by R. L. Stine
Will I be safe in the water?
He gripped the low, white metal railing at the edge of the pier. His right arm throbbed. He could barely hold on, but he started to lower his body toward the rolling water. Glancing back, he saw Daniel’s intense stare and the pulsing red eyes of his twin as they made their steady way toward him.
A powerful heat blast bounced off the metal railing, shook the rail, and made a craack like a lightning bolt. Another shot sent an explosion of heat over the top of Mark’s head.
He glimpsed the dark water below. He took a deep breath and prepared to loosen his hold on the rail.
And then stopped.
He gripped the rail tight and stared across the pier as Lea caught up to the boys. They had all their attention on Mark. Daniel was pushing his brother forward, moving them in for the final burn. They didn’t see Lea come up behind them.
Ignoring his pain, Mark hung on the rail and watched Lea move up behind the boys. She stretched out her arms as if to tackle them both. Instead, she wrapped her arms around them, pulled them into a tight hug from behind.
They struggled to free themselves. The three of them moved in an awkward dance, held together in Lea’s tight embrace.
As she wrestled with them, she called to him. “Good-bye, Mark. Good-bye, darling. It’s the only way. I have to take them back.”
“Lea, no!”
Gripping the rail, he watched helplessly as Lea spread her hand over Samuel’s blond hair—and turned his face to her. Turned his burning eyes on her.
Took the beam of fire. Turned it on herself.
Mark couldn’t stop the howl of horror that burst from his throat. Working his legs against the pier wall, he struggled to pull himself up. To get to her. To reach her in time.
But no.
Lea burst into flames that consumed her instantly, rising like candlefire, straight, without a flicker. She didn’t move or struggle or make a sound. The boys squirmed and thrashed. But even as she burned, Lea held them close, pressed them to her. And the fire swallowed them, too.
Unable to breathe or cry out, Mark watched all three of them in the fire, statues in a dark embrace, then ash, crumbling ash, a sinking pile of ash inside the single tall flame.
Then gone.
Gone, and the fire vanished with them, leaving the asphalt unmarked.
Mark felt hands grip his arms. Saw faces above him. People tugging him up from the pier side. He heard screams and cries. Sirens approaching. Smoke swept over him from the still-flaming Dock House. People came running onto the pier, faces tight with alarm. Seagulls screamed in the sky.
He let it all fade to the back of his mind. He pictured Lea. Her smile. Her bright, dark eyes.
Gone. Lea was gone.
As he stared, the fire that had consumed her went out with an almost-silent husssssh.
75
Mark found Roz in the flower bed at the side of the guesthouse. She was on the grass, digging with a trowel in a square of black dirt. Axl, in red shorts and a sleeveless red T-shirt, sat nearby in a clump of freshly planted petunias, stabbing at the ground with a plastic shovel in imitation of his mother.
Roz looked up and brushed a bee away from her shoulder. “Who was that on the phone?”
Mark hunkered down beside her. He liked the smell of the fresh dirt. Like rich coffee. “Sergeant Pavano. You remember. The cop.”
Roz nodded. “Of course I remember him. What did he want? To arrest you for some other murder you didn’t do?”
Mark snickered. “Don’t be bitter. He had no choice really.”
“Of course he did. And I’ll be as bitter as I want. He was a total idiot.”
“Not total,” Mark said. “Don’t forget. He was brave. He tried to rescue Ira and Elena and the other kids. He went in before anyone.”
She shoved the trowel into the dirt. “So what did the big hero want?”
“Actually, I think he called to apologize for the way the police treated me. But he never got around to it. He just asked how everyone is doing. You know. With Lea gone.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said Ira and Elena hadn’t really accepted it yet. But they were doing the best they could. What else could I say?”
Roz sighed in reply.
Mark twisted his face in a frown. “Pavano says he’s going back to New York City. He said the city is a lot safer than out here.”
Roz concentrated on the trowel. “Maybe he’s right.”
“Look this. Look this.” Axl called to them, holding up his yellow shovel.
They turned to see what the little guy was staring down at. Mark saw two fat brown insects in the scoop of the shovel. “Those are called beetles,” he said.
Axl held the shovel close to his face. His dark eyes studied the two bugs. “Look what Sammy teached me. Sammy teached me this.”
Roz’s mouth dropped open. “What? What about Sammy?”
“Sammy teached Monkey Boy.”
Mark felt his heart skip a beat as Axl’s eyes flared. In a few seconds, they were fiery red. Axl lowered his glowing gaze to the shovel, and all three of them watched as the beetles sizzled and burned.
Acknowledgments
First, I need to thank Stacy Creamer, whose excitement and enthusiasm for this novel gave me the courage to venture through the red rain and complete what was a very ambitious project for me. I’m so appreciative of her support.
Andrew Gulli of the Strand Magazine must be thanked for coercing me from my day job of scaring children into the world of scaring adults.
