advantage of a creepy old pedophile. And it really doesn't help when the story ends with the implication Jake will kill Amy Burke and claim her as his bride in the afterlife, with Amy being the same age as Cassandra was.
  • Demonic Possession: The entirety of the Fear Street Cheerleaders books. There's also Hide and Shriek which deals with the protagonist trying not to not fall under one by Pete, and the sequel which its protagonist being taken over by him.
  • Detention Episode: Trapped.
  • Disability Immunity:
    • Niki's deafness in Halloween Party comes in handy when everyone is being subjected to Justine's trap, specifically the noises of terrible car crashes being played over and over again on a stereo.
    • Paulette Fox from Into the Dark is blind, but her other senses are so sharp that she is able to tell that the criminal who has taken to terrorizing Shadyside is not her new friend Brad, even though he looks exactly like him.
  • Doing in the Scientist: While Shadyside had its share of Urban Legends from the beginning, Haunted was the first time the series featured overtly supernatural events with no attempt at a rational explanation. The Sleepwalker MAY have featured a cat that was able to travel through walls, but even that is left ambiguous.
  • Downer Ending: Used a couple times, most notably in The Best Friend, where Honey accidentally kills Bill and pins it on Becka. This did not go over well with the readers at the time, and eventually a contest was held to let them decide what happens to Honey in a sequel.
  • Dramatic Irony: Sydney kept telling Emma they should've brought the money they found to the police in The Rich Girl. Had Emma listened to Sydney, the police would've probably been able to inform the girls the money in the bag was fake.
    • This is used a fair bit in The Boy Next Door. The killer is revealed early on, so there are moments such as when one character comments that giving Melinda makeup will make Scott like her more, when we know this is far from the truth.
  • Dwindling Party: Trapped and Scream, Jennifer Scream!
  • Erotic Dream: Cory has one about Anna in The New Girl (limited to just kissing, as the books are meant to be somewhat kid-friendly). Later he has a Nightmare Sequence where she reveals she's really a ghost but it's just meant to be a fake out for the reader.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: How Keith is killed in Dead End.
  • "Everybody Dies" Ending: The Awakening Evil and Door of Death in the Sagas line, and possibly what happens in the last Seniors book.
  • Everybody Lives: A few books have all characters survive, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a happy ending.
  • Evil All Along: Catherine from The Secret Bedroom and Emma from The Rich Girl.
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: It's repeatedly noted that no birds live in the Fear Street Woods, and that they seemingly go out of their way to try and avoid them.
  • Evil Former Friend: Not evil per say, but definitely bitchy in the case of Geri Marcus in Lights Out. A former best friend of Holly Flynn, Geri believes Holly purposefully tried to destroy her life when Geri's parents figured out she was seeing a boy they didn't approve of, even though Holly had told Geri she wasn't good at lying. Two years later and Geri still wishes Holly was dead.
  • Evil Matriarch: Angelica Fear. Also counts as a Mama Bear. She might be a twisted bitch, just like her husband, but she'd do anything to protect her children. She'd even sacrifice kids to bring hers back from the dead.
  • Evil Old Folks: A lot more frequent in Sagas, but also in Don't Ever Get Sick At Granny's.
  • Evil Twin: Double Date uses this with Bree and Samantha each making Bobby think the other is dangerous while Bree also blames their unstable triplet Jennilyn. It turns out there is no Jennilyn and the sisters are just teaching Bobby a lesson with this act.
  • False Friend: The majority of the books frequently feature the main character learning one of their close friends actually hates their guts and has been plotting to destroy their life for some trivial reason, usually due to jealousy or to get their boyfriend, or both.
  • Feuding Families: The Fears and the Goodes, though the feud appears to have at some point petered out, as it almost never gets brought up in any of the stories that are set in the present day, with the latest chronological reference to it seemingly being the 1920s segments of You May Now Kill the Bride.
  • Fiery Redhead: Discussed in The Lost Girl, as the narrator says that his girlfriend Pepper fits the stereotype that redheads are "fiery and emotional and jealous".
  • Flower Motifs: Roses are featured heavily in Forbidden Secrets and Dance of Death, the 3rd and 8th Sagas book.
  • Foregone Conclusion: Mira Block is listed as one of Clarissa Turner's dislikes in the Shadyside High Yearbook, so when Mira appears as one of Clarissa's best friends in No Answer, it's clear Mira's going to do something terrible to justify being listed as Clarissa's only dislike. She killed Clarissa's sister Justine, Debra Lake, and tried to kill Clarissa and her foster brother.
  • Forgiveness: A theme in The Stepsister 2. In the first book, Nancy had turned out to be the killer as she blames Emily for the death of their father. A year later, Nancy seems to be cured but Emily has a hard time truly forgiving her for trying to kill her. Even as she claims to forgive Nancy, she is quick to blame her when things go wrong. It turns out Nancy was indeed planning revenge this whole time, only pretending to be cured. However, Emily manages to stop Nancy simply by hugging her and finally forgiving her for real.
