The Stinal Countdown: Fear Street: Cheerleaders: The Third Evil

The Cheerleaders saga continues. And I'm still super invested in what weird turns we're due to take. Can Stine stick the landing on the third part of this epic, or will it be like so many other Stine series and fall apart super fast. Only one way to find out, with Cheerleaders: The Third Evil.

Ah, now we're back to the camp I love about these covers. And nothing is more campy than a cheerleader doing the splits over a grave. And yes, that is the Fear grave, which has been the sticking point of this saga so far. I also like the sinister look on our cheerleader's face. I will say the proportions of the arms look a bit too long, very stretchy. Maybe that's just me and my poor perspective. Regardless, it doesn't take away from another great Fear Street cover.

In our first book, Bobbi and Corky Corcoran had recently moved to Shadyside with their parents and younger brother Sean. The family ends up residing on Fear Street. Bobbi and Corky, all-state cheerleading champs, joined the Shadyside Tigers cheerleading squad, much to the chagrin of Kimmy Bass, who holds a grudge against the sisters, especially Bobbi. During a bus trip to the game, the bus accidentally crashes into Fear Street Cemetery, sending cheerleading captain Jennifer Daly crashing into the grave of Sarah Fear, but somehow she doesn't die. Bobbi becomes captain, which angers Kimmy. Strange things seem to happen and Bobbi is unable to save Kimmy from falling during a routine attempt. 

Bobbi gets kicked off the team. When she goes to shower, suddenly she's locked inside and the showers spray her with scalding water, killing her. Corky at first suspects Kimmy of foul play, but soon discovers that it was Jennifer, who did die in the accident, but her body was possessed by an evil spirit. After battling with the spirit, Corky manages to defeat it and put an end to the evil for now. But of course, with a lot of Fear Street, nothing ever stays buried. 

In book two, Corky still suspects the evil spirit still lingers. She soon meets a strange woman named Sarah Beth Plummer who knows a lot about the history of Sarah Fear, mainly because she is also named Sarah Fear. A descendant of the original. Corky tries to move on from the death of Bobbi, but death still follows her. And the intense brother of Jennifer, Jon Daly, is also following her, believing Corky killed Jennifer. Chip Chasner, former boyfriend of Bobbi and Corky, ends up dead. Jon dies as well. Soon Corky discovers that Kimmy was possessed by the evil spirit ever since that fateful night. She manages to drown out the spirit, flushing it down her bathtub. But she soon learns that you can't drown a spirit, meaning that the evil is still here.

Now let us proceed to book three.

We open with a some focus on the new cheerleader in the group, Hannah Miles, replacing Megan Carman. Ah Megan Carman. Remember all the great moments she had in the last two books? Things have slowed down since Corky defeated the evil last time, but she still has a lot of stress given all of the death and the feeling that the spirit isn't gone. But she's now co-captain of the squad. Though she's not too fond of how much of a show off Hannah is. 

After practice, The other girls not named Hannah go out to eat. Turns out Hannah being a show-off isn't the only thing happening. Spring Break's coming up, which means we're close to WOO, PARTY SUMMER! But they'll be spending their week at cheerleader camp at Madison College. The girls are still worried about the evil spirit though. But Corky's certain that the evil spirit is certainly gone for good, despite, you know, the note last book that says that spirits don't frigging drown! They get back on topic about the camp. How other cheerleaders are there.  At least one hundred cheerleaders total. Including Belvedere who "do all that rap stuff". My god these books are whiter than a polar bear in a snowstorm.

Their attention is then turned to Corky's pea soup, because she enjoys pea soup. Totally not for a stock scare or nothing, oh wait. The soup begins to boil over, getting hot and scalding. Much like how Bobbi died. Much like how Sarah Fear died. Sure enough, the evil's back, and Corky now wonders which girl is being possessed this time. Though, real talk, this evil spirit really sucks at remaining inconspicuous. Like at least show some restraint before you scare them, not one chapter into this book. Also wow, a 15 page chapter, that feels long for a Stine book.

Kimmy takes Corky home, but not before stopping by the Fear Street cemetery. Both of them are still shaken up given the whole incident with Kimmy being possessed. Corky returns home only to find a corpse on her bed! Oh, wait, it's Sean, who is still an annoyance, so nothing's changed there. We then get a rather disturbing dream as the ghost of Bobbi enters Corky's room and tries to warn her about something, but no sound comes out. Instead, she pulls off the top of her head to reveal a skull filled with cockroaches. Corky wakes up, only to step on actual cockroaches. She goes in a panic, but when the rest of the family enter the room, they don't see any roaches. 

After that mind-screw, Corky and the girls finally arrive at cheerleading camp. When they discuss the dream, Debra begins to tell Corky that it might be a warning, but gets interrupted when Hannah enters the room, angry that Heather and Ronnie took up all the space in the bunk. Debra begrudgingly trades bunks with Hannah. Hannah then asks Corky to run her a bath, which 1. do it yourself, lazybones and 2. This triggers the memory of the whole attack in the bathroom with the evil spirit. And sure enough, after setting up the tub for Hannah, the girls hear Hannah scream, complaining that the water is scalding. 

