As a warning, there'll be spoilers below, but I'll warn you again when we come to them.
The Babysitter was the first Point Horror novel I ever read - and that's longer ago now than my birth was then. First year in comprehensive school, I was given the Babysitter trilogy for my birthday. I'd obsessively read every single Goosebumps novels, and Point Horror were seen as a major leap forward by us kids, like going from a PG film to a 15.
Reading it now, this particular novel seems quite tame, even by Point Horror standards. There's a madman, but he doesn't actually kill anyone - he just attacks babysitters, off-screen. Even so, I can see how this book - clearly appropriate for an intelligent 12-year-old - fooled me into thinking I was reading well beyond my years.
I can ring the changes with the obviously-far-more-childish Goosebumps. It's written in third person, it features a fifteen-year-old protagonist, she has a job (albeit babysitting), she's dating, and cruicially, there's no supernatural element to the story.
That last one was the killer for me. The books I'd been reading previously had lost many perceived markers for kids' fiction along the way - no more illustrations, slightly stronger language, and (this may just be me) no longer in Welsh. But books had still been full of magic and science-fiction for me.
Looking back, it's a standard slasher with all the slashing removed. I was pleasantly scared by it, but until the final chapters, all the scares come from a few creepy phone calls and an anonymous note. I remember being very impressed by the reveal of whodunnit, since I hadn't guessed at all. Reading it now, it seems completely transparent, but I don't suppose it's fair to judge the success of a mystery novel when I've known the answers since childhood.
It's an incredibly American book. Maybe that's obvious for a novel in what's essentially Hallowe'en: The Novels, but it interests me now, because most of these books didn't keep me up at night. They were thrilling rather than terrifying (though there are exceptions, which I'll hopefully come to later on). But this world was so different from mine. I was already familiar with American culture from the Goosebumps novels, and I wonder whether I started to see horror as a genre specific to the US. I can't remember ever reading a British horror novel, nor even watching British horror.
Over the years (was it years?) that I read these books, I became very familiar with its depiction of American culture, and a lot of those staples are in here. Dating. The shy main character who thinks she's ugly, unpopular and unloved ... has been asked out on a date, but isn't sure if the guy is serious enough for a real relationship. This is not my experience of feeling like an outcast. Being asked out was enough to make me feel like the king of the world for months.
Hanging out. They spend time at pizza places - certainly more time than my mates and I would've been allowed to stay in Pizza Hut after our meals. It fascinates me how little of this novel is set in the homes of these characters. Is that to make them feel older? Or do American kids genuinely spend most of their time on neutral ground?
And babysitting itself. Having a job was rare in comprehensive school, even by sixth form. Closest I came was pretending to have a paper round because I thought it made me seem outdoorsy. In the US, it seems babysitting's a common enough job that it's ideal for the everyman main character. The emphasis is on the horror, but the romance is significant - the book, and probably the entire range, belong on the same family tree as Twilight.
Spoilers start in the next paragraph.
There are three men in this novel - the three who could be the madman. There's Chuck, the new kid in school who eventually starts dating main character Jenny. There's Willers, the creepy guy next door - even though next door, as we learn, is unoccupied. And there's Mr Hagen, the father who's hired Jenny to look after his kid, perpetually nervous because he had a daughter who died.
Did you guess who did it? It was Mr Hagen. Willers was an undercover policeman, and Chuck was genuinely interested in her (and they're a happy couple at the end). So we have three roles - the creepy guy you could easily imagine had done it, the guy who's very close to the main character, and the perfectly innocent-looking character. It's easy to overlook Mr Hagen as a suspect, since he appears to be the plot device. That said, it's easy for a more experienced reader to spot him a mile away, since Jenny regularly goes through periods of being convinced it's either Willers or Chuck.
I'm interested in seeing how regularly this pattern of three suspects crops up in the series. I'm also interested in seeing how interchangeable the protagonists are. Ultimately, I'd like to uncover why this series is no longer around. What took its place? Twilight? Computer games? The internet?
Meanwhile, it's been fun to revisit this book, and in the name of full disclosure, I must admit that one night, alone in a strange house last week, reading this at one in the morning ... I went to bed scared.
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