  • Foreshadowing: In The Rich Girl, Emma and Sydney discover a duffel bag full of fifty dollar bills that have Benjamin Franklin's face on them, even though he's on the hundred dollar bill. That's because the money is all fake.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode:
    • The villains of the original series were always either regular people, ghosts, or psychics, with the only exception being Cat, where the antagonist was a Voluntary Shapeshifter.
    • The Bad Girl is the only non-Ghosts of Fear Street book to contain elements of science fiction, in this case a serum (made from a completely random mixture of chemistry lab supplies) that can bring back the dead Ă  la Re-Animator.
    • The books usually did not reveal who the killer was until the end, except for The Boy Next Door, which makes it clear from the get go, with the suspense coming from what he is going to do and when he will do it, rather than who he is.
    • Double Date is one of the few books to have no killer at all, as everything was a prank set-up by the Wade twins to get back at Bobby.
  • Frame-Up:
    • Forbidden Secrets. Victoria was the one behind the incidents against Savannah, which she claimed she did for the sake of convincing Savannah to leave Blackrose Manor and Tyler Fier. Of course, Victoria was right about Tyler the whole time.
    • Ski Weekend features a group of teenagers being set up to take the blame for killing someone who died before the story began.
  • "Freaky Friday" Flip: Switched, where depressed girl Nicole switches bodies with her friend, Lucy, by jumping off a magic wall while holding hands. Lucy then uses Nicole's body to go on a killing spree. Subverted when it turns out it was all in Nicole's head: Lucy died a while ago, and the ensuing mental breakdown caused her to hallucinate scenes of violence — and that she is Lucy.
    • Played Straight in "The Perfect Date": Brady's new girlfriend, Rosha, is actually his late girlfriend Sharon; after she was killed in a sledding accident, she returned from the grave by switching bodies with a beautiful, living girl (forcing the body's original owner into her own undead, horribly scarred body).
  • The Friend Nobody Likes: Downplayed with Matty Winger. He's a somewhat annoying and disloyal friend to have, but several characters tolerate him for his sense of humor (which is more of an Informed Attribute, as few if any fans find him funny).
  • Friendly Scheming: Borderline case. All the girls in Double Date put on one as a payback on the womanizer protagonist Bobby for his bad behavior. They make him believe one of the twin sisters he's dating now is a dangerous psychopath, then make him think there is a third sister who is actually the psycho.
  • Gainax Ending: In the third and final book of the 99 Fear Street saga, we learn the true cause of the evil and supernatural events in the house is some sentient rats that live in the basement and their human allies. What? Although it's more that the rats are physical manifestations of the house's evil, and the so-called human allies are ghosts who've become a part of the house.
  • Gaslighting:
    • The Rich Girl, where Sydney Shue is driven insane by her best friend and her boyfriend so the two can keep the duffel bag of money Sydney and Emma found.
    • Sweetheart, Evil Heart had Marla Newman, Trisha Conrad, and Phoebe Yamura make Ty Sullivan believe he was being stalked by a dead girl as revenge for cheating on them. However, it appears as though the girl they made up was in fact real...
  • Geographic Flexibility: Fear Island at first appears to be nothing but a tiny and uninhabited patch of pine trees in stories like The Overnight, but then it gets cabins and cottages in later books like The Fire Game and All-Night Party before suddenly developing a massive (and generations-old) Fear family summer home in Party Games.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: Occurs frequently. One notable example is the basis of Seniors; Josie Maxwell's attempt at cursing her math teacher doomed her entire class.
  • Good Scars, Evil Scars: In Dance of Death, Justin Fear feeds off of the blood of beautiful young woman to extend his youth and immortality. But if his victim's beauty is tarnished it won't work. His attempt at a first victim, Honoria, cut her face with a knife to stop him after he kills her fiance.
  • Gorn: The series schizophrenically zig-zags between anemic PG-13 violence and surprisingly gruesome Splatter Horror involving dismemberment, decapitations, disembowelment, maulings, melting flesh, people magically exploding into Ludicrous Gibs, etc.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: 99 Fear Street's malevolent sentience is implied to have come about because it was built on top of a mass grave of victims of Simon and Angelica Fear.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Subverted in Forbidden Secrets. Savannah is convinced Victoria just wants Tyler Fier for herself and is trying to scare Savannah away from him. The only thing that finally convinces Savannah is when she finds out Tyler really is evil soon after Victoria dies.
  • Guilt-Ridden Accomplice: The Sleepwalker. Mayra was hypnotized by her boyfriend to stop her from going to the police to report that he caused a hit-and-run accident and killed a man. Mayra's sleepwalking was her guilty subconscious bringing her back to the scene of the accident in an effort to make her remember.
