I wish I could say that I enjoyed this book, but this has to be the worst thing I've ever read by Stine. It's not exactly the "grab the matches and gasoline" read that other mainstream books might have been, but it's probably one of the most bland and mediocre books that I've read this year. What makes this especially disappointing is that there's the start of a truly great idea here. I think that's why this review is a little more harsh than some of my other ones: Stine can and has done better. 
 I'm a big fan of Stine's Fear Street and Goosebumps series, as I'd read them fairly religiously as a kid. I'd gone into this aware that although his books were fun, Stine isn't Proust. Nor is he Stephen King. The problem with this book is that somewhere along the writing process, Stine forgot that he was writing for adults rather than for children or teens. He does things here that might have been overlooked by a younger audience, but for an adult audience makes the work seem shallow and unrealistic even by supernatural fiction standards. I don't mean that to come across as sounding like younger readers aren't just as demanding, but think of it this way: if Stine had tried to sell Fear Street's The Stepsister to an adult audience, it wouldn't have flown. 
 Part of the problem is that there's never a moment in the book where I particularly cared what happened to anyone. At times Lea is quite possibly one of the stupidest women in fiction and the Tommy Boy quote of "did you eat a lot of paint chips when you were a kid" kept ringing through my head throughout the book. Her husband Mark isn't much better. Both of them never really think much beyond their own egoes and rather than play this up for the book, Stine almost completely ignores this element. 
 The menace of Daniel and Samuel isn't particularly convincing either. Seriously, when they started brainwashing kids into painting blue arrows on their cheeks and having them chant that they'll "rule the school", that's about when I realized that nothing was going to make this any better. Another reviewer said that this might have worked if it was a Goosebumps book, but it's awful when you try to sell it to an adult audience. 
 I don't think I've read a book this underwhelming since Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. I'd have given up reading this book a while ago except that I kept waiting for Stine to put something in here that would make me feel that my time spent here was actually going to pay off. I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend that anyone curious about this book get it from the library. Don't spend money on this one, at least not until you've read enough to know that you'll like it. This bland, mediocre novel full of equally bland characters is a dud.