SVT #98 - The Beast Is Watching You
Were Alice Wakefield and Eva secretly in love?
Will Liz and Todd make out during their next baby-sitting session?
Will Jessica make friends with a rogue camel named Blinky? Find out soon!
=( With a frowny, I must bear the news that the answer to all of these questions is “no”. But I strongly urge you to read the recap of #97 - Too Scared to Sleep, so that this here recap makes sense.
I hate these pixelated covers. So as you can see, after pushing little Gretchen down the stairs, Jessica looks guiltily around to see if there are any witnesses, and begins her plan to bury her in the backyard…
A girl watches from the scary mansion’s widow’s walk. In italics. The sight of ‘two pretty blond girls’ (Jess and Liz, doncha know) “fills her with violent loathing”. She thinks a warning to them: “Don’t close your eyes in this house…don’t close your eyes. If you do, you’re mine…” Yes, well, scary girl, this is all very well and good, but warnings work so much better if you actually speak them out loud, not just think them. This is a simple social skill; maybe this is why you feel people don’t understand you and you have to get all murderous on their asses.
In normal writing, we see Jessica and Elizabeth walking up to another babysitting job at the Riccolis’ and dissecting everything that just happened in the previous book. Heh. Imagine if we talked like this in real life. “Hey Julie, do you remember yesterday how we went to the uni library and studied? And the professor gave us that economics quiz? Remember how I was wearing that yellow sweater? Hmm?” The twins wonder if anything spooky is going to happen tonight; given the fact that one of the kids there has had a nightmare every single night the twins have been there, my money’s on “yes”. The twins insist to each other that everything must have a reasonable explanation. Juliana’s back scratches must have come from a cat (a crazy cat).
Oh, and in case you care, Olivia is 10 years old, Andrew is 8, Gretchen is 7, Juliana is 5 and Nate is 2. Everyone bustles around before Mrs. Riccoli leaves that night. Elizabeth thinks, “This is such a normal family. They’re busy and lively and happy. Of course the spooky things aren’t real. How could they be?” I’m sorry, but this is shitty, shitty reasoning.
The twins think about the secret room from the last book, and the picture of what looks like their mother with the little girl. Because they are both stupid, they reason that the fact that Alice seemed scared to death of the house, and the fact that the girl in the picture looked exactly like Alice and the photo said “Alice and Eva” on the back, are unrelated. Jessica thinks that there are probably lots of Alices who look like her mother. Actually, this may not be that big a stretch of the imagination in Sweet Valley, the land of a thousand doppelgangers.
The twins entertain the kids by baking a cake with way too much sugar and chocolate in it (Jessica puts eight handfuls of chocolate in instead of four, because the kids tell her to). Then the kids go to bed and the twins are nervous. They try to pass the time by reading riddles to each other. In response to Jessica’s “what do you call a female horse who sleeps during the day?”, Elizabeth answers “a nocturn-horse?”. Elizabeth! You’re supposed to be a writer! (The answer is, of course, a nightmare, which stupidly freaks the twins out)
The twins really freak out when they see two pale figures with angry red scars, brandishing bloodstained knives, at the window. They plan to evacuate the kids…
…until it turns out that the figures are just Steven and Joe dressed as zombies. And being bitches. Seriously, it’s one thing to prank your younger sisters, but involving kids as well? Not cool! (Steven hilariously calls him and Joe “Wakefield and Howell, professional frightifiers! Whoa baby!”…yup)
The twins tell on Steven to their parents, for once. Alice and Ned aren’t happy. They forbid him from ever annoying the girls again while they’re working, and force him to apologise to the twins. Steven apologises ungraciously, meanwhile thinking “I am sorry…I’m sorry I got caught!” The Wakefields also strongly suggest that Steven get a part-time job like his responsible sisters. Lol!
Then we creepily enter Alice Wakefield’s italic memories. We learn that once upon a time, when Alice was twelve, she was the babysitter of a girl called Eva Sullivan. Eva was “a difficult child to babysit”. During the day she was “Friendly, quiet and polite - a lot like Alice herself”, but at night, she would sometimes wake up sweating and crying, “her sobs filling the entire house”, and sometimes she would sleepwalk. Something in her dreams was disturbing her, but she wouldn’t tell Alice what (this is never really explained. Is it night terrors?) Eva’s bedroom is, of course, the little ‘secret room’ that the twins discovered in the last book. To bed, Eva wears a nightgown with yellow daisies, and one pink bunny slipper (if she wears them both, Alice can’t hear her when she sleepwalks). (This information is important later) Alice makes a big production of locking the door to the balcony, because if she doesn’t, Eva could sleepwalk off it. Eva falls down the stairs sleepwalking, but she doesn’t even wake up. This freaks Alice out. End italic bit.