  • Harassing Phone Call: A very common occurrence in the books. It's even lampshaded in The Surprise Party when the protagonist thinks the caller has seen too many bad horror movies.
  • Healthcare Motivation: In The Rich Girl, Emma's mother needs an operation but they are too poor to afford it. That's why wants the bag of money she and Syndey find it. In the end it turns out she went pretty far in making sure she gets it, and it's implied she cared more about buy random stuff instead of the operation.
  • Head Turned Backwards:
    • Happens to Gillian in Dead End, after falling down the stairs.
    • This is also Liz/Beth's preferred way to off their victims in The New Year's Party
  • The Heart: Whenever Danielle Cortez is discussed in Fear Street Seniors, it clearly sounds like she was the one cheerleader everybody got along with.
  • He Knows Too Much:
    • This is why Cindy dies in All Night Party. She kept hinting she knew her killer's dark secret (he started a fire and his policeman father covered it up) but it turns out she was just bullshitting him to mess with his head. Oops.
    • A similar event happens in Truth Or Dare when April states her secret is that she "knows about the girl on Sumner Island." While April knew her friend Ken cheated on his girlfriend Jenny, Jenny thought April meant she knew Jenny killed the girl Ken cheated on her with.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity:
    • Holly Flynn's attempts at figuring out who is causing mayhem at Camp Nightwing in Light's Out gets impeded because no one wants to believe the accidents are deliberate and because they mistakenly believe she's an uptight bitch thanks to Geri Marcus.
    • Nora Goode is put in an asylum after the Fear Mansion burns down because no one believes her account of what started the fire.
    • Sarah/Jane Fear is believed to be the one responsible for the deaths that occurred around her in The Awakening Evil, and was suspected of being the Evil Spirit in the Cheerleaders books. It's not until The Evil Lives! that Sarah Burns' identity as the Evil is revealed.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Will usually happen to a protagonist who dies by the end of the book, only to remain as either a zombie, ghost, or vampire.
  • Hidden Villain: The ghosts of Simon and Angelica Fear are the Big Bad Duumvirate of the Fear Street Nights Trilogy. Angelica's identity is only revealed at the end of Midnight Games, and the fact that Simon came back from the grave alongside her is only made clear partway into Darkest Dawn.
  • Hollywood Acid: Subverted and justified in The Sign Of Fear. Christina is unable to do anything when her cruel aunt is suddenly burned to death by juice from a pie which has been enchanted by the Fier Family's medallion.
  • Horrible Camping Trip: The premise of The Overnight and Camp Out
  • Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: There have been plenty of books centered around the holidays, including Christmas, Halloween, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day.
  • Hunting "Accident": How Carlo is killed off in Dead End.
  • Ice Queen: Invoked in-universe when Greta Bradley is described as being "made of ice".
  • Idiot Hero: Cory Brooks from The New Girl is a likely unintentional example. He completely misses that his best friend (who is a girl) has the hots for him big time and doesn't realize that's why she seems annoyed that he's so obsessed with Anna (the titular new girl). He also thinks for a while that the girl might be some kind of ghost, his only reasoning at first being basically that she seems old fashioned (though in his defense they do find out some additional anomalies such as a newspaper article from a long time ago stating she died), as well as thinking she might be a ghost even after she's kissed him and otherwise touched him. That said, he's still a nice enough guy (at times even coming to help when he thinks Anna is in danger) that it's possibly to root for him.
  • If I Can't Have You…: Justin Thompson killed Ty Sullivan to be with Trisha Conrad, thinking she'd be grateful for being saved from Ty's cheating. When Trisha rejects him, Justin attempts to kill her.
  • I Hate Past Me: Having gotten some considerable Character Development over the course of investigating his future death, the ghost of Paul in Haunted is distinctly unimpressed with the behavior of his living self.
  • I Just Want to Be You: Honey Perkins is desperate to be Becka Norwood in The Best Friend and The Best Friend 2.
  • I Let Gwen Stacy Die: High Tide and The Dead Lifeguard.
  • Incredibly Obvious Tail: In Wrong Number 2, Jade and Deena notice that they're being stalked by a man wearing a bright orange hunting cap. One reviewer notes that this is a pretty weird thing to wear if you're going for stealth. It turns out to be Deena's brother Chuck, who's trying to scare Jade into eloping.
  • In Medias Res: A few of them, such as One Evil Summer, start this way.
  • In Spite of a Nail: The main characters in Haunted do everything they can to prevent a past/future death and their actions only end up causing it to happen anyway.
  • I Reject Your Reality: A few of the books have focused on protagonists who're mentally unstable, via the book being told Through the Eyes of Madness.
  • Jerkass: There are a lot of these, the most prominent being Reva Dalby.
