As I am incapable of entering a used bookstore without purchasing something, I recently picked up a second-hand copy of RL Stine’s 2012 novel Red Rain. Stine is better known for the Goosebumps series of horror stories for children, but this was one of his two attempts at writing horror for an adult audience. I read a lot of those books when I was the right age for them, so I have a nostalgic fondness for the series.

Another thing I have a nostalgic fondness for Troy Steele’s Blogger Beware¹

Front Tagline: Suffer the little children…

Back Tagline: What do you do when evil enters your home?

Official Book Description:

Lea is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trapped on an island during a terrible hurricane, she barely escapes alive.

Out of the carnage, two orphan boys appear – innocent, angelic and thrilled to be adopted by their new mother.

But these are no ordinary children. They bring the gift of death – and they want to share it with the whole town.

Brief Synopsis:

The story begins with a mysterious prologue in which the female protagonist, Lea, wanders across a beach after a hurricane. While she’s appreciating the debris and masses of dead starfish, blood begins to rain from the sky, per the book’s title. The blood rain parts and two young twin boys appear before her.

The first chapter skips back in time to show us Lea’s blog post about her arrival on the island of Le Chat Noire, somewhere off the coast of North Carolina. The island is known for being cursed, basically, and especially for being a place where “the living dead walk among the living.” She lands on the island and has a creepy encounter with an old lady in a tea shop who tells her about the aftermath of a hurricane in 1935, which she remembers from her childhood. Keeping in mind that this book was published in 2012, I still can’t decided whether that means she’d supposed to be suspiciously long-lived or just regularly long-lived. Our intrepid travel blogger does not pass judgement either way.

In order for the plot to happen, Lea has of course knowingly travelled to the island during hurricane season.

“Yes. My husband warned me not to come here in hurricane season,” I said, inhaling the bitter steam from the cup.

Mark is so sweet. He always wants me to stay home. But exploring my backyard would make for a dull travel blog, don’t you agree?

The next few chapters detail Lea’s stay on the island, alternating between blog posts and regular third-person prose for no clear reason. She watches a ritual in which a group of men kill themselves by drinking poison and are then brought back to life by a priest chanting in French, and then, oops, it’s time to hide from the hurricane.

Here the perspective shifts to Lea’s husband Mark, who is on a book tour near his home in New York. Before you can blame RL Stine for self-inserting too hard, it’s revealed that Mark is a child psychologist and his book, Kids Will Be Kids, is a non-fiction work about the benefits of light-touch parenting and being friends with your kids (Great Parenting Alert). I’m still not sure whether that’s a fair description of Mark’s work, because it’s mostly described by its detractors and Mark doesn’t do a great job of defending it.

In case the graphic deaths by poison weren’t enough to remind us that this is a book for grown-ups, Mark’s narration comments extensively on the attractiveness of his 23-year-old personal assistant, Autumn.

Meanwhile, Lea hides from the hurricane in the house of the online friends she made researching the island. The roof falls in, landing on Lea, and she wakes up later with a bump on her head. After the hurricane passes, we’re treated to a few chapters of Lea walking through the destroyed island and noting the many gruesome deaths, including those of the owners of the hotel she had checked into.

Finally, in chapter 15, we get an abbreviated version of the prologue, in which Lea meets the two mysterious twins who will drive the story’s actual main plot. They are described as angelic, blond twelve-year old boys with blue eyes who speak in a weird British/Irish accent with a lot of “boyo"s and “bruvver"s (perhaps inspired by Tangier Island). They explain that their home was destroyed and their family killed by the hurricane.

Lea immediately decides to adopt them and bring them home. She phones Mark and pushes past his disapproval. The chapter then switches perspective²

Perhaps because he’s writing an adult-oriented horror novel, Stine attempts to emulate Stephen King by having a lot of different viewpoint characters that make the novel far longer than it needs to be. The most egregious example is Andy Pavano, whose initial introduction is an elaborate setup for a fake-out chapter cliffhanger. I would have admired the audacity if he’d never reappeared, but we’re then treated to occasional chapters about his love life until he finally comes into legitimate contact with the main characters again.

Meanwhile, the twins have been officially adopted by Mark and Lea in a matter of days and are introduced to their new home and family: Mark and Lea’s 14 year old daughter Elena and 12 year old son Ira, and Mark’s sister Roz and her one year old son Axl. Mark has set up a room for the twins in the attic, but in another Great Parenting Alert, he and Lea are immediately persuaded by the twins to allow them to displace Roz and Axl in the guest house out back.

