Posted by Leah Schnelbach
https://reactormag.com/r-l-stines-the-cataluna-chronicles-teen-horror-time-machine-review/
https://reactormag.com/?p=824172
Highway to History: R.L. Stine’s The Cataluna Chronicles
In which R.L. Stine asks Back to the Future to hold his teen-appropriate non-alcoholic beverage.
By Alissa Burger
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Published on September 18, 2025
The majority of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books function as interconnected but standalone narratives: there’s a shared setting and some familiar characters that appear time and again, but generally speaking, you don’t need to have read the previous books in the series in order to jump right in. There are, however, a handful of exceptions, where Stine features a trilogy or series within the larger Fear Street series, like 99 Fear Street trilogy (1994), the Silent Night trilogy (1991-96), and the Cheerleaders series (1992-98). Another of Stine’s lesser known trilogies within the Fear Street series is the Cataluna Chronicles, which includes The Evil Moon, The Dark Secret, and The Deadly Fire (all 1995) and centers around an evil sports car that threatens the life of anyone who dares to drive it. Any book that features a sentient, malevolent car will inevitably invite comparisons with Stephen King’s Christine (1983) and there are some of these in Stine’s books, but the Cataluna Chronicles also has some unique surprises of its own.
The trio of Cataluna Chronicles books are pretty fatalistic and the body count is high. The prologue of the first book, The Evil Moon, follows the misadventures of two young men who steal the Cataluna for a joyride from a used car lot, find themselves powerless in a car that’s charging down the highway at eighty miles an hour, and bail out on the unforgiving pavement, only to be run over by a tractor trailer. From these opening pages, Stine makes it clear that the Cataluna is not messing around and this isn’t going to be one of those Fear Street books where everything turns out mostly okay in the end, explained away by a prank gone awry, mistaken identity, or someone faking their own death. These two boys steal the car and they die. The end. Or at least, the end of the beginning.
After this hard-hitting prologue, The Evil Moon makes an unexpected turn, taking readers not back to the used car lot or familiar Fear Street, but to West Hampshire Colony in 1698. Early colonial America doesn’t really seem like the natural fit for a technohorror(ish) series about an evil car, but it’s where we go and where we first meet fifteen year old Catherine Hatchett, an outcast young woman who is lurking outside the school windows eavesdropping on the lessons within, because as a girl, she has been forbidden attendance. She is curious and smart, able to conjugate the Latin verb tenses that stymie the boys in the classroom, though her reward for her intelligence is to be chased through the woods, assaulted, and ridiculed. Her nickname in the community is “Bad Luck Catherine” and the colonists blame her for everything from their failing crops to their ailing livestock, and even her own mother scolds Catherine, telling her “You have caused enough trouble for one day. You have caused enough trouble for a lifetime!” (17). Catherine was presumably born under a “bad moon,” which marked her body with a crescent moon-shaped birthmark on her temple. Her only friend is Gwendolyn, an old woman and suspected witch who lives in the woods outside of the settlement.
When the West Hampshire Colony votes to expel Catherine from the community and her parents reveal that they’re not actually her parents, with Catherine instead being a foundling child that was left on their doorstep after the death of their own infant, Catherine realizes that there’s more to her story than she has ever known: Gwendolyn is her biological mother, a witch, and a shapeshifter, a gift that has been genetically passed down to Catherine and which she uses to escape the colonists when they attempt to hang her. Catherine turns into a cat to claw out the eyes of Joseph Parker, a boy who seduced and betrayed her, then turns into a rat and forces her furry body down the throat of colony elder Edmund Parker, suffocating him. Gwendolyn is murdered by the angry colonists, leaving Catherine alone with her newfound power, no one to guide her in its use, and no way to escape … until she finds her mother’s final gift, a shiny white sports car that is completely anachronistic and looks very out of place in the dark woods behind Gwendolyn’s cottage. Catherine initially believes it to be a monster: “the creature’s eyes began to glow with a bright yellow light … The monster stretched out as long as her parents’ woodshed. But stood not half as tall. It had four black wheels and clear windowpanes all around. Through those panes she found another wheel of sorts. And two rows of seats, red as blood” (124). It turns out Gwendolyn magically brought this car from the future and it becomes Catherine’s only way to escape the danger in which she finds herself. But she doesn’t make the trip alone: William Parker, brother of Joseph and son of Edmund, is not about to let Catherine get away after murdering his family, and he goes along for this bizarre road trip through time and space.