    • Geri Marcus in Lights Out is downright abusive to Holly Flynn, and most of the other counselors are behind her in terms of temperament because they bully, harass, and condescend to Holly on a regular basis.
    • Trisha Conrad in Fear Street Seniors is a downright bitch who frequently stabs people in the back and never gets punished for it. In fact, Seniors had more than a few of these. Jade Feldman, Dana Palmer, Marla Newman, Ty Sullivan, Mickey Meyers, Will Reynolds, Mira Block, and Josh Maxwell.
    • Josie in Broken Hearts, thanks to treating her newly brain damaged sister Rachel as a burden she dumps on their other sister Erica. Erica kills Josie thanks to her horrible selfish attitude.
    • Cindy in All Night Party spends most of her birthday party complaining about the gifts she receives, and as it turns out almost everybody wished she was dead for one reason or another.
    • Al in The Confession was a part of Julie's group of friends, but fell in with a bad crowd and Took a Level in Jerkass. He started harassing Julie and the others on a regular basis, frequently getting them in trouble for stuff he did.
  • Jerk Jock: Ty Sullivan of the Seniors book is a prominent example. Over the course of three books he cheats on five different girls, Jennifer Fear, Greta Bradley, Trisha Conrad, Phoebe Yamura, and Marla Newman. He breaks up with Jennifer and Greta is killed, and then Ty himself is killed at the Valentine's Day dance.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Jerk:
    • Reva Dalby promises to be nicer at the end of each book but acts like just as much of a bitch in the next one.
    • Carter initially thinks that Adam is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold in The Cheater. Adam is a poor delinquent, but also an arithmetic prodigy, and Carter assumes that the reason why he acts like a jackass is because he is secretly frustrated over his gift being unappreciated on the Wrong Side of the Tracks. It quickly becomes apparent that, no, Adam is not a troubled soul, he is just an asshole who does bad things simply because he enjoys doing them, especially to Carter.
  • Karma Houdini: Quite a few.
    • Carter Phillips of The Cheater springs to mind - she's essentially responsible for almost all of the bad things in the book that happen (Adam blackmailing her, Adam's death, and her best friend getting attacked by a bunch of creeps at a bar). Not to mention she gets Adam to take her math SAT so she can get into Princeton... aside from some emotional turmoil, she gets off scot-free. As does her boyfriend, the one who killed Adam.
  • Kids Are Cruel: Part of Honey Perkins' Freudian Excuse in The Best Friend 2.
  • Killed Off for Real: Kimmy Bass is killed off in Cheerleaders: The New Evil, after surviving the previous three books. Although she dies near the end instead of in the beginning. Notable due to Kimmy being one of the few, and possibly the ONLY character outside of Seniors, who both has recurring roles/appearances/mentions outside of books featuring her, and still gets murdered.
  • The Load: Laura Goode in Heart of the Hunter frequently feigns illness to get out of doing any work and usually gets her sister Amanda to do everything. That just made it easier for Amanda to slowly poison Laura since no one was able to tell she legitimately wasn't well.
  • Love Dodecahedron: In the Seniors books. Ty Sullivan dated Jennifer Fear, Greta Bradley, Phoebe Yamura, Marla Newman, and Trisha Conrad at the same time. Trisha was cheating on her boyfriend Gary Fresno, who cheated on Mary O'Connor with Trisha.
  • Love Makes You Evil: Any killer who uses their unrequited attraction to someone else.
    • Amanda Goode from Heart of the Hunter.
    • Ruth Manning from A New Fear, and both Simon and Angelica Fear in the first half of The Burning.
  • Love Triangle: It wouldn't be a Fear Street book if there wasn't one of these to spice things up.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: One Last Kiss. Eleanor Rawlins learns that Priscilla Fier is really her dead mother, whom her father told her was killed by vampires when she was just a baby. In reality, Priscilla was turned and subsequently became the head of her colony, and Eleanor's father had been moving her around to keep Priscilla from getting her hands on her.
  • The Main Characters Do Everything: Door of Death takes this to a rather ridiculous degree as, aside from the town blacksmith, the only people in Shadyside who qualify as "cheaters" on Jake Fear's list just happen to be the protagonist Amy Burke and her friends.
  • Mama Bear: Angelica Fear. Later, Nora Goode who, unlike Angelica, isn't an evil matriarch.
  • Mind Rape: Mary O'Connor is subjected to this when her social studies teacher has her do "favors" in exchange for not telling that she looked at the answers to an important test. It turns out he was running an experiment to see how far a student would go to avoid being reported.
  • Missing Mom: Robin Fear in Fear Park is being raised solely by his father Nicholas. It's all but confirmed Nicholas finally killed Ruth as revenge for Rosalyn's death in A New Fear.
  • More Criminals Than Targets: Shadyside is a medium-sized town in which clusters of murders are as natural an occurrence as the sun rising or the leaves changing, and while a few stories do take place in other locations they still involve people from Shadyside.
