Rating: ⭐⭐⭐+

The Secret, the second entry in R.L. Stine’s trilogy The Fear Street Saga, continues the origin story of the curse placed on the Fear family. If you read my last post on The Betrayal, then you’ll know that I found this series as a young kid—I was just nine years old, probably a little young for the level of juicy terror and gore peddled by Stine in this series. But I was hooked into the suspense and drama of it all, and age restrictions weren’t going to stop me.

Perhaps being below the intended age bracket is part of the reason this trilogy was so impactful for me. The Secret in particular shook me with its dark imagery and tragic characters. Of course, reading it as an adult has been a completely different experience. Its flaws are much more apparent to me now, but interestingly I enjoyed this one more than The Betrayal this time around, even though previously it was the opposite.

In The Secret, Ezra Fier is hot on the trail of the villainous Goodes when he and his family arrive in a town that’s been gutted by a terrible plague. In a place with so much hate and death, it doesn’t take long for the curse to find them… Jonathan survives Wickham Village and falls in love with Delilah, a preacher’s daughter. If being with her feels so good, then why do bad things happen seemingly from the moment they meet? Then, Elizabeth Fier unearths her ancestors’ mysterious amulet the same day a handsome drifter is welcomed into her family’s home. When she and her sister both catch feelings for the charming Franklin Goode, they have no way of knowing that their fates are already entangled with his.

Some of the tropes found in this book:

Moves Around A Lot
Hereditary Curse
Feuding Families
Artifact of Doom
Sins of Our Fathers
Ghostly Goals
Sibling Triangle
Bewildering Punishment

Right off the bat, The Secret comes in hot against the backdrop of a premium horror setting: a town with corpses as its only remaining inhabitants. Yes, corpse-ridden ghost town, let’s gooooooooo!

I also enjoyed that this book had a character with a longer POV. Even though The Secret is the shortest of the three books, Jonathan is the character we stick with the longest in the whole trilogy, clocking it at a whopping 91 pages from his viewpoint. Unlike other characters up to this point in the series, we see Jonathan survive, learn and grow. The character development in these books, short and fast-paced as they are, is pretty minimal. So it’s nice to have a character who is a little more filled-out.

Another strength this book had over The Betrayal was female characters who actually did interesting things that contributed to the plot. Jonathan’s sister Abigail takes it upon herself to drag her brother to explore the ghost town and lay some of the corpses there to rest, unwittingly unlocking a mystery that will unleash untold horrors on her family. Delilah also ends up being quite a bit more manipulative than she seems at first blush. Chicks in this book are taking charge, and I am here for it.

**SPOLER-RIDDEN RANT WARNING**
Skip the following three paragraphs if you want to remain un-spoiled for The Secret

Unfortunately this novel reaches a premature climax with the ending of part two. The third and final part is more or less a re-skin of the last part of The Betrayal. There are differences, but the moving parts are mostly the same: An unsuspecting family of Fiers, a handsome drifter concealing murderous intent, and a lone survivor to carry on the grudge.

And then there’s the absolutely mystifying way that part two of the book ends: the curse just…stops for 100 years? Apparently all the Fiers needed to do to stop the curse was…get rid of the pendant that literally has the word EVIL engraved on it?? Like, not even destroy it, just hide it really well??? Part 3 starts with a new family of Fiers, Jonathan’s great+ grandchildren, living a prosperous life of blissful curse-ignorance. I get that Stine needed to move the plot forward in time quickly, because it’s a long way from the 1740s to Nora’s framing device in 1900. But there has to be a better way to get there than just hiding the macguffin like a toy from a dog, then rebooting a plot it seemed I’d just read in the previous book.

And last gripe I swear: Where the heck did Franklin “The Last of the Goodes” Goode come from? I feel like Stine could have graced us with at least a page or two of backstory as to what’s been going on with the Goodes for the last 100 years for this dude to still be carrying a grudge when no one else seems to remember what he’s mad about.

**END SPOILER ZONE**
The rest of this article is spoiler-free

Though all that may make it sound like I really disliked the final part of this book, it was…fine. Reading about two sisters competing for the affection of a mysterious newcomer was actually fairly fun. And all together, I do think I enjoyed this book a bit more than The Betrayal. Images like a mother chasing the blue-ribboned hat of her dead daughter, and a knitting needle sticking out of someone’s chest have lived on in my brain since I first read these as a child, and they don’t disappoint today.

Overall, The Secret gets a 3.5 star rating from me. While it suffers from many of the same flaws as the first book, like weak dialogue and characters on mystifying plot rails, I enjoyed the characters in The Secret quite a bit more and actually felt bad when the horrors of the curse befell them. It also does a great job setting things up for the third and final book, The Burning. Number three is the strongest of the trilogy, in my (perhaps somewhat biased) opinion, so keep an eye out for my next review in which I dish all about it.

What did you think of The Secret, or The Fear Street Saga as a whole? Share your thoughts in the comments!