Performing in a school production of Grease, Janna is delighted when her talents win her much praise and the attentions of an apparent fan, until the harmless token gifts of flowers and notes become the threatening moves of a stalker. Original.
Carol Ellis is an American author of young adult and children’s fiction. Her first novel, My Secret Admirer, was published in 1989 by Scholastic as part of their popular Point Thriller line.
She went on to write over fifteen novels, including a few titles in the Zodiac Chillers series published by Random House in the mid-1990s, and two titles in The Blair Witch Files series for young adults, published by Bantam between 2000 and 2001.
Another of the Point Horrors that I’m not entirely sure if I’d originally had during the 90’s, though with this story set around a school production of Grease - it made me feel very nostalgic.
Janna is delighted that her performance is receiving all the plaudits until the attention of an unknown fan seems to be bordering on obsessive...
A pretty straight forward teen novel for the series, whilst re-reading this now I found that the main suspect being called Stan was highly amusing!
Carol Ellis is becoming one of my favorite Point Horror authors. This January 1996 entry in the series is her last appearance and it is really good. Nostalgia usually fuels me with five star ratings but I don't think I would go that far with The Stalker but I did enjoy it.
Janna Richards is in a touring company performing Grease, nothing big on Broadway but regional theater, as a background dancer. It's been her dream since she was little, watching the ballet and taking all the different types of classes, and now she has a more prominent role. Her relationship with her ex-boyfriend Jimmy is over, breaking up to pursue this big break, and Janna is free to concentrate on her plans for college and majoring in theater.
On opening night, a rose is thrown down on the stage from the catwalk after the curtain calls as Janna straggles behind immersed in the high of performing. She has an admirer, a fan who keeps leaving her roses, but soon the behavior becomes...unsettling.
Calls and notes become more threatening and a strange car starts following the company as they move to a new town. Is it Jimmy behind this? Someone in the theater group? Is Janna's fan really responsible...or is jealousy behind the scenes making her life a nightmare?
There are actually a lot of really good suspects and the actions of the stalker get even more deranged and dangerous. Once you think you know who it is...Ellis turns the tables and you shift your opinion to someone else. When we find out who it is, I was surprised and it subverted my expectations to be sure.
I really liked the sweet ending but I feel a few loose ends of plotlines needed to be sewn up other wise...I'd recommend it if you haven't read The Stalker before.
well i finished this book already [: It is very interesting. Because it had me on the edge of my seat. SOMEONE is stalking Janna. This person is obessed with her! She has 5 different suspects. Can it be Jimmy .. the mad ex? Ryan? Stan the weird fan? Liz the jealous dancer? Or the who can the other one be....?
My mother, Carol Ellis, passed away on November 5th, 2022. While she'd been retired for some time, she spent years making her living as an author for children and young adults. When I was a kid, I was tremendously proud of her status as a writer, but she always seemed vaguely embarrassed by it. As I grew older, she told me she didn't enjoy the process of writing, and I'm sure that was part of the problem but there was also something deeper. My mother was an extremely self-deprecating person, inclined to critique herself to a fault. As such, I think she was uncomfortable with her public status. Also, as an avid reader herself, I think she decided early on she would never measure up to the books and authors she admired. It saddened and confused me to hear her dismiss her writing and, from time to time, even become cynical about the whole concept of telling stories. This never lasted very long because she enjoyed reading too much, but it was still depressing. Later on, I would occasionally try to change her perspective by pointing out the long and (in my view) proud tradition of popular fiction authors, people who, yes, wrote largely for money but gave years of joy to millions of readers. She would just shrug and say something like "Sure, but I wasn't even that good." Even in the past few years, when I would tell her how so many people online would respond with comments like "Oh wow, I LOVED your mom's books growing up!" if I mentioned her in a comment to a post or video, she would brush it off. "Doesn't it make you happy, knowing people still like your work?," I'd ask. She'd shrug or look away and reply, "Sure, I guess so."
Despite her indifference, my mother's career as a YA and children's author was substantial. A conservative estimate would put the number of books she wrote or co-wrote somewhere north of 50, and there were shorter works as well. She's best remembered as a fixture of Scholastic's Point Thriller line from the late 80s to the mid 90s, but her work ranged over several genres and publishers, her career lasting from the late 1970s till 2017; in the weeks following her death, I started discovering material she never even mentioned to me.
Through the years, despite sharing my mother's passion for reading, I rarely read her work. While she didn't exactly come out and say so, it was pretty clear she'd prefer I not. There were occasional exceptions and, towards the end of her career, I sometimes assisted her, both as a researcher and as an uncredited co-author. But her main body of work seemed like something she didn't want to get into much, so I largely avoided it. Now I've lost her forever and, partially to distract myself from the grief but also to try and create some sort of memorial to her, I've decided to read through her works and comment on them here.