  • Nasty Party: Halloween Party, where, aside from some very nasty party crashers, the hostess is a 30 year old woman pretending she's a teenager so she can avenge the deaths of her mom and dad caused by the parents of her guests.
  • Negative Continuity:
    • The Fear Street Sagas books are somewhat difficult to decipher due to the fact that the only Fear Family Tree is linked directly to Simon and Angelica. It's hard to determine how some of the relatives are linked to the main Fear Family. Examples include Richard Fier, who lived in Wickham Village in the 1600s, and Jake Fear living in Shadyside well before Simon and Angelica moved there.
    • A more glaring case of this is the portrayals of Hannah and Julia Fear. In The Burning and House of Whispers they appear as normal young women, but Daughters of Silence bluntly implies that their parents versed them in witchcraft before they died.
    • When exactly did the Fear Family move from New Orleans to Shadyside?
    • The principal of Shadyside High is a bit inconsistent, though the most commonly used one was Hernandez, who has bit parts in several books and a somewhat prominent role in Give Me a K-I-L-L.
  • Never Found the Body: In The Prom Queen. It turns out the killer was the 'missing' body. Something similar happens in Sunburn, as well as Who Killed the Homecoming Queen.
  • Never Trust a Title: The Mind Reader is about a girl who has visions of the future, and is not actually a mind reader in any way.
  • Non-Malicious Monster: On the vampire end of this trope, there's Richard/ Trevor Fier in One Last Kiss.
  • Not Helping Your Case: In The Wrong Number, Chuck is accused of killing Mrs. Farberson because he went up to their house soon afterwards (having heard it on the phone). This happens soon after Chuck got in trouble for pulling a knife on a classmate and phoned in a bomb threat to a local bowling alley as a prank.
  • Offing the Offspring: Simon Fear accidentally killed his daughter Hannah thinking she was a servant named Lucy Goode.
  • Older Than They Look: Justine Cameron from Halloween Party. She's a thirty year old woman who enrolled herself in Shadyside High and passed herself off as a teenager in an elaborate revenge scheme.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted. While they appear in unrelated stories, there are several characters with the same first name. Even some protagonists fall victim to this. Justified that in reality it would be weird for a school to only have one person with a name like Holly enrolled over all those years.
  • Our Vampires Are Different:
    • There are conflicting portrayals of vampires ranging from the Goodnight Kiss duology, The Thirst, One Last Kiss, and Drop Dead Gorgeous.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different:
    • Contrast the werewolves in Bad Moonlight and Can You Keep a Secret? to the one in Heart of the Hunter where the protagonist turns into an actual wolf.
    • There's also some wererats (who may also be ghosts of some sort, its kinda vague) at the end of the Third 99 Fear Street book, who turn out to be the Big Bad Triumvirate controlling the other ghosts and evil spirits that haunt the house.
  • Papa Wolf: Daniel Fear comes back from the dead just to help his wife Nora escape from an insane asylum with their newborn son when it catches fire. At the same time, the asylum director was planning on selling Nora's baby to a wealthy couple against Nora's will, so Daniel made sure to kill him first.
  • Police Are Useless: If the police are ever involved, it's a given that they are most likely going to be of no help whatsoever, with The Prom Queen being just one example. In The Mind Reader, a cop is the villain.
  • Politically Correct History: Subverted. Many of the Sagas books mentioned black slavery, which you wouldn't expect from a modern American children's book series (unless it was teaching kids about slavery and had a heavy "Slavery was bad" moral to it).
  • Pom-Pom Girl:
    • The cast of the Cheerleaders books are made up of this trope with Corky Corcoran being the most prominent.
    • Phoebe Yamura is probably one of the least unpleasant cheerleaders you could find in a horror novel, although Dana Palmer subverts this despite a Sympathetic P.O.V. during her Day in the Limelight, and Jade Feldman especially goes hard in the other direction and is a self centered egotist who the rest of the squad besides Phoebe and eventually Samantha reluctantly enable due to needing her triple backflip to win an upcoming completion.
    • Danielle Cortez was implied to be one before she died as she's always referred to as being both enthusiastic and dedicated towards cheering.
  • The Power of Friendship: The protagonists of Camp Fear Ghouls stand up to the villains with a friendship chant they had come up with.
  • The Power of Love:
    • Played with rather cruelly in Heart of the Hunter. Jamie Fier is told that if his one true love ever sees him in his wolf form, he'll be stuck like that forever. Amanda Goode has always truly loved Jamie, no matter how much he hated her or how much he wanted to kill her family. Once Amanda saw his wolf form, he became stuck like that, and Amanda decided to keep Jamie her prisoner forever. Jamie actually wondered how Amanda could truly love him despite him loathing her.
    • Played straight in Night Games where Spencer is defeated by the characters hugging him, as it was his hatred that allowed him to come back from the dead.