The twins are babysitting again, and Jessica starts talking about how awesome it’d be to have a Halloween party at the Riccoli mansion, and jokes about how they could pretend that someone once died in the secret ‘murder’ room upstairs. Then she feels a sudden cold draft on her face. Ooh. The there’s a scream, and it turns out Gretchen has had a nightmare.
In the dream, Gretchen was walking through the hall of the mansion, when she heard something behind her. A girl, who was also somehow a monster. The girl was wearing a nightgown with little yellow daisies on it, and carrying a teddy bear, when suddenly she was no longer a girl, but just a monster with ugly flesh in place of a face. She grabbed Gretchen and tried to push her down the stairs, and then Gretchen woke up.
The monster girl watches mockingly in italics.
Steven and Joe hang by the Wakefield’s pool, and Steve talks about how he wants cooler sunglasses that wrap around his head - “those reflective kinds, with the mirrors on the lenses”. For some reason this makes me think of Jason Priestly on 90210. The boys talk about how they should go into business together to make cash. Conveniently, Mr. Wakefield shows up with a new riding mower. The boys decide to start a landscaping business. Steven gets some way-too-grandiose fantasies in his head about how awesome the business will be. Mr. Wakefield agrees to the business, as long as Steven reads the manual (this couldn’t possibly be foreshadowing, could it?).
Todd and Liz are babysitting the Riccolis when they smell smoke - no! It’s Andrew’s bedroom. They rush up to save him when, strangely, they realise there is no fire. Then the smell goes away. Andrew wakes up from his nightmare and tells ToddandLiz that he dreamed of a girl who set his room on fire. Creepy! She was wearing a nightgown with yellow flowers, carrying a teddy bear, and wearing one pink bunny slipper. Hmm.
ToddandLiz tell Mrs. Riccoli about smelling smoke in Andrew’s room. Mrs. Riccoli is dismayed, and admits that Andrew used to play with matches. Mrs Riccoli thinks that maybe the move has affected Andrew more than she thought.
Steven does a crap job of mowing the Wakefield’s lawn, and Mr. Wakefield is angry and makes him promise to read the mower manual. Joe is retarded and does an even crapper job of mowing. He runs over Steven’s in-line skates and soccer ball, and almost kills Steven. He also tramples Mrs. Wakefield’s herb garden. The boys are both idiots in these scenes.
Another Alice italic scene. Flashback to sitting for Eva, when Eva cries for Alice and admits that she is afraid she will die in her dreams. How sad for a little girl! Alice promises Eva that even if she dreams she dies, she will always wake up. “Even if it’s a really bad dream?” Eva asked at last in an anguished voice. “I mean - really bad?”
Aw. Poor little Eva! Sucks that she only has Alice Wakefield for advice, who probably dreams every night about puppies and rainbows and moonshine.
Jessica is tucking Gretchen in, who asks her to stay with her til she falls asleep. Unfortunately, Jessica gets tired and falls asleep herself. She ‘wakes’ (but is actually dreaming) to find herself walking through the halls of the mansion. The dream feels so real that Jess isn’t sure she’s dreaming. The house looks a lot newer, and the paintings are different. Jess finds herself walking towards Eva’s bedroom, which now doesn’t have plaster blocking the door, just a normal doorway. The room has a locked balcony. Jess feels a presence, and turns around to see “the most hideous, ghastly face she had ever seen in her entire life. The flesh was yellowish black, hanging horribly off the skull in places where it wasn’t already decomposed”. Ugh! The figure was “crumpled and battered. One arm swung loosely from its socket, and one leg stuck out at a crazy angle. Bruises covered the hands.” The figure is, of course, the same bunny-slippered, nightgowned girl that everyone else has been dreaming of. The creature hisses and tries to push Jessica off the balcony, tearing her shirt sleeve in the process, but then Jess wakes up. Jess pretends to Gretchen that it was just an ordinary dream, so as not to scare her. When Jess is leaving the house, though, she notices a big rip in her shirt. Dunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!
