A Midsummer Night's Scream Review

TITLE A Midsummer Night's Scream
AUTHOR R.L. Stine
PUBLICATION July 2nd 2013 by Feiwel & Friends
READ June 15 to 16, 2013
SOURCE From the publisher for review

The master of horror takes on the master of theater!

Get ready for laughter to turn into screams in R.L. Stine's re-imagining of Shakespeare's classic romantic comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Everyone knows that Mayhem Manor is cursed. After production on the horror film was stopped due to a series of mysterious deaths, it became a Hollywood legend--which makes it perfect for Claire and her family. If they can successfully finish the film, it should be enough to save their ailing movie studio.

Sure, the old haunted house is creepy, and strange stuff has been happening, but this is Claire's chance. Her chance to become the movie star she's always dreamed and her chance to finally convince her friend Jake that she is girlfriend material. Of course, the fact that Jake thinks he's in love with her best friend, Delia, who is crushing hard on Jake's friend Shawn, who insists on following Claire around, could be a problem, but Claire is sure she can figure it out. After all, the course of true love never did run smooth.

But once shooting starts, "creepy and strange" morph into "bloody and deadly," as the lines between film and reality begin to blur...

Whenever I write a review I try to think of one word that I want to use to describe the book and then I extrapolate from there. Rubbish is the only word that comes to mind when I think about A Midsummer Night’s Scream. This book was terrible. I usually try to be just and fair in my reviews but really there is just nothing good that I have to say about this novel.

The novel kicks off with a group of teenagers getting stranded in the woods when their car breaks down. We watch them set off into the woods in search of help and see them barge into a mansion that is basically a death trap. This stuff was so unbelievable, I mean one girl sits at the dining room table and ends up getting her hand chopped off when a sword fall from the roof, then everyone runs into the kitchen and when they notice the phone doesn’t work they start searching for food. No joke. More of these teens die and then it is revealed that those first few chapters weren’t the real story, they were a movie that the characters in the book were watching. A movie that was made in the 60’s where the teens actually ended up dying so production was stopped. Well guess what, the characters who were watching the movie are rich Beverly Hills kids who are now starring in the remake!

The incredibly fake tone that was set in the beginning is maintained throughout the novel. Everyone in this book does the most stupid things. I mean they remake this movie and, as I’m sure you can guess, people start really dying just as they had in the original. But since the studio is about to go broke they see this movie as their golden ticket and force production through once all the police investigations are over. Now, the people running this production company are the parents of teens who are working on the movie and they keep sending them off to work on this set where people are dying in freak accidents every time they try to shoot a scene. Very believable Mr. Stine.

We are also introduced to a little, hairy, leprechaun looking man very early on in the story. Our MC, Claire, finds him in a trailer and then she keeps stealing his potions. She’s trying to get a love potion to use on a guy that she likes who actually likes her best friend but she keeps stealing the wrong potion. First she steals a hate one and then a Benjamin Button type one but persist she does. I mean wouldn’t you stop when the first potion you stole made the guy you want to love you actually try to punch you? I can’t stress enough how ridiculously stupid every character in this novel was. Her best friend takes the lead in the movie after the original lead dies in a tragic accident. The guys that these girls like must have no brain because they can’t read that these girls like them when the girls are basically hitting them in the face with love sticks. The parent’s are so money hungry that they send their kids off to face probable death multiple times.

I just can’t with this book. The way it was written annoyed the heck out of me. Claire asks the readers questions along the way like she is having a conversation with you instead of you being a reader of a novel. The wrap up of it all is so incredibly far fetched that I found myself laughing when I should have been nervous for the characters. The one thing that I can say that is more on the positive side for this novel is that it did play out in my head like a Goosebumps episode. I think Stine would be better off sticking to MG literature where readers are much more willing to suspend belief to get a fun story. I can’t recommend this novel at all.