  • Playing with Fire:
    • The Fire Game deals with a bunch of kids starting fires for fun.
    • The bulk of the Sagas books explores the fact that the Fear Family were cursed to meet their end by fire due to the original spelling of their name, "Fier."
  • Prank Punishment: The whole plot of Double Date. A number of school girls pull an elaborate prank on serial womanizer Bobby to teach him a lesson about his bad behavior. See also Friendly Scheming.
  • Product Placement:
    • Maybe. Almost every book has the characters enjoying Cokes. The beverage is so prevalent that's kind of shocking when the protagonists have Pepsi instead in Drop Dead Gorgeous.
    • Evian-brand water is brought up constantly in The Bad Girl.
  • Psychic Powers: As seen in the aptly named The Mind Reader, Runaway, and The Hand of Power.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: The police in The Mind Reader believe Ellie when she tells them about a body in the woods, though this is later subverted because one of the police officers is the killer, and it's her best friend's dad.
  • Redemption Equals Death: After April was turned into a vampire in Goodnight Kiss, it seems she became one of the villains in the sequel. But it turns out "April" is really her cousin Diana. Diana sought to avenge April, because apparently she was so disgusted by what she had become and what she did at the end of the first book she killed herself by stepping into sunlight and letting herself burn.
  • Remember the New Guy?: The Seniors books included a yearbook section at the beginning of each book with basic descriptions of the Shadyside Senior Class, and if any one of them had died their status would be updated with a "deceased" stamped over their picture and description. Halfway through the series in The Gift the Yearbook was updated with the rest of the Senior Class that were only mentioned in passing, even though one of them had already died and another was sent to a mental hospital.
  • Replacement Goldfish: Daughters of Silence appears to be about this trope, as Simon and Angelica Fear take a liking to two girls, Jenna and Hallie, who bear a resemblance to Julia and Hannah, their dead daughters. It turned out they're really planning to sacrifice the two in a ritual to bring Julia and Hannah back.
  • Rich Bitch:
    • Reva Dalby of Silent Night takes the cake for all-time bitchiness.
    • Most of Trisha Conrad's friends claim she isn't this when they're simply excusing the fact she's a remorseless homewrecker and backstabber who isn't particularly loyal to her friends.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: Stine says the idea for Cat was inspired by a headline he saw that said a football team in a small town killed a cat on purpose.
  • Sacrificial Lamb: Danielle Cortez in Fear Street Seniors. The first senior to actually die in the third book, which is also her first appearance. On the first day of school. She doesn't even get a description in the yearbook section until it's updated with more seniors in the sixth book, and by that time she has a "deceased" stamped over it, making it impossible to read any information about her.
  • Sapient House: The eponymous dwelling in the 99 Fear Street Trilogy.
  • The Scapegoat: Maggie in The Hidden Evil is framed by her sister for the death of their father.
  • Shout-Out: Double Date features two monkeys named Wayne and Garth.
  • Shrinking Violet: Deidre Palmer, who is fairly shy and kind of a klutz. It's part of her Polar Opposite Twins schtick with Dana.
  • Sinister Car: The Cataluna Chronicles subseries are about a sleek white car which is possessed by an ancient evil.
  • Sins of Our Fathers: A common tactic of Fear Street killers, with the biggest example possibly being Halloween Party wherein Justine Cameron gathered together the children of the teens responsible for the accident that killed her parents and seeks to make them suffer horrible deaths. She succeeds in at least killing the one guy whose dad drove one of the cars that caused the accident.
  • Ski-Resort Episode: Ski Weekend is a subversion, in that the plot doesn't begin until after the characters leave the ski resort and have to take shelter at a privately owned lodge during a bad snowstorm.
  • Slut-Shaming: Mira Block is not trusted by Debra Lake because she has lots of boyfriends and doesn't show any sign of stopping. Unfortunately, Debra's slut shaming turns out to be justified when Mira is revealed as a psychotic killer.
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Ty Sullivan's bloated ego let him think he could get away with dating three girls at the same time. They knew the whole time and staged an elaborate prank to get back at him.
  • The Sociopath: One third of Shadyside's teen population are budding serial killers who go on vengeful murder sprees over the silliest of reasons.
  • Spoiled Sweet: Melissa from Haunted. She comes from a rich family but is a very kind hearted person and there's even one point where her friends are making disparaging remarks about a poor person and she tells them to stop.
  • Spirit Advisor: Bobbi Cochran after she dies in The First Evil to her twin sister Corky.
  • Staircase Tumble: Happens to Gillian in Dead End. When Natalie and the others find her corpse, her head has been completely turned around.
  • Stalker with a Crush:
    • Secret Admirer and Sweetheart, Evil Heart. Though it turns out to be a Red Herring in Secret Admirer when the person who has been stalking the main character turns out to be her best friend and simply hid behind the facade of an obsessed fan to cast suspicion off herself.
