As an adult, Stine processes that trauma by inflicting it on his readers, and the cycle of abuse continues. Your heart aches for this poor lad, heart rate roller coasting up then down, as one life-threatening crisis after another is revealed to just be another harmless prank played by a good friend, only to have that relief cut short again and again by pounding footsteps, rattling windows, and monster attacks, only to have the adrenaline drain from his veins as that threat is dispelled in turn, and then it happens again and again. People tell writers to "write what you know" so judging by his books, Stine's childhood must have been a living hell of people banging on windows, jumping out of doorways, grabbing him from behind, stabbing him with fake knives, and pulling off monster masks. Hagen is never actually there, and the cadaver always, always, always turns out to be shirt draped over a chair. Inevitably it always turns out to be someone politely approaching to say, “Miss you dropped this”, or tapping her on the shoulder to ask the time, and Mr. Hagen lunging at her from a doorway, or she turns on her bedroom light to find a dead body. Jenny had to look down at her t-shirt to remind herself what she was wearing.Įvery single chapter ends with a fake jump scare as pounding footsteps approach Jenny from behind, or someone grabs her from behind, or she sees Mr. “What a pretty t-shirt…What do you call the way the colors all run together?” She’s constantly mistaking piles of laundry for dead bodies and here’s what happens when a receptionist asks her about her t-shirt: Jenny has a hard time realizing that approaching headlights are actually not the glowing eyes of the dead Mr. This is about the level of smarts on display by most characters in pretty much every single one of Stine’s books. But when he goes to push her into the quarry he misses, and falls in himself and dies. Hagen is not a reasonable man! He catches Jenny making out with her boyfriend, Chuck, who wears Bart Simpson shirts and jean shorts, and he takes appropriate action: driving Jenny to an abandoned rock quarry and trying to murder her. I understand he's upset about losing a child, but if you’re only paying $5/hour a 50% survival rate sounds like about as much as you can expect.īut Mr. Hagen is stalking her because he used to have a son AND a daughter but his daughter died due to babysitter neglect. After an enormous number of not-very red herrings it turns out Mr. She’s sitting at the Hagens, taking care of their son, Donny, and she’s barely there for one night before she starts getting menacing phone calls and finding threatening notes stuffed into her backpack. Jenny Jeffers is 16 and babysitting because it pays $5/hour and her mom’s a legal secretary who doesn’t make jack. He’d go on to write lots more horror for kids after The Babysitter, and to be honest his formula doesn’t change much over the next 2,000,000,000 books, but this is the big one because it's one of his first, it's one of his most popular, and it helped launch the influential Point Horror series for Scholastic. Babysitting was big business in 1989 and Stine was well-prepared for writing a book about teenaged girls, having previously authored books like Phone Calls.
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