At practice, the girls still aren't too fond of Hannah, especially with how bossy she acts, acting as if she's team captain. Kimmy is so annoyed by Hannah that she says that she could just murder her, which sets off alarms in Corky's head, given, you know, the whole spirit stuff. Later, Corky enters the college campus and begins to be pulled down by a carpet underneath her. Pulling her down like hot tar. But when Debra shows up, Corky is just on the ground like nothing happened. At the first competition, the Tigers do well, but it's the Redwood Bulldogs who really wow the judges with their rap. The girls don't care much for Redwood, particularly its captain, Blair O'Connell.

Corky gets another Bobbi dream, only this time Bobbi's head is filled with snakes. She's awakened by the screams of Hannah, whose braid has been cut. Much like the bath incident, she blames Kimmy and Corky, despite, you know, them being asleep when it happened. Though this does feel reminiscent of Kimmy when she was jealous of Bobbi, so it's not that much of a stretch. But Hannah being irrational and stubborn still thinks they're trying to kick her off the team. After she leaves, the girls suspect the evil spirit, and that maybe Kimmy is still possessed. Corky then checks her drawer and finds a pair of scissors with Hannah's hair on it.

So Hannah tells Miss Green, the team  advisor, about the braid incident. Corky is also bothered by Blair, who she also finds to be a snob. Miss Green asks who cut the braid, to which Kimmy confesses to it, trying to save Corky, but Miss Green doesn't buy it. Corky tries to reveal the truth about the evil, but Miss Green says they'll be punished for this when they return to Shadyside. The next cheer competition goes down with the Bulldogs starting. Corky and Kimmy still really hate how great and stuck-up Blair is. Suddenly, Blair goes for a handspring, but seems to trip over something and smashes her face into the ground super hard. Her lip is busted and she's bleeding profusely, but she claims that she must have been tripped by someone.

It's Shadyside's turn, so they try the diamond-head pyramid trick again. The one where one cheerleader goes atop a pyramid of others, leaps and falls into the arms of the cheerleader below. Given how bad it's gone before, this doesn't bode well. Hannah wants to be the one on top, so that's what she gets. Hannah on top with Kimmy to catch, and even Corky has her suspicions that this is going to go, but surprisingly, it goes off without a hitch. 

Afterwards, when Corky and Hannah return to their bunks, Hannah is really excited about how things went and, you know, Blair being hurt. She doesn't notice Corky grab the scissors and try to stab her, before Kimmy comes in. Corky's not feeling well. Nauseous, dizzy and hearing a bunch of evil laughter. She goes to the sink, but the water begins to scald like all water near Corky at this point. But she also realizes what she almost did. She almost murdered Hannah. She now realizes who has inherited the evil. It's her!

So we move on from the whole cheerleader camp and just return to Shadyside because I guess Stine just lost interest or hit a wall? Either way, Corky's still pretty screwed up given the revelation of her having the evil inside her. But she seems to enjoy being possessed now, remembering all of the things she did. How much fun it was to trip Blair, to scare the girls with the pea soup, to almost murder Hannah. She realizes that Bobbi was warning her from beyond the grave that the evil was inside Corky. Suddenly, her bed shakes violently, knocking her to the floor. The windows open and shut. Her perfume bottles hover in the air. The dresser mirror bursts into the flames. And a puddle of blood is in the carpet. A puddle that grows larger and larger, almost drowning Corky inside. But when Sean shows up, she's snapped back to reality. 

As Sean takes her to his room to show her something, she suddenly gets the idea to snap his arm. Like, we're in full violent maniac mode, huh? So, she tries to do just that, but Sean escapes in time. She then has a dream of being on a boat with some kids. She's taken the form of Sarah Fear. Suddenly, the boat gets caught in a whirlpool that spins them rapidly. She grabs the deck rail only for it to turn into a snake. Corky wakes up and yawns, making a hissing noise and puking a green gas, which okay, that's at least a bit different than the whole scalding water shtick. As she tries to control herself, the voice in her head says that it's time to kill, starting with Debra. Despite her protest, the spirit ultimately wins over, so now she prepares to kill Debra.

So, why are we killing Debra? Well, Debra seemed to have begun to take Hannah's side, and since the M.O. of the spirit is to kill whoever hurt their host, that's why Debra's a dead duck. She waits in a car for Debra to show up. When she does, Corky puts on the gas and is ready to run her down. But she hits the divider instead, smashing her head hard. But Debra isn't dead though. But not wasting an opportunity, Corky lures Debra into the car and drives her to the old mill. But not to get some cider, to commit some murder. 

On the way to the mill, Corky manages to convince Debra that Kimmy's totally the evil spirit. Not her, the one who just tried to mow her down or nothing. The two climb atop the wheel of the mill, which means that Corky gets to finally get this over with and shove Debra over the side. But she gets caught by a man, so no murder attempt yet again. But there's always tomorrow to kill Debra, I guess. And then Kimmy. And then finish the job she started with Hannah.