My friend and longtime (and long-suffering) Goosebumps editor, Susan Lurie, was an enormous help, as was my wife, Jane Stine, who is painfully insightful and always right about my books.
Finally, I need to mention three old horror movies: Village of the Damned, Children of the Damned, and Island of the Damned. While this book is not a reimagining of those films, the horrifying children in all three of them gave me the inspiration that disgustingly evil children might be a fitting subject for me.
Thanks, all.
Red Rain
R.L. Stine
Reading Group Guide:
Introduction
Lea Sutter, a travel writer, follows her adventurous spirit to Le Chat Noir, a mid-Atlantic island with a propensity for hurricanes—and the living dead. After barely surviving a hurricane there herself, Lea finds two young orphaned boys, Daniel and Samuel, and adopts them on the spot.
When Lea arrives home in Sag Harbor with two new sons in tow, Lea’s husband Mark their children, Ira and Elena, are less than thrilled. The young boys don’t quite fit in, but Lea stubbornly refuses her family’s pleas to reconsider the adoption. Around the same time, small nuisances start popping up—a stolen necklace here, an insistent room swap there—that cast suspicion on the angelic young boys. But when a man is brutally murdered in the Sutter’s driveway, suspicion falls on Mark. As the Sutters’ lives begin to unravel under the weight of the murder investigation, Sag Harbor is hit with a string of grisly homicides and missing children, including Ira and Elena. After a gruesome takeover at the local school, Daniel and Samuel’s true motives are finally revealed.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. What writing techniques did you find the most successful at maintaining tension and building suspense? Was there a particular scene that had you on the edge-of-your-seat?
2. How did the prologue affect your experience of reading the rest of the book? Were you surprised at how quickly the book’s narrative caught back up with the scene set in the prologue?
3. Did you like the author’s choice to make some chapters blog posts? How did the blog post style enhance the narrative in ways that a more straightforward chapter couldn’t have done?
4. Martha explains to Lea that Le Chat Noir is “the only place on earth where the living share their space with the living dead.” Expand this concept of a line between life and death. Where else did you see tension between life—vitality, exuberance—an
d death—darkness, destruction—in Red Rain? What other dualities did you see at play in the book? Where, and between whom?
5. Which character was the strongest anchor of sanity in the book? Roz? Mark? Pavano? Whose viewpoint did you trust the most?
6. Which of the murders spooked you the most? Consider how fear works—was it creepier when you “witnessed” the murder or when you slowly discovered details after the fact? Why?
7. If you were Pavano or Pinto, who would you suspect for the murders of Dr. Hulenberger and Autumn? The other murders? The missing kids? Do you think the police were out of line in suspecting Mark for the crimes? Why or why not?
8. Did you suspect the Revenir was at play in the twins’—and Lea’s—behavior throughout the book? If yes, what gave it away? What parts of the book seemed different to you in hindsight, once you learned what had happened on Le Chat Noir?
9. Daniel asks Samuel, as they survey all their kids in the school, “Does it make you feel alive, Sammy? Does it now?” What do you think motivated the brothers to kill? Did they really just want to feel alive?
10. Stine saved two plot twists—one about Lea, one about Axl—for the very end of the book. Did you see either one coming? How did the twists change your impression of the rest of the book? How would you imagine a sequel to Red Rain playing out?
11. Consider the prevalence of explicit, realistic violence and terror in the media today. How did the experience of reading a thriller differ from the experience of watching one? Did you feel desensitized to the violence in Red Rain?
12. Some horror novels scare audiences through psychological manipulation within realistic scenarios, while others rely on otherworldly but abjectly horrifying scenarios. Which is scarier to you? Where did this book fall on the spectrum between these two methods?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. R.L. Stine is well-known for his children’s books, particularly his Goosebumps series. As a group, pick a Goosebumps novel that you’ll read before meeting, or read a chapter out loud during book group. What similarities did you find across the genres in Stine’s writing style and approach to horror? Which aspects distinguished the adult book from the children’s one? Pretend your book group was tasked with turning Red Rain into a children’s book. How would you edit the book for age-appropriateness? Keep in mind Stine’s own note that, “I have to give the kids shivers — but not nightmares.”
2. Write your own short horror story before book club. In order to keep the Stine spirit alive, your story must include at least three of the following components: foreshadowing, a plot twist, a cliffhanger, or a teaser prologue. Read a few of each other’s stories aloud and try to identify the components used in each story. How does writing your own thriller change your opinion of Red Rain and of the genre in general?
3. Keep the undead spirit alive in your book club by taking a ghost tour of nearby haunted attractions. Use the following websites as guides: www.ghosttourdirectory.com/find-a-ghost-tour or www.angelsghosts.com/haunted_ghost_tours.html.
4. It may not be Halloween season, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a spooky book club! Get into the thriller spirit with the following ideas: turn out all your lights and have book club entirely by candlelight; decorate your book club meeting space with spider webs, mirrors, and any other eerie decorations; or play an ominous soundtrack quietly in the background (think thunderstorms, wind, howling cats, or organ music).
