Column Teen Horror Time Machine Not All in Her Head: The Fever and Bad Dreams Seriously, after the THIRD time your friend is attacked at the creepy hospital, you should start to ask questions. By Alissa Burger | Published on July 30, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share A lot of weird stuff happens in ‘90s teen horror: ghostly presences, the reanimated dead, body swapping, extraterrestrial beings who try to keep a low profile while they meddle in human affairs. While some of these occurrences can be tough for characters to wrap their heads around, it’s one thing to ask “are you sure it was a ghost?” and it’s another thing entirely to say “you must be imagining it” when evidence to the contrary keeps piling up. In Diane Hoh’s The Fever (1992) and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street book Bad Dreams (1994), Duffy Quinn and Maggie Travers are doubted, disbelieved, and have their sanity questioned when they try to tell people what they have seen and heard, despite the fact that something is clearly wrong. No one listens to them, their fears are discounted, and both girls nearly die as a result.  In Hoh’s The Fever, Duffy is hospitalized at Twelvetrees Community Hospital, with a fever that is making her delirious and weak. There’s a really nasty strain of the flu going around town and while the doctors are pretty sure that’s what’s going on with Duffy, no one’s really sure. So she’s stuck in the hospital and miserable. She’s not too lonely though: a surprising number of her high school classmates work at the hospital: Dylan has a job there as a custodian, while Amy and Cynthia are volunteers. There’s a new guy in town named Smith who has all the girls swooning, who works as an orderly at the hospital, though Duffy doesn’t exactly see what all the fuss is about. Her parents and her friend Jane come to visit her frequently, bringing her magazines and keeping her company. The only person from Duffy’s life who hasn’t put in an appearance since she’s been in the hospital is her best friend Kit. Kit was taken in by his aunt and uncle when his parents died and his relationship with them is tense and adversarial; while he has dreams of getting out of their small town, he can’t go to college because his aunt and uncle have told him he needs to stay in Twelvetrees and work in his uncle’s shoe store until he’s paid off all the money they spent taking care of him as a child. When Duffy’s other friends tell her that Kit had a big argument with his uncle and left town, setting his sights on California, she’s not completely surprised. She’s even happy for him, though she is hurt that he didn’t stop by to say goodbye before he split.  There’s lots of interpersonal drama on the hospital floor as well. Amy and Dylan used to date, but it turns out that Dylan broke up with her because he has a crush on Duffy. Dylan and Cynthia are both working at the hospital as a way to get some hands-on experience as they look ahead to their dreams of being doctors. Cynthia is particularly intense, completing her junior and senior year simultaneously—in addition to her work at the hospital—so she can get to college and med school that much more quickly. Smith is a cocky ladies’ man, but he remains an enigma: no one really knows who he is, where he came from, or what his story is.  Rather than being a marvel of modern medicine, the hospital itself is a surprisingly Gothic place: “A tall grim structure of worn gray stone, sparsely covered with wilting ivy, it towered menacingly over the street […] Visitors entering by the wide stone steps puzzled over the thick odor of mold and mildew. They did not realize that the building itself was gradually decaying from the dampness that began at its base and slowly but steadily made its way up the stone” (3). The elevator is constantly breaking down and the hospital experiences frequent power outages, which seems like it would be a pretty big deal with all the life-support and vital monitoring equipment that hospital patients usually need. The hospital has a wealthy benefactor, Victor Latham, who might be able to help make them make some much-needed improvements, though that becomes a lot more complicated when Latham dies in the hospital while there recovering from a heart attack.  On top of all this, Duffy hears an altercation in her room through her fevered haze during her first night there, including sounds of a struggle and a terrified “No! Please don’t!” (1, emphasis original). She has no idea who it could be or what they could be arguing about and there’s no one in the other bed in her room. When she tells people that she heard someone in her room in the night, they brush her off, assuring her that it must have been the nurses coming to check on her (the “duh” is unspoken, but unmistakably implied). While one odd occurrence might be easy enough to dismiss, odd and dangerous things keep happening to Duffy: when she sneaks out of her room to take a walk, she nearly steps into an out-of-order elevator, a mistake that would have sent her plummeting five floors down (a fate from which she is saved by Smith’s quick thinking). As she starts to recover, Duffy is allowed to go outside in a wheelchair, but someone unlocks the chair and sends her flying down the steep hill of the hospital grounds, nearly ending up in a lake before Dylan is able to stop her. When she goes down the hall to take a shower, someone comes into the room, turns off the light, and attacks her, nearly drowning her in the water on the shower room floor, though this time Duffy saves herself, slashing out with the razor she brought with her and wounding her attacker. All three of these instances are terrifying near-death experiences for Duffy—and in each case, the hospital has some liability: the out of order sign was put in front of the wrong elevator, which left the open elevator shaft accessible;there’s speculation that the hospital wheelchair may have malfunctioned;  though Duffy locked the door to the shower room behind her, someone was still able to get in, which suggests a pretty serious security breakdown somewhere. But the response of hospital staff and volunteers is that if Duffy had been resting and following doctor’s orders like she was supposed to, none of this would have happened: she wasn’t supposed to be walking around, they suspect that she tried moving the wheelchair herself and lost control, and she hadn’t been given permission to go the shower room, with the nurses telling her that in her still-weakened state, she would need to be accompanied. So sure, Duffy may have almost died—a few times—but it’s kind of her own fault.  