2.5 rounded up to 3

This is the second of the 'Fear Street Super Chiller' spin-off that I've read this year. While 'The Dead Lifeguard' felt worth the extra page count, 'Silent Night 2' didn't do much to raise the stakes throughout and so it felt bulky at times, particularly in the front half.

It also does that thing a lot of series were doing at the time where the cover is completely misleading. It's been many years since I read the original 'Silent Night' novel, and so maybe the Christmas aesthetic played into the story more (at the very least, I feel like the song 'silent night' played a bigger role in terms of the creep factor).

Not only is the cover much creepier than anything we find within the pages, it's completely misleading. This is an incredibly straightforward kidnapping heist story with absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever.

The teenagers, as is typical of a Stine novel, feel like teenagers and use teenage logic and decision-making. This was easily the best part of the story. I can 100% imagine a pair of teenagers coming up with this kidnapping plot as a means of, I kid you not: randsoming the daughter of a rich local businessman for a million dollars.

The literally don't think it through any more than that. There's no discussion of how they'll get the money without being identified, they allow themselves to be seen lurking around the department store with zero explanation for why they're there and no thought at all about the fact that if they called from within the department store, their location would be easily traceable.

They're appropriately immature is I guess what I'm getting at. And that was fun to read about as an adult.

But the plot really dragged due to a lot of false starts, and the subplot about Reva trying to steal her cousin's boyfriend, while relevant to part of the climax, got entirely too much 'screentime.'

I'm glad I read it, though, if for no other reason than as a reminder of how much better the original 'Silent Night' was.