A Conversation with R.L. Stine
You wrote jokes and joke books as a young writer. Do you plan on going back to comedy at some point? Do you see any similarities between writing comedy and horror?
I think there’s a close connection between horror and comedy. When you go to a horror movie, you always hear people laughing and screaming at the same time. I try to include a lot of humor in my horror writing, especially for young people. I use the comedy to lighten the mood any time I feel a scene is getting too intense for kids. To me, the structure of writing joke books and horror novels is similar. I always think of the big, climactic horror scene as the punch line. Recently, I wrote a kids’ series that was pure comedy—not scary at all. It’s called Rotten School.
Though you’re most widely known as a children’s author, Red Rain isn’t your first adult novel. What brings you back to adult fiction, even with such success in the children’s book world?
Many of my devoted Goosebumps and Fear Street readers of the 90’s are now in their twenties and early thirties. I keep in touch with that audience on Twitter, and I feel very grateful to them. Many of them requested that I write something new for them. These readers inspired me, and I actually wrote this book because of their many requests.
How is writing for adults different than writing for kids—stylistically, technically, or content-wise? Do you prefer one over the other?
When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know the creepy events in the book are fantasy. The readers have to know that the scary stories couldn’t happen. They are just make-believe. I don’t want them to believe the story and become frightened. Writing for adults is the complete opposite. The horror will not work unless every detail is real, unless the story and characters are completely believable.
You once explained that you don’t feel competition from gruesome horror movies because your target audience is too young for R-rated films. Do you feel differently with Red Rain, knowing that your older readers are indeed exposed to graphic, violent movies?
I’ve always made a distinction between the slasher/torture movies and horror stories. I think a horror story needs some wit and cleverness, twists and surprises. It’s a different process to plot a thriller with twists and turns—not the same as a story in which someone is held prisoner and is slowly tortured. Red Rain has some pretty graphic, nasty scenes. But I didn’t write them because I felt pressure from any other horror source. I just wanted to tell a nasty story.
Do you believe in karma, ghosts, or anything else supernatural? How does the supernatural influence your writing?
My friend from New Orleans said she had the ghost of a young boy living in her house, and she saw him in the kitchen several times. I’ve never had this kind of experience. I’ve written dozens of ghost stories and I’ve never seen one. But I keep looking.
Red Rain is set primarily in Sag Harbor, where you have a home. What locations in the book, if any, are based on actual spots in your town? Would you ever set a grisly murder in someone’s real-life home?
The Sag Harbor locations and streets and the pier are all real. I tried to be as accurate as I could to give authenticity to the story. The restaurants and shops are all real, too. I did make one change for plot’s sake: I put a middle school next to Sag Harbor Elementary. It doesn’t exist there but I needed it close.
Do you envision any single character in Red Rain as a truly reliable narrator? Who can readers trust to most clearly point out danger ahead?
None of the characters are reliable narrators. Lea is reliable in many regards, but she has a very big secret she is keeping. Mark is reliable and honest with the reader, but it takes him a very long time to begin to figure out what’s happening in his household. And Pavano is basically clueless.
You once said, “I try to shock readers and tease them and lead them off in the wrong direction.” Did you know the twists in Red Rain would happen when you started writing? If not, when in the writing process do you formulate them?
I started with a seven-page outline of the premise. I knew there would be evil twins and naïve, unsuspecting parents. I knew there’d be hideous murders. But the story didn’t really develop until I began writing. This is very unusual for me. For all my kids’ books I do a very detailed chapter-by-chapter outline before I begin to write. I usually think up the ending first. But not in this case. With this book I planned only three or four chapters at a time. I kept thinking of new wrinkles and new twists as I wrote. I rewrote the first 60 pages twice, and I kept moving chapters around—something I’ve never done in my life.
I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I thought of Lea’s big surprise. It meant I had my ending—and I knew how to get there.
Which one person, alive or dead, would you be most excited to see reading Red Rain?
One person reading it won’t get me excited. A few million people reading it would be very exciting to me! But, seriously…I would love to see one of my now-grownup readers reading this and rediscovering the “I-want-to-keep-turning-the-pages” feeling that he or she had at age.
If you had to live through one book that you’ve written, adult or children’s, which would you pick, and why?
Ha ha. My impulse is to say that I’ve lived through them all! But…I’ve written several time-travel novels, (Beach House and Haunted come to mind), and I guess they are the ones I’d like to live in. I’ve always been fascinated by time travel. I have a real yearning to go back, say, 50 or 60 years, just to smell the air and see what people look like and listen to what they talk about. I wouldn’t like to live in most of my books. I don’t like true life horror. But I’d love to travel back a few decades just for the fun of it.
© RLSTINE.COM
R.L. STINE, author of the multimillion-selling Goosebumps and Fear Street series, lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, an editor and publisher, and their dog, Minnie. His son, Matt, is a sound designer and music producer.
Visit him at www.rlstine.com.
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