    • Honey in The Best Friend is like this towards Becka
  • The Starscream: Jade Feldman more or less tried to stage a coup against Phoebe Yamura for control of the cheer squad with Dana Palmer backing her up.
  • Stealth Sequel: While not overtly advertised as such, the Fear Park Trilogy is a continuation of Nicholas's story from A New Fear.
  • Straw Misogynist: The killer in The Boy Next Door kills girls he thinks are acting inappropriately. That is, he kills girls who wear make-up, skimpy clothing, and act flirty. He's more attracted to the main character's sister because she dresses frumpy. It's hinted that this behavior was instilled in him by his mother.
  • Summer Campy: Lights Out is set at a summer camp called Camp Nightwing where bad accidents happen, including a murder.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In A New Fear, Nicholas Fear (a poor laborer seeking wealth to win over his rich girlfriend’s father) shows up in Shadyside to claim the vast swaths of land that his great-grandfather owned. He is promptly informed that, since the Fears have been gone from Shadyside for twenty years, the now-abandoned land is hopelessly burdened by back taxes.
  • Take That!: At one point in the Fear Street Nights trilogy, the characters see an Adam Sandler movie and Stine makes it clear he is not a fan.
  • Take Up My Sword: Several of the books have the main character dying, usually making someone continue the story.
  • The Smurfette Principle: Gender-Inverted. There are only a handful of male protagonists, all the rest are female.
  • Title Drop:
    • "Maybe he is the guy I'm supposed to meet this year, she thought. ''The boy next door".
    • "You have the wrong number, do you understand?"
  • Teen Horror: Nearly all of the books revolved around teenagers being terrorized, and they were written primarily for an audience of such.
  • Teens Are Monsters: Sometimes literally, due to the fact that most of the killers in the series are disgruntled teenagers motivated by jealousy, greed, boredom, or revenge.
  • Then Let Me Be Evil:
    • A common problem for the Fear Family is that many of its members will eventually throw themselves into their dark power once they've had enough of being unfairly victimized by outsiders. Some, such as Jonathan Fier, Leah Fear, and Margaret Fier, avoid this by choosing to remain good people.
    • Catherine Hatchett from The Cataluna Chronicles trilogy didn't become evil until after she'd been harassed and almost lynched after being mercilessly blamed for her village's string of bad luck.
  • Token Minority Couple:
    • Will Reynolds and Clarissa Turner are two of the only three notable Black characters in the Seniors books and are dating each other for most of the series.
    • Kenny Klein and Jade Feldman are the only two Seniors characters with Ambiguously Jewish surnames, and they are in a relatively stable relationship in all of the books where they appear together.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Emma in The Rich Girl. She conspires with her best friend's boyfriend to drive said friend insane so they can have the money they found all to themselves. After successfully doing that, Emma and the boyfriend are told by a store clerk that the money in the duffel bag was fake. Apparently they never bothered to really look at the money.
  • Tomato Surprise: Switched. By the end of the book, the reader learns that Nicole had never actually switched bodies with her friend Lucy, as Lucy had been dead before the story began. Nicole was unable to deal with Lucy's death, so she imagined the whole ordeal.
  • Town with a Dark Secret: Pretty much the whole point of the series, although this is a subversion due to the fact that everyone talks about how Fear Street's supposedly cursed. Whether or not anyone actually believes the stories is a different matter, but it's not something the town goes out of its way to deny.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Corky Corcoran reveals in The Third Evil that she likes pea soup. After an incident with the Evil Spirit, she loses her taste for it, but it becomes an in-joke among the cheerleaders.
  • Trauma Conga Line: The Fraiser family gets this in spades in the first part of the 99 Fear Street trilogy. Mr. Fraiser is rendered blind, James and his dog Cubby are trapped in the walls of the house, crying for help for his parents, Mrs. Fraiser is emotionally devastated by the loss of two children, and Cally is killed and warped into a malevolent spirit by the house. The only member left in marginally okay condition is Kody, and she has to deal with having lost her twin sister and baby brother.
  • Trilogy Creep: The Cheerleaders trilogy was followed by up by two extra Super Chillers books, than a prequel about Sarah Fear in the Sagas series.
  • Tunnel Network: There's a labyrinth of tunnels located beneath Shadyside, built for use as a massive bomb shelter at the height of Cold War paranoia sometime circa the 1950s. Despite being a ripe setting for horrors, their only prominent appearance was in Trapped.
  • Twin Switch: Double Date, in which it turns out that the twins had been pretending to be each other to mess with Bobby.
  • Tuckerization: According to Stine, Matt from Goodnight Kiss was named after his son.
  • Tyop on the Cover; The first few books have the series tagline, "Where your worst nightmares lives" at the top. But on the cover of The Sleepwalker, it says lives instead of "live".