The twins’ antics escalate from there. They begin by stealing jewellery and wallets and soon enough they’re murdering people. Because of their uncanny ability to listen in on sensitive conversations (“how long have you been standing there?”) they quickly discover Mark’s antipathy to them and decide he needs to be framed for the murder of a man who comes over to tell him that the grant for his next book has been denied. A gory description of the man’s burned head and torn out windpipe follows. At this point, our policeman, Andy Pavano, actually becomes relevant to the plot, as he is sent to investigate the murder.

We’re led to believe that the twins used a blowtorch to commit the murder, but later find out that Samuel can shoot fiery lasers from his eyes. At low strength, the beams can be used by Daniel to hypnotise people, and at high strength they can be used to burn stuff.

The story’s viewpoint rotates between Mark, Lea, Pavano, Elena, Ira and Samuel. The scenes from the children’s perspectives remind us what Stine is really comfortable with writing. If he’d pared this book down to just those parts and sanitised the gore a bit, it might have made a decent Goosebumps story.

Most of the rest of the book is gradual escalation. Daniel and Samuel hypnotise people and commit more murders to frame Mark for, Pavano investigates the murder, Lea gets really interested in death rituals, and Mark is seduced by and has sex with his young PA because this a mature book for adults. The adjective “creamy” is used eight times.

Eventually, Lea receives some email from her friend on the island containing black-and-white photos of Daniel and Samuel taken in 1935, letting her in on what the reader has known for hundreds of pages: the twins are evil living dead who hypnotised her into adopting them.

This realisation comes too late to prevent the twins from executing their ultimate evil plan: hypnotise the neighbourhood’s children and take over their middle school. The novel’s climax has the school surrounded by police and worried parents and a whole lot of people getting their faces melted by Samuel’s eye beams. Perhaps the only reason this plot wasn’t used for Goosebumps is its uncomfortable evocation of school shootings.

Pavano gets a heroic moment of trying and failing to stop the kids, surviving with some severe burns. Mark, reappearing after being on the run from the police for the murders he was framed for, gets a more successful heroic moment, in which he bashes their heads together, knocking them out and successfully unhypnotising their victims. However, they manage to recover and slink off before they can be arrested.

But the Twist is:

In addition to the old photos of the twins, Lea received a more recent photo of herself being revived by the chanting island priest. She died when the roof fell in on her during the hurricane. She tells this to a disbelieving Mark during a meeting at the pier. They are then joined by the twins, who try to kill Mark.

After a chase and lot of new fires, Mark is cornered by the boys and Samuel’s laser eyes. Lea comes up behind them and hugs them, turning them to face her. In an admittedly striking final image, Samuel’s eye beams light her on fire, and the fire consumes all three of them.

But the Second Twist is:

Samuel taught baby Axl how to shoot fire from his eyes. Never mind that this completely contradicts the story’s established mythology. What kind of Goosebumps book would this be without a nonsensical last-page twist?

The Platonic Girl-Boy Relationship:

As this is a book for adults, Stine does away with this trope in favour of having Mark Sutter seduced by Autumn, his 23-year-old blonde PA, whose intestines disappear three quarters of the way through the novel.

Questionable Parenting:

Lea abducts two children from an island.

Memorable Cliffhanger Chapter Ending:

This is a sophisticated book for adults, so we have a three-chapter version:

Chapter 10: Lea is attacked by a crazy man on the island.

Chapter 11: Policeman Andy Pavano is introduced in a chapter that concludes with him knocking on Mark’s door and telling him that his wife has been killed.

Chapter 12: Whoops, Pavano had the wrong house, the message is for someone else!

The twist at the end of the book, that Lea actually was killed in the hurricane, makes this foreshadowing, I guess.

Great Prose Alert:

Somewhere in the back, a baby cried. Mark suddenly realized there were several babies on laps, swaddled like tiny mummies.

RL Stine Shows He is Down With Technology:

Lea’s blog can be found at Travel_Adventures.com, despite underscores not being allowed in domain names.³

Conclusions

Going in, I expected that the book would read like an elongated Goosebumps entry with adult elements like sex and violence. That turned out to be an entirely accurate prediction. Red Rain is not a good novel – I don’t think I would have finished it if I hadn’t read it on a flight. Every Goosebumps tic is on full display, from the extremely short chapters with extremely contrived cliff-hanger endings to the ridiculous similes to the cartoonish approach to history, mythology and, well, reality. Like many of the weaker Goosebumps books, it’s not scary so much as ridiculous. Unlike those books, it does not have the mercy of also being short.