Stine, Mental Health and The Babysitter III

I've been thinking a lot lately. This blog is getting very close to two milestones. One hundred thousand views and five hundred blogs. Which, dependent on my output this year, I should be able to land the latter. This is blog 445 just as a heads up. So with so many books covered, it becomes a constant battle as to what my favorite and least favorite books are in this whole series. And there are some bad books, especially from R.L. Stine. Stine is our main character when it comes to book blogs around here. His vast library and notoriety often make for the best person to cover. And while there are works from him that I love, there are a lot I really can't stomach. And most of them come from his stint with Point, Scholastic's teen book line. 

And with Point comes the worst book I've read of his so far, which I did rant about when I covered it a year and a half ago, but lately I feel like I just want to go deeper into why it's his most damning work. Yes, more damning than the child exploitation and blackmail or Revenge R Us. More damning than the piss poor fat jokes of Say Cheese and Die—Again!. More frustrating than a visit to Reva Dalby in the Silent Night series, or the absurd stupidity of the Halloween Night books. The choice I've always made for Stine's worst book and the worst I've read for the series comes from a book that, up until one pivotal point, would have just been another book. But with one moment, it becomes Stine's most shameful work. That I've read so far, of course. But let's go deeper about The Babysitter III.

The Babysitter tells the story of teenage girl Jenny Jeffers who makes the unwise decision to babysit for the Hagen family. Things seem to go fine, but it constantly feels like someone's watching her, and she gets creepy, threatening phone calls every night. Eventually, the truth is revealed that the one responsible was the father, Michael Hagen. A few years prior, his youngest daughter died on account of a negligent babysitter. It broke Mr. Hagen to the point that he saw all babysitters as people worth killing, and he intended to do so with Jenny, leading her to a rock quarry and planning to throw her into the quarry, killing her. However, Mr. Hagen ends up falling into the quarry and dying. The entire experience, obviously, stays with Jenny and it never goes away. 

This leads into the sequel book, The Babysitter II. Jenny returns to babysitting, this time for the Wexner family. However, she's never been able to get over what happened on that fateful night at the quarry. She begins to see the corpse of Mr. Hagen everywhere, and the phone calls even start to return. However, it turns out that Mr. Hagen isn't the culprit, as he's dead. Instead, it's a woman named Miss Gurney, who was the secretary to Dr. Schindler, the psychiatrist who Jenny was seeing. Miss Gurney believed that Dr. Schindler had romantic feelings for Jenny instead of her and used the history of Jenny's encounter with Mr. Hagen to mess with her before trying to kill her by again throwing Jenny down the quarry. However, Jenny's boyfriend Cal stops Miss Gurney in time and the story ends there. Honestly, the saga itself should have ended there. 

The Babysitter III has Jenny visiting her cousin Debra for the summer. It's been two years since the Hagen incident, but it remains prevalent in her mind. But it seems like, even further away from home, the specter of Mr. Hagen is still haunting her. Right down to Debra being the one to get creepy phone calls as she babysits for a woman named Mrs. Wagner, who already has to deal with Maggie, their former housekeeper, constantly sneaking inside the house and stealing stuff. Eventually, it culminates with Peter, the baby son of Mrs. Wagner, being stolen, seemingly by Mr, Hagen, only for Debra to soon realize what's been going on. Mr. Hagen is Jenny all along. She's become so mentally broken that she starts to believe she IS Mr. Hagen and kidnapped Peter. Eventually Jenny is stopped and sent away. And this is why I hate this book perhaps more than any other book I've read for the blog.

Stine is not averse to using bad mental health as a factor in someone being the villain of a book. We've also had split personalities plenty of times. And it's not like the concept of a split personality or poor mental health can't work in horror. The best example of that being Norman Bates in Psycho. But this is a case where it just feels gross. Because this isn't just any split personality. This is someone so mentally broken that they think they're the person who tried to kill her. And it makes zero sense. Why after two books of Jenny having these nightmares of Mr. Hagen does she suddenly start acting like him? There never feels like there's a triggering moment that would cause that. At least in cases like Fear Street's The Dead Lifeguard, there's a more logical reason, for lack of a better term, as to why Marissa starts to believe she's Lindsay. That the trigger was Lindsay's death. With Jenny there is no trigger. She's just suddenly acting like Mr. Hagen.