  • Undead Child: Hester Goode is revealed to be a ghost as well after she kills Abigail Fier.
  • The Unfair Sex: Trisha Conrad goes out with someone else's boyfriend and then cheats on him. When Stacy Malcolm points this out, everyone thinks she's not being fair to Trisha. When Ty Sullivan cheats on five different girls, three of them pull an elaborate prank on him as payback.
  • The Unfavorite:
    • Julia Fear felt this way to her sister Hannah. So she tried to kill her.
    • Garrett Malbourne in The Hidden Evil was his mother's unfavorite, although this turned out to be a good thing since death turned her into a Yandere ghost. Although it's implied she was a bitch to him even before she died.
  • Ungrateful Bitch: Reva Dalby, due to Aesop Amnesia.
  • Unholy Matrimony: Frequent in the Fear Street Sagas books since the main characters are actually old enough to get married by the standards of their respective eras. The biggest example is Angelica and Simon Fear, whose relationship only made the two even more depraved.
  • Unreliable Narrator:
    • Nicole in Switched, when the ending reveals she's regularly hallucinated her dead best friend is still alive and imagined all the horrible deaths.
    • Hope Mathis is revealed to be this at the end of the first Fear Hall book because she has numerous split personalities and imagines they're separate people.
  • Updated Re Release: Goodnight Kiss and Goodnight Kiss 2 were re-released together in a compilation titled Temptation that included an exclusive bonus short story called "The Vampire Club".
  • Very Special Episode: What Holly Heard had a Drugs Are Bad subplot about steroid abuse, and it's about the only time that the series tackled anything harder than underage drinking or smoking.
  • Villain of Another Story: Lizzy, the villain of The Lost Girl, makes a cameo in the later (but chronologically earlier) novel The Dead Boyfriend.
  • Wax Museum Morgue: In Faces of Terror but with a twist. The wax figurines don't contain corpses, they absorb the souls of people they're based on until they die.
  • Weaker Twin Saves the Day: Deidre is the one who investigates the vampire attacks more in The Thirst and later kills the vampire or one of them, anyway.
  • Wedding Episode: You May Now Kill the Bride
  • What Happened to the Mouse?:
    • We never found out what happened to Corky Cochran after The New Evil.
    • The Seniors series has an Ambiguous Ending. It's clarified that Clark Dickson is a vampire and he turns Matty Winger, and seniors Phoebe Yamura and Kenny Klein are added to the body count, but the readers are left to wonder if Josie Maxwell was killed by the Doom Spell entity at the end, along with the rest of the surviving graduates.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Where is Shadyside, anyway? The most information we ever get is that it's somewhere on the East Coast. One of the Sagas books places it specifically in Massachusetts. The film trilogy places it in Ohio, likely because that's where R.L. Stine was born.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: The plot of The Rich Girl is an extended reference to Les Diaboliques, with The Reveal being that the protagonist's best friend and boyfriend conspired with each other to fake the boyfriend's death and then made it seem like he came back from the dead in order to drive her insane.
  • Who Murdered the Asshole: All-Night Party revolves around Cindy's murder during her birthday party on Fear Island. Throughout the entire book, Cindy managed to piss off each of her friends (with the possible exception of Gretchen). Even after she's dead we learn she was a bigger bitch than she first appeared to the degree you have to ask how any of her friends liked her enough to throw her a surprise party.
  • Who's Laughing Now?: Justin Thompson kills Ty Sullivan in Sweetheart, Evil Heart because he was sick of Ty's bullying and the way he was cheating on Trisha Conrad.
  • Wicked Stepmother: Averted with Timothy Fier's stepmother Gretchen.
  • With Friends Like These...:
    • Numerous times a killer will be revealed to be someone's close friend secretly wanting them dead or injured, such as Secret Admirer and The Rich Girl.
    • The majority of the Doomed Class suffered hard from this trope, as most of them were complete assholes who treated each other like shit. The worst offenders were Trisha Conrad and Mira Block, who tried to murder her best friend Clarissa Turner just to get Will Reynolds.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Jenny from Truth Or Dare and Nancy from The Stepsister.
  • Woman Scorned: Dominique Fear. Although, everyone thought Dominique was this when her former lover died under mysterious circumstances. But Dominique was innocent, and actually tried to warn him about his impending death. Being executed for a crime she didn't commit turned Dominique into the above trope after death.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Killer's Kiss. Delia purposefully sabotaged herself and murdered her unfaithful boyfriend Vincent in order to frame her rival Karina, which Karina made easier with her anger issues.
  • Wrongly Accused: Chuck in The Wrong Number.
  • Yandere: Lots of the Fear Street books have villains who were driven into murderous rage by obsessive love or being rejected by a crush.
  • Younger Than They Look: Miss Matheson in Faces of Terror looks like someone's grandmother, but she's really in her 20s.

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