Duffy is also having some symptoms that don’t quite seem to correspond with her doctor’s diagnosis and treatment, including an odd halo effect around the lights in the ceiling that is a new development since she came to the hospital. One night, Duffy overhears a doctor and nurse outside her door talking about a bottle of heart medication that has gone missing. The doctor is incensed, saying “I don’t care if it takes all night, I want that bottle found. In the meantime, if any of the patients start complaining about nausea or dizziness or happen to mention visual problems, for instance that the lights look funny, pay attention” (98). Duffy is definitely paying attention, since these are the exact symptoms she has recently started experiencing, but when she tells hospital staff about it, they are once again dismissive, assuring her that there’s no way a nurse or doctor would mix up the heart medication with her prescribed antibiotics. She is scolded for being a difficult patient and told to just take her medicine and be quiet about it. Jane’s brother has a lab, though, and Duffy begs Jane to test a couple of her pills that she pretended to take and then hid, to find out for sure what they are … and it turns out they are the missing heart medication, just as Duffy suspected.  Duffy decides enough is enough and she’s planning to sneak out of the hospital, figuring she’ll be less likely to die if she just rides out this flu bug at home. But before she can make her escape, someone sneaks into her room at night and tries to kill her (AGAIN). Duffy fights off her attacker and makes a slow and steady run for it, eventually ending up in the hospital’s basement morgue. When Cynthia comes down to the basement with an armload of laundry, Duffy thinks she might have just found her ride home, but all she has really done is back herself into a potentially fatal corner. It turns out Cynthia has made some mistakes, killed to cover them up, and is ready to do so again. The hospital benefactor, Victor Latham, died from an allergic reaction to penicillin after Cynthia was snooping in his file trying to figure out how she could get on his good side to score some future med school connections. Volunteers aren’t allowed to look at these files though and when she’s busted, she hastily pops it back into the files, but in the wrong spot, which (combined with human error on the part of the administering nurse) resulted in Latham’s death. Duffy’s friend Kit saw Cynthia with the file and urges her to tell the doctors what actually happened. Seeing her med school dreams disappearing right before her eyes, Cynthia refuses, kills Kit in Duffy’s room when he comes to see Duffy , dumps Kit’s body and car in a nearby quarry, and starts the rumor that he left town. All’s well that ends well (for Cynthia at least) … until Duffy finds out what happened, so now Cynthia has to kill her too. Duffy fights Cynthia off in the morgue by blinding her with some bug spray, stabbing her with a hypodermic needle, and then knocking her down with one of the rolling shelves, saving herself and making sure Cynthia won’t get away with it. When she wakes up in her room surrounded by her friends, they have the good grace to say “We’re all really sorry we didn’t believe you” (184), but that doesn’t really make up for not listening to Duffy’s cries for help as she was almost murdered multiple times under their watch.  In Stine’s Bad Dreams, rather than an overheard struggle, Maggie Travers has a recurring dream of a young woman being murdered in her bed. Maggie, her sister Andrea, and their mother have just moved into a new house on Fear Street. The girls’ father died unexpectedly from a stroke and without him, they can’t afford to keep their house in the wealthy North Hills section of Shadyside. Maggie and Andrea are constantly arguing and as they get settled in the new house, the first thing they argue about is who gets to sleep in the antique canopy bed the previous owners left behind. The bed was left in the room that Maggie had claimed for her own on their earlier visit (after Andrea chose the bigger, quieter bedroom in the back of the house) and their mother says the bed is Maggie’s, despite Andrea’s objections that “that’s soooo unfair!” (22). It turns out to be not such a prize though, when Maggie starts having nightmares and later, finds out from the neighbors that Miranda, the girl who used to live there, was actually murdered in that bed.  A bad dream in a new place following a traumatic loss is understandable and early on, even Maggie doubts the significance of her recurring nightmare. However, the nightmare begins to be echoed by inexplicable and troubling things happening in her real life. Maggie and Andrea are on the swim team and are two of the finalists for an All-State competition race, along with two other girls, Dawn and Tiffany. Someone pushes Dawn down the stairs at school, breaking her arm and knocking her out of the competition, then sneaks up on Tiffany after swim team practice and stabs her. Both girls survive, but they won’t be racing any time soon. The danger hits closer to home when Maggie finds a knife stabbed into her pillow. Maggie suspects Andrea—and honestly, has plenty of good reason to—but this theory goes out the window when Maggie wakes up one night to find the girl from the nightmare standing over her bed, holding a knife. She asks the girl “Are you—a ghost?” (111, emphasis original). The girl nods calmly, then comes at Maggie, ready to stab her as she screams for help. Maggie was nearly murdered in her bed—just like Miranda before her—but when her mom hears Maggie’s story of seeing the strange girl, who disappears out the window before Maggie’s mom comes in, her response to Maggie is “Don’t worry. I’ll get you help. I’ll get you help right away, dear. We’ll find a good doctor. You’ll be okay. I know you will” (113). Maggie’s mom doubts her daughter’s sanity when she should be trying to protect her from attempted murder and much like Duffy’s terrifying hospital adventures, this leaves the opportunity for the murderer to try again.  Determined to get to the bottom of the nightmare mystery and her ghostly attacker, Maggie heads up to the