And what really makes it so bad is that the book tries to vilify the character we've spent three books focusing on. Three books of this girl suffering only for Stine to pull such a piss poor attempt at turning her into the villain that it makes this entire book series not worth it. And that's just as much the danger of turning things into sagas that didn't need to be sagas. There was never a need for a third book. There was barely a need for a second. At least the second book can be excused as a way to follow up on how Jenny's been since the inciting incident, but a third just feels like it only exists because the books sold well. And thus less effort was put into doing something fresh with the concept. Just continue the story of Jenny's declining mental health and wing it until the end. And, like many of Stine's books before it, he hit a wall. An inability to create a strong enough ending to the story. He could have gone with Maggie learning about the Hagen stuff and using it to her advantage, or even given us a zombie Hagen, even if it would have made no sense since supernatural elements weren't a part of the series... yet. 

Imagine if this was the final book in the series. Because lord knows it could have been. We could have ended this series with our most sympathetic character, the lead of three books, being deemed insane and turned into the villain. And I think even Stine realized that at some point. Because The Babysitter IV brings the focus back on Jenny and tries to divorce her issues with Mr. Hagen. Only by having a story involving a ghost. Because, yes, NOW supernatural elements can exist in this universe. A zombie or ghost Mr. Hagen could have always existed. And, for most people, The Babysitter IV is considered the worst of the four, but I honestly feel that it's a band-aid on a large wound caused by being impaled on a rock after falling in the quarry. Because yeah, ghosts existing in a series that was set in reality is really dumb. But I'll take that being the factor of a story over another Mr. Hagen rehash, or ending another book where Jenny is presented as crazy. It's a messy fix, but it's a fix, I'll take it. 

But it again accentuates why the ending of the third book is so damn bad. Because if supernatural figures exist as established in the fourth book, and by that logic Mr. Hagen can return in either zombie or ghostly form, then having Jenny be possessed by Mr. Hagen would have been a much, MUCH better outcome, not just in horror terms of the ghost of a grown man possessing the body of a teenage girl, but in preserving the dignity of Jenny Jeffers and avoiding that mess of an ending. Would it have been a plausible ending? Probably not, but again, Stine throws away any notion of this not being a world where the supernatural exists with the fourth book, so it could have existed in the third. And it's not like Stine hasn't made these sort of twists before. Perhaps his best being the twist of Welcome to Camp Nightmare, where we learn that we've been following aliens on another planet the entire time. And while it can all feel like a last minute choice, it can feel plausible because there's little to the book to suggest that it's an impossibility.

The Babysitter III is, honestly, Stine's most shameful work because it feels like it's his worst presentation of mental health as a motivating factor for someone's bad actions. It was bound to happen eventually given it's a crutch he used a lot, especially with Fear Street and his Point works. Sooner or later, he'd use the calling card in the worst possible way, and this was the end result. Which sucks because up until this twist, the book was fine. I don't think Stine did this twist maliciously, but did so without considering not only how it would damage Jenny's character, but how badly it represents mental health and how people with poor mental health could be affected by a story like this. That someone's general PTSD and trauma after a horrific incident becomes trivialized into a piss poor plot device and in the end they're just going to succumb to their demons and they're clearly beyond help. I get that presenting one overcoming their trauma isn't entirely realistic, but an ending this bleak does way more damage. You have a trauma, you're crazy and clearly you'll just get worse until you're an active danger to others. That's the message this ending presents.

I try to defend Stine a lot. To the point it's even affected my own mental health. Mainly on the fact that it feels like I'm having to play defense for a guy whose work is often boiled down as lesser than or weak, when I think there are a lot of great books Stine has done and a lot of great concepts he is capable of. But even with my cheerleading, I'm as harsh a critic to Stine's foibles. His mysteries are often straightforward until there's a clear wall hit that causes him to pivot horribly. He uses the same tropes constantly like whispery phone calls and the motive being an obsessed teen with their own poor mental health. The Babysitter books are victim to many of Stine's worst traits, but I still think the first book is a solid horror story to the point that I still recommend it. And I even don't mind the second, even if one could find making PTSD and trauma the only character factors of someone as exploitive. But it at least works fine and doesn't lose its way. The third book did, and Stine tried and failed to resolve that with the fourth. It's my least favorite book because it's Stine's most shameful pivot. I still have a lot of books of his to read to see if there's a twist far worse than this, but until that day comes, I can easily say that The Babysitter III remains the nadir of the works of Robert Lawrence Stine.