Corky wakes up the next day and she's herself again. Maybe the evil finally got bored and left? Nope, she ends up falling back into the dream about Sarah Fear. The memories of Sarah Fear that were retained from the evil spirit. She slips further out of consciousness to find more of the memory, which takes her further through time. She's aboard the ship again with her nephew Michael and niece Margaret, while her husband is sick below. As well as Jason Hardy, her servant. She decides to let Michael play with the ship's wheel, while she notices a butterfly aboard the ship. The voice has her kill the butterfly because, of course. 

Sarah does battle with the evil voice in her head, who says that when Sarah dies, it will live on inside the children. You can't kill this evil. Turns out this evil's been busy and so has Sarah. Killing for whoever the voices asks of her. She kills a man at the mill by crushing him under the wheel. The woman nearby gets strangled with a clothesline. When a cop later arrives at the Fear mansion, she shoves his head in a pot of boiling potatoes. Sarah's had enough of it, and believes that if she drowns, the spirit will drown too. So she tries to throw herself off the rail, but the spirit keeps the ship spinning, stopping that plan. Eventually she manages to jump into the water below and drown herself. The spirit makes the water boil hotter and hotter, but still Sarah refuses. Corky then finds herself in the POV of the spirit, trapped six feet under the ground with the rotted corpse of Sarah Fear, waiting for a body to finally free it from its suffering.

Corky wakes up and realizes that she's screwed. She'll always have the spirit within her unless she kills herself. But the spirit would rather still screw with her by turning her room into another disturbing nightmare. Then at breakfast, her fried eggs turn into eyeballs, which fair dos to this book on the freakish imagery. So, she has to relent to the spirit again, this time by luring Kimmy to the same death of water, this time from River Ridge. 

So, we arrive at River Ridge on a stormy night because, why wouldn't it be a stormy night? Kimmy shows up, confused as to why bring her here. When she mentions the Hannah stuff, they say maybe Hannah set them up, and it's totally not Corky being controlled by an evil spirit or nothing. Corky interrupts by asking Kimmy to see what's down at the ridge, then just tosses her off the cliff. Filled with grief over the death of her friend, Corky begins her own jump off the cliff, while the spirit tries to hold her back. But she soon manages to leap off the cliff to the water below. Despite, you know, not actually wanting to die, Corky dives deeper while the spirit panics. 

It almost seems to work, with the spirit panicking and drowning, but sure enough, the spirit brings Corky's body back to the surface. But with Corky's body killed, the spirit is defeated and washes away forever. Kimmy isn't actually dead though, she managed to survive. She manages to find Corky's body and brings it back to life. The two begin to leave as Corky looks out to the water and believes she can see the smiling face of her sister Bobbi. The book ends with Corky, Kimmy, Debra and Ronnie eating out yet again, with Corky joking about wanting some pea soup before asking for burgers and fries instead.

The Third Evil is a better book than the second. Not as good as the first, but still works really well. Part of me had wished Stine didn't rush his way out of the whole cheerleading camp as it could have worked there for our setting and not lost anything. We could have still had the focus of the book be a possessed Corky attacking the others at camp. Bringing it back to Shadyside seems like a case of Stine hitting a wall. It doesn't kill the book, but does make the second half feel slightly more jarring. But, admittedly, I do feel the book's strength comes from that second half with Corky's possession. We've had two books where the spirit is in someone else aside from the protagonist, and having Corky be the unwilling pawn in the spirit's evil schemes works really well, making her feel really evil and scary. 

Speaking of scary, the book also does feel scary. Filled with so many bizarre and horrific images, particularly from the warped realities that the spirit puts upon Corky like the egg eyes for example. And the mind controlled Corky feels like a true threat, though as we come to find out, the spirit kind of sucked at actually succeeding much this time around, save for what happened to Blair. She failed at murdering Debra or Kimmy and even failed at breaking Sean's shoulder. I also feel the spirit's defeat feels odd. Even if Corky did die, what's stopping the spirit from staying possessed inside her until she passes on to another being? It happened with Jennifer. Hell, it happened AFTER Jennifer was already killed. So it just feels weird to have it be so easily bested. But I guess, at least for this point, we needed a finale to the trilogy and that's the best we'll get, so I can accept it.

So, in the end, The Third Evil is a strong enough way to end the initial trilogy. Not everything clicks, but the things that do (Corky's possession, the history of Sarah Fear's death, the nightmares) really help in making this super memorable. It has solid pacing, memorable and freaky scares, and feels like our darkest Fear Street book to date, even more so than the original Cheerleaders book. I still think I like the original a shade more, but this hits well as a runner up. This isn't the end of the Cheerleaders saga with more in the series. I really want to know what the hell is going on with the cover for The New Evil, but for the time being there's other events in Shadyside that I'm ready to tackle. I'm not cheered out, but I could use a break at least. Cheerleaders: The Third Evil gets an A-.