The Evil Moon, The Dark Secret, and The Deadly Fire trace the Cataluna’s destructive path through Shadyside in 1995, along with Catherine and William’s deadly game of cat and mouse across the centuries. In The Evil Moon, Bryan Folger becomes obsessed with the car when he sees it in a used car lot and is willing to do anything to possess it: he has a part-time job with a florist and steals money from a stranger’s home when he’s there delivering flowers; he breaks into another house to steal more money and when he’s arrested and ends up assigned to community service at the local hospital’s gift shop, he steals money from the register there too. When he sees the Cataluna in his friend Alan’s driveway (because Alan knew how much the car meant to Bryan and bought it for him, which seems excessive, but whatever), Bryan assaults Alan and steals the car. His initial moments of euphoria are overwhelming, but just like the two boys in the prologue, Bryan soon loses control of the Cataluna, which starts driving faster and trying to run down pedestrians and small children, while Bryan screams and attempts to turn the car back toward Alan’s house, figuring if he can get it back where it’s “meant” to be, the nightmare will end. And it kind of does: the car returns to Alan’s house but by the time it gets there, Bryan is dead: “Burst blood vessels had turned his face reddish-blue. A terrifying silent scream twisted his features. His blank eyes bulged. His dead hands still gripped the wheel” (137).
In The Dark Secret, Lauren and Regina Patterson are stepsisters and their parents buy the Cataluna as the girls’ shared car. Regina quickly becomes obsessed with the car, insisting on driving every time the girls go out together, and she nearly runs down a couple of children: one on rollerblades and another on a tricycle. Both kids escape unscathed, though the tricycle is smashed to smithereens as “Regina threw back her head and laughed” (43). The car drives a wedge between Lauren and Regina, and when there’s a series of hit and runs in Shadyside, Lauren is sure it’s Regina. She tries to cover for her stepsister but every time Lauren tries to broach the subject with Regina, she is shut down. When Lauren finally confronts Regina, the truth comes out: Lauren is the hit and run driver, not Regina. While she has repressed the memories of the terrible things that have happened in the car, they all come rushing back to her: “A man’s face pressed against her windshield, face contorted in pain. Blood running from his mouth, smearing across the glass … Metal slamming against metal. A scream of terror. Squealing tires. A body landing on the hood with a heavy thunk “ (129, emphasis original). The car urges Lauren to run down Regina but she resists, plunging the car into a nearby lake and nearly dying in her attempt to get rid of the Cataluna, though Regina swims to her rescue. Even waterlogged, the car’s not finished, though: as the rescue personnel pull the car from the lake, one of the firefighters on scene is captivated, reflecting that “I’d like to get a sports car like that … Man, that car is wicked!” (135, emphasis original). He has no idea. But while Lauren and Regina survive the Cataluna’s curse, plenty of innocent people died along the way, and when Lauren tries to explain that it was the car and not her that is responsible, Regina only says “We’ll talk about it later” (134), which doesn’t offer much in terms of what the criminal consequences of Lauren’s series of vehicular homicides might be.
In the third book of the trilogy, The Deadly Fire, people are at least wise to the Cataluna’s death toll, though a family of race car drivers leverages this reputation into a racetrack gimmick, where fans turn out in droves to see the “Doom Car” in competition. The first race is off to a good start until the Cataluna does what it always does, wresting control from driver Stan McCloy and plowing into the stands, killing both Stan and a number of spectators. While most of the McCloys are understandably ready to be shut of the Cataluna, Stan’s brother Buddy becomes increasingly obsessed with it, sneaking it out of his father’s garage to race it on his own along the dark streets of Shadyside. His fickle on again-off again girlfriend Sara is a race track groupie and only seems interested in Buddy if he’s got the hottest car, his new neighbor Marisol seems intrigued by the Cataluna, and there’s a new guy in town named Will who also fancies himself a race car driver (and quickly becomes a rival for Sara’s affections).