Jess tells Liz about the dream, and they conclude that Jess just dreamed Gretchen’s dream because she’d heard about it. But Liz is worried by Jess’ detail of the pink bunny slipper - Gretchen didn’t mention that, only Andrew did. And Jess wasn’t there when Andrew spoke about his dream. Dunnnnnnnnnn…….
Steven still hasn’t properly read the mower manual, but he tries to ride the mower again. In this instance, he crashes into, and subsequently splinters, the neighbours’ fence. These scenes annoy me, have I mentioned this?
Winston and Jessica (what an awesome team) are babysitting, when Gretchen sleepwalks down the stairs. She falls, and Winston catches her. She doesn’t even wake up. Of course, when she does, she says she was having the same monster-flesh girl nightmare. Mrs. Riccoli tells Winston and Jessica that Gretchen has a history of sleepwalking (nice of her to forewarn the babysitters of her children’s weird pasts, isn’t it?).
Steven and Joe have a stupid competition over who can mow the lawn fastest. The winner gets to name their landscaping company (either ‘Wakefield and Howell’ or ‘Howell and Wakefield’). I don’t even care what happens. Something about the mower getting stuck and them going around in loops.
The twins hilariously watch the boys do laps around the garden. Jess wants to tape it cos it looks so stupid. Liz won’t let her.
Somehow, the boys run into Mrs. Riccoli. She notes their riding mower enthusiastically and talks about how run-down her new house’s garden is. She offers the boys the job of cutting her grass (insert politically incorrect joke here). Seriously, this lady must have money coming out the wazoo to hire babysitters every night and landscapers and interior decorators and stuff.
Liz and Jess babysit again (yawn) and decide to explore Eva’s no-longer-secret room for clues. In the closet they find……………….one bunny slipper. AAAAAAAAAGH!
Suddenly, the door to the room slams shut. The twins can’t jimmy it open, not even with scissors. They worry about being trapped in a room that no one knows exists. Then they start smelling smoke. Noooooo. The book ends with another italic section from monster-girl Eva’s point of view, as she watches flames lick around ‘the boy’ (Andrew)’s room. Lila the pyro, is that you? Yeah. Then there’s the setup for the next book.
Will Andrew and Juliana make out?
Will Mrs. Riccoli fall for Steven?
Will Elizabeth grow a cancerous mole?
Find out in the next book in this series, #99 - The Beast Must Die.
Will Liz and Todd make out during their next baby-sitting session?
Will Jessica make friends with a rogue camel named Blinky? Find out soon!
=( With a frowny, I must bear the news that the answer to all of these questions is “no”. But I strongly urge you to read the recap of #97 - Too Scared to Sleep, so that this here recap makes sense.
I hate these pixelated covers. So as you can see, after pushing little Gretchen down the stairs, Jessica looks guiltily around to see if there are any witnesses, and begins her plan to bury her in the backyard…
A girl watches from the scary mansion’s widow’s walk. In italics. The sight of ‘two pretty blond girls’ (Jess and Liz, doncha know) “fills her with violent loathing”. She thinks a warning to them: “Don’t close your eyes in this house…don’t close your eyes. If you do, you’re mine…” Yes, well, scary girl, this is all very well and good, but warnings work so much better if you actually speak them out loud, not just think them. This is a simple social skill; maybe this is why you feel people don’t understand you and you have to get all murderous on their asses.
In normal writing, we see Jessica and Elizabeth walking up to another babysitting job at the Riccolis’ and dissecting everything that just happened in the previous book. Heh. Imagine if we talked like this in real life. “Hey Julie, do you remember yesterday how we went to the uni library and studied? And the professor gave us that economics quiz? Remember how I was wearing that yellow sweater? Hmm?” The twins wonder if anything spooky is going to happen tonight; given the fact that one of the kids there has had a nightmare every single night the twins have been there, my money’s on “yes”. The twins insist to each other that everything must have a reasonable explanation. Juliana’s back scratches must have come from a cat (a crazy cat).
Oh, and in case you care, Olivia is 10 years old, Andrew is 8, Gretchen is 7, Juliana is 5 and Nate is 2. Everyone bustles around before Mrs. Riccoli leaves that night. Elizabeth thinks, “This is such a normal family. They’re busy and lively and happy. Of course the spooky things aren’t real. How could they be?” I’m sorry, but this is shitty, shitty reasoning.