As I mentioned, my mother's writing career was extensive. A large portion of her work was ghostwriting for others and even a fair amount under her own name were series works where she was more less told what to write. There were also nonfiction works which were pretty tightly controlled by the editors as well. While I know she gave every project her all (no matter how little she enjoyed some of them) and no doubt put her stamp on all she wrote, I'm primarily interested in the peak of her career, that is novels written under her own name and over which she had at least some degree of artistic control. This comes out to 20 or so books. While I have most of these works, there are still some I'll have to search for online and in used bookstores.
There's no point in pretending these "reviews" will be objective. All the books will get 5 stars, although I will be honest about elements of my mom's work I don't care for. Mixed in with my comments on the books will be memories of the creation of those I was old enough to be aware of, memories of my mother and her thoughts and comments on the books, and thoughts about the culture and industry that shaped her career.
I have no illusions that my mother was some sort of literary genius. But her work touched many readers nonetheless. She was also an incredible human being, one of the kindest people anyone could hope to meet. I will miss her terribly for the rest of my life. My hope is these commentaries will act as a tribute to her and bring back some good memories for those who grew up with her work, just as they preserve some cherished memories for me of a very cherished person.
THE STALKER
This was the last of my mother's work in Scholastic's iconic Point Thriller line. Since I was in late middle school/early high school when it was written and published, I remember it better than many of the other Point titles. I even recall helping her look through the books on musical and community theater she used for research. The process of writing "The Stalker" seemed fairly pleasant from my perspective. As a former actor herself, my mother enjoyed the book's theater setting and I have memories of her laughing over plot details with me on occasion. Despite this, several years later when she was telling me how much she disliked writing her novels and I brought this up, she said something like "No, I hated that one too," and insisted my memories of it were false. Maybe they were, but I've come to wonder if external factors might have been warping her recollections, at least in part.
Looking back, I realize now that "The Stalker" came out just as YA fiction was starting to change dramatically. Harry Potter wouldn't arrive till the following year but there was a sense that the kind of light, pulpy work my mom did wouldn't satisfy much anymore, what with competition like the rising internet. We were getting less fan mail, and my parents didn't talk much about her books after they were finished, in contrast to previous years. My mother's days at Scholastic were numbered, though I don't know if she was aware of that at the time. The Point line mostly ended the following year, I believe.
Putting all these wistful memories aside, what of "The Stalker" as a novel? I found it very lightweight but quite enjoyable. Janna, the aspiring dancer heroine, is pleasant company although I felt her romantic attachments were a bit tacked on. I wonder if my mom would have been able to do more with her as an aspiring actor and/or singer rather than dancer. The dance angle was perfectly well handled but I wasn't exactly smelling as much greasepaint as I expected.
On the plus side, the supporting cast are all well characterized. As for the suspense aspects, my mom was a huge mystery fan and she handled those elements like a real pro. The "red herring" trope is often quite correctly mocked, but it's deployed with genuine deftness here, including some touches that actually startled me.
Another point that I mostly liked but was unexpected was that my mom's style in "The Stalker" helped teach me better what is meant by a "cozy" mystery. I always struggled to understand how a thriller involving violence, up to and including attempted murder, could be somehow "reassuring" for a reader, but I think I finally viscerally experienced it here. It's not really so much that the forces of good and order are clearly always in charge; in fact, in some ways that's surprisingly absent in "The Stalker," with the police portrayed as pleasant but remarkably impotent. Instead, I think the key to this book's coziness is that, for all the tension and fear, and there's plenty of it, the focus is ultimately on solving the puzzle. We experience the book as something that can and ultimately will make sense, and thus it's a kind of exercise, the darkness of which is interesting but incidental. Unfortunately the last scene was rather anticlimactic and I wanted more payoff with several fun characters. Still, this certainly didn't ruin the book.
Bottom line, "The Stalker" may have been the somewhat melancholy end of an era for my mother, but it certainly shows she still had plenty of spunk in her as a writer at the time. Due to my pleasant memories of the book's creation, I'd always intended to read this one. Wish I could share my thoughts with her, the way we always loved talking about books together, but glad I finally got around to reading this in any event.
Janna is getting stalked by an obsessive fan. She's on the road with the company she dances with and has to figure out who her stalker is while being surrounded by jealous co-workers and ex boyfriends. Janna was a cool character who wanted to take control of her life and rely on herself to find the culprit.
One of the last 'classic' Point Horrors to be released and probably one of the last slasher teen books, there are some great points in this book. I loved the fact that the cast were working on Grease, and I also enjoyed that this is one of the few Point Horror books (asides from Nightmare Hall) that doesn't focus on highschoolers.