William Parker spends much of the trilogy pursuing Catherine Hatchett from place to place and across centuries, often faced with the riddle of trying to figure out who she has shape-shifted into this time. Immediately after she flees the West Hampshire Colony, he follows her to a nearby farmstead, where he works to determine which of his new friends’ bodies his enemy might be hiding within, attacking the family cat and killing an innocent young woman before he gets it right. This question of Catherine’s shapeshifted form is at the heart of The Deadly Fire as well, where everyone seems to have designs on the Cataluna and no one’s intentions or motivations are particularly clear. When William and Catherine made the temporal leap from 1698 to 1995, Catherine’s spirit was imprisoned in the car while William’s found a home in a new human body. This is a new development: William maintained his own body in the immediate aftermath of Catherine’s violence in the West Hampshire Colony, and before he shows up in a human body as a character in The Deadly Fire, he seems to have been a kind unseen presence watching from the shadows, monitoring the Cataluna’s death toll and serving as an occasional narrator, there, but largely invisible. The prevailing assumption throughout The Deadly Fire is that William is now (uncreatively and lazily) Will, but William’s spirit actually occupies Marisol’s body—and after yet another fatal encounter, where a drag race with the Cataluna ends in Will’s death, Marisol takes the wheel, ready to stop Catherine once and for all.
William’s embodiment in Marisol’s female body is actually handled in a straightforward and nonsensationalized way, and William’s residence in a female form is not sexualized or presented as abject or grotesque. William comfortably occupies this physical form while remaining true to his own identity, telling Catherine matter-of-factly that “I don’t blame you for not recognizing me … But it is me inside this girl’s body. It is me—your old friend William Parker” (117). Once he has revealed his identity, the story seamlessly transitions to referring to him as William and using masculine pronouns, grounded in his identity rather than the physical body he occupies.
William has pursued Catherine across centuries and has dedicated himself tirelessly to learning the secrets of the Cataluna, and as a result, he is able to do what no one else ever has: wrest control of the car from Catherine’s spirit and return it to where he first encountered it, in West Hampshire Colony in 1698. There’s a time travel paradox at work as William tells Catherine “I’m destroying this car nearly three hundred years before your mother was born, Catherine! … Do you know what that means? That means your mother will never exist in this time and place. And so, you will never exist. You will never be born!” (134, emphasis original). While this time travel conundrum offers a retribution of sorts, the Cataluna’s destruction is also grounded in supernatural vengeance, as the spirits of all the people the car has killed emerge to attack and destroy Catherine. And just like that, all of the Cataluna’s horrors are erased and undone, though the danger itself may be reborn as William wakes up disoriented in the woods and returns home to find that his mother has given birth to a baby girl … with a small crescent moon birthmark on her temple. Stine’s Cataluna Chronicles are a curious combination of historical fiction and technohorror, connecting a sentient, malevolent car with historical ostracism that parallels that of the witchcraft hysteria of Salem in 1692. While Catherine is initially presented as sympathetic and even pitiable, she quickly becomes monstrous, consumed with a hate that lasts for hundreds of years. William is presented with similar complexity, driven by vengeance to do some terrible things. In the end, when William succeeds in bringing Catherine back to her own time and destroying the car, the resolution is tenuous and potentially transitory. It could be that with Catherine’s erasure and the car’s destruction, the horrors of both the present and the future have been undone, or with the birth of the new Parker baby with the familiar crescent moon birthmark, the horrors could just be beginning (again).[end-mark]
The post Highway to History: R.L. Stine’s The Cataluna Chronicles appeared first on Reactor.
https://reactormag.com/r-l-stines-the-cataluna-chronicles-teen-horror-time-machine-review/
https://reactormag.com/?p=824172
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