The twins think about the secret room from the last book, and the picture of what looks like their mother with the little girl. Because they are both stupid, they reason that the fact that Alice seemed scared to death of the house, and the fact that the girl in the picture looked exactly like Alice and the photo said “Alice and Eva” on the back, are unrelated. Jessica thinks that there are probably lots of Alices who look like her mother. Actually, this may not be that big a stretch of the imagination in Sweet Valley, the land of a thousand doppelgangers.
The twins entertain the kids by baking a cake with way too much sugar and chocolate in it (Jessica puts eight handfuls of chocolate in instead of four, because the kids tell her to). Then the kids go to bed and the twins are nervous. They try to pass the time by reading riddles to each other. In response to Jessica’s “what do you call a female horse who sleeps during the day?”, Elizabeth answers “a nocturn-horse?”. Elizabeth! You’re supposed to be a writer! (The answer is, of course, a nightmare, which stupidly freaks the twins out)
The twins really freak out when they see two pale figures with angry red scars, brandishing bloodstained knives, at the window. They plan to evacuate the kids…
…until it turns out that the figures are just Steven and Joe dressed as zombies. And being bitches. Seriously, it’s one thing to prank your younger sisters, but involving kids as well? Not cool! (Steven hilariously calls him and Joe “Wakefield and Howell, professional frightifiers! Whoa baby!”…yup)
The twins tell on Steven to their parents, for once. Alice and Ned aren’t happy. They forbid him from ever annoying the girls again while they’re working, and force him to apologise to the twins. Steven apologises ungraciously, meanwhile thinking “I am sorry…I’m sorry I got caught!” The Wakefields also strongly suggest that Steven get a part-time job like his responsible sisters. Lol!
Then we creepily enter Alice Wakefield’s italic memories. We learn that once upon a time, when Alice was twelve, she was the babysitter of a girl called Eva Sullivan. Eva was “a difficult child to babysit”. During the day she was “Friendly, quiet and polite - a lot like Alice herself”, but at night, she would sometimes wake up sweating and crying, “her sobs filling the entire house”, and sometimes she would sleepwalk. Something in her dreams was disturbing her, but she wouldn’t tell Alice what (this is never really explained. Is it night terrors?) Eva’s bedroom is, of course, the little ‘secret room’ that the twins discovered in the last book. To bed, Eva wears a nightgown with yellow daisies, and one pink bunny slipper (if she wears them both, Alice can’t hear her when she sleepwalks). (This information is important later) Alice makes a big production of locking the door to the balcony, because if she doesn’t, Eva could sleepwalk off it. Eva falls down the stairs sleepwalking, but she doesn’t even wake up. This freaks Alice out. End italic bit.
The twins are babysitting again, and Jessica starts talking about how awesome it’d be to have a Halloween party at the Riccoli mansion, and jokes about how they could pretend that someone once died in the secret ‘murder’ room upstairs. Then she feels a sudden cold draft on her face. Ooh. The there’s a scream, and it turns out Gretchen has had a nightmare.
In the dream, Gretchen was walking through the hall of the mansion, when she heard something behind her. A girl, who was also somehow a monster. The girl was wearing a nightgown with little yellow daisies on it, and carrying a teddy bear, when suddenly she was no longer a girl, but just a monster with ugly flesh in place of a face. She grabbed Gretchen and tried to push her down the stairs, and then Gretchen woke up.
The monster girl watches mockingly in italics.
Steven and Joe hang by the Wakefield’s pool, and Steve talks about how he wants cooler sunglasses that wrap around his head - “those reflective kinds, with the mirrors on the lenses”. For some reason this makes me think of Jason Priestly on 90210. The boys talk about how they should go into business together to make cash. Conveniently, Mr. Wakefield shows up with a new riding mower. The boys decide to start a landscaping business. Steven gets some way-too-grandiose fantasies in his head about how awesome the business will be. Mr. Wakefield agrees to the business, as long as Steven reads the manual (this couldn’t possibly be foreshadowing, could it?).
Todd and Liz are babysitting the Riccolis when they smell smoke - no! It’s Andrew’s bedroom. They rush up to save him when, strangely, they realise there is no fire. Then the smell goes away. Andrew wakes up from his nightmare and tells ToddandLiz that he dreamed of a girl who set his room on fire. Creepy! She was wearing a nightgown with yellow flowers, carrying a teddy bear, and wearing one pink bunny slipper. Hmm.
ToddandLiz tell Mrs. Riccoli about smelling smoke in Andrew’s room. Mrs. Riccoli is dismayed, and admits that Andrew used to play with matches. Mrs Riccoli thinks that maybe the move has affected Andrew more than she thought.