However, the reveal of the stalker ruined it for me. There was just no way it was Carly when you have so many other characters with a better motive. Liz would have been the obvious choice, and making it Carly leaves a gaping plothole. The Liz/Ryan stuff is unresolved. I think given more time this could have been a classic within the Point Horror releases.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
I think but I’m not positive that I read this in grade school, it was definitely something I would have read while bored during study period. Many a hour lost to reading books when I should have been studying, like the dollhouse murders. This is a fun one, I didn’t see the twist coming, perhaps because it kind of comes out of nowhere, but I suppose you always gotta keep the audience guessing and second guessing in a mystery scenario. I wonder why stalkers were so prevalent in YA of the 80s and 90s? I guess so you can have a relatively small body count while still ramping up the spook factor, and of course the teen romance. Gotta have that.
One-Line Review: When someone is stalking you, TELL PEOPLE.
Full Review:
I don't have much to say about this book. It was average. I didn't read it for the first time until I was in my late teens, so I don't have all the warm fuzzy feelings surrounding it that I have with some of the older Point Horrors, which probably makes me a bit more critical.
The basic premise of the book is that Janna, a dancer in a (presumably) small theatre group, is being "stalked" by someone who leaves her flowers and notes, and who plays nasty tricks on her, like making threatening phone calls and dropping a set piece on her while she's onstage alone. In a turnaround from Ellis' early novel My Secret Admirer, Janna assumes that the nice things (the flowers) and the nasty things are coming from the same person, which is the first plot point that I find difficult to swallow. (I've had secret admirers before, and I've had stalkers, and I've never confused the two.)
Anyway, Janna runs around a lot, screeching about the things that are happening and letting the stress affect her performances, but doesn't actually tell anyone aside from her roommates until two thirds of the way through the book. Herein lies hard-to-believe point #2. Her reasons for not calling the police or reporting it to someone in charge of the play include 'What can anyone do? I don't know who it is!' and '[the choreographer, who seems to fill the role of producer here] doesn't like to hear excuses about bad performing'. Um, okay. If I were getting threatening notes and being followed around by some weirdo, I'd tell the people in charge of the production, the security in charge of each theatre I performed at, and the police. But maybe that's just me.
She does eventually tell the police, but not until she's been attacked twice. Turns out she was right, they were fairly useless. This seems to be a common theme in Point Horror.
What was good about this book? Well, it was readable. Aside from the two things I've mentioned there wasn't anything majorly wrong with it, and those alone do not make a bad book; I'm used to books that require some suspension of disbelief. Also, I didn't predict the bad guy. They were on my list, as most characters are when I read books like these, but there were at least three or four suspects that I thought were more likely.
The flip side of this is that, although I've read the book three or four times in the last decade, I didn't REMEMBER who the bad guy was. In fact, I only had a vague memory of reading it at all. Ask me again in a year, and I'll probably have forgotten again.
Carol Ellis is kind of hit-and-miss for me. Camp Fear was reasonable, and had a certain creepy factor to it, and My Secret Admirer is a shining star from the early days of Point Horror that I adored in childhood and can still read over and over again, but The Stalker is definitely not her best effort.
Janna starts receiving gifts and strange notes while on tour as a dancer in Grease. At first she thinks it is her ex-boyfriend trying to get her back but when the messages get creepier and the attacks get violent she realizes her stalker wants her out of the way. The only problem is Janna has too many suspects and not enough answers. Will she figure out who is trying to scare her before it it too late? I enjoyed this story and how you never knew who was after her until the end. There was also an interesting twist at the end that I did not see coming.
The first page lets the reader know that theater dancer, Janna, has a stalker. And throughout the book you read page after page how Janna is determind to find out and face who is stalking her. But you end up getting the same amount of pages of Janna running, jumping, hiding, screaming, freaking out from every noise or person. I just wanted to scream; 'Damnit, girl!!' I got to the point of not caring at all who the stalker was and why this person was stalking Janna.
I got this from the library on the off chance that it was a book I read ages ago that I've been trying to remember the name of. Sadly, it is not. (For details on the book I'm trying to remember, see this thread here on Goodreads.)
I read this book in one sitting the story line and plot line was pretty good the ending and who stalker was I pretty much figured out in the first few chapters she author made it obvious! It read more for a teenager and the way the characters talked and acting! Overall not a bad read if your looking for a quick and fast easy read!
This was a very good book. I would read it again and again and again. I love how Janna doesn't trust anybody evacuee she doesn't know if they could be her stalker. I definitely recommend this book to everyone.
One of the better point horror books, read this in a couple of hours as I couldn't put it down. Janna is a likeable character and there are plenty of suspects for the stalker to keep you guessing. Love it!
A nice short and easy read. Read it in 2 sittings. It was fast pace and engaging. The ending was very quick and although I didn’t hadn’t suspected the stalker reveal the ending just fell a little flat for me.
An enjoyably chilling addition to point horror, this book is a tense addition to the point horror series and it will have you hanging on the edge of your seat