Steven does a crap job of mowing the Wakefield’s lawn, and Mr. Wakefield is angry and makes him promise to read the mower manual. Joe is retarded and does an even crapper job of mowing. He runs over Steven’s in-line skates and soccer ball, and almost kills Steven. He also tramples Mrs. Wakefield’s herb garden. The boys are both idiots in these scenes.
Another Alice italic scene. Flashback to sitting for Eva, when Eva cries for Alice and admits that she is afraid she will die in her dreams. How sad for a little girl! Alice promises Eva that even if she dreams she dies, she will always wake up. “Even if it’s a really bad dream?” Eva asked at last in an anguished voice. “I mean - really bad?”
Aw. Poor little Eva! Sucks that she only has Alice Wakefield for advice, who probably dreams every night about puppies and rainbows and moonshine.
Jessica is tucking Gretchen in, who asks her to stay with her til she falls asleep. Unfortunately, Jessica gets tired and falls asleep herself. She ‘wakes’ (but is actually dreaming) to find herself walking through the halls of the mansion. The dream feels so real that Jess isn’t sure she’s dreaming. The house looks a lot newer, and the paintings are different. Jess finds herself walking towards Eva’s bedroom, which now doesn’t have plaster blocking the door, just a normal doorway. The room has a locked balcony. Jess feels a presence, and turns around to see “the most hideous, ghastly face she had ever seen in her entire life. The flesh was yellowish black, hanging horribly off the skull in places where it wasn’t already decomposed”. Ugh! The figure was “crumpled and battered. One arm swung loosely from its socket, and one leg stuck out at a crazy angle. Bruises covered the hands.” The figure is, of course, the same bunny-slippered, nightgowned girl that everyone else has been dreaming of. The creature hisses and tries to push Jessica off the balcony, tearing her shirt sleeve in the process, but then Jess wakes up. Jess pretends to Gretchen that it was just an ordinary dream, so as not to scare her. When Jess is leaving the house, though, she notices a big rip in her shirt. Dunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!
Jess tells Liz about the dream, and they conclude that Jess just dreamed Gretchen’s dream because she’d heard about it. But Liz is worried by Jess’ detail of the pink bunny slipper - Gretchen didn’t mention that, only Andrew did. And Jess wasn’t there when Andrew spoke about his dream. Dunnnnnnnnnn…….
Steven still hasn’t properly read the mower manual, but he tries to ride the mower again. In this instance, he crashes into, and subsequently splinters, the neighbours’ fence. These scenes annoy me, have I mentioned this?
Winston and Jessica (what an awesome team) are babysitting, when Gretchen sleepwalks down the stairs. She falls, and Winston catches her. She doesn’t even wake up. Of course, when she does, she says she was having the same monster-flesh girl nightmare. Mrs. Riccoli tells Winston and Jessica that Gretchen has a history of sleepwalking (nice of her to forewarn the babysitters of her children’s weird pasts, isn’t it?).
Steven and Joe have a stupid competition over who can mow the lawn fastest. The winner gets to name their landscaping company (either ‘Wakefield and Howell’ or ‘Howell and Wakefield’). I don’t even care what happens. Something about the mower getting stuck and them going around in loops.
The twins hilariously watch the boys do laps around the garden. Jess wants to tape it cos it looks so stupid. Liz won’t let her.
Somehow, the boys run into Mrs. Riccoli. She notes their riding mower enthusiastically and talks about how run-down her new house’s garden is. She offers the boys the job of cutting her grass (insert politically incorrect joke here). Seriously, this lady must have money coming out the wazoo to hire babysitters every night and landscapers and interior decorators and stuff.
Liz and Jess babysit again (yawn) and decide to explore Eva’s no-longer-secret room for clues. In the closet they find……………….one bunny slipper. AAAAAAAAAGH!
Suddenly, the door to the room slams shut. The twins can’t jimmy it open, not even with scissors. They worry about being trapped in a room that no one knows exists. Then they start smelling smoke. Noooooo. The book ends with another italic section from monster-girl Eva’s point of view, as she watches flames lick around ‘the boy’ (Andrew)’s room. Lila the pyro, is that you? Yeah. Then there’s the setup for the next book.
Will Andrew and Juliana make out?
Will Mrs. Riccoli fall for Steven?
Will Elizabeth grow a cancerous mole?
Find out in the next book in this series, #99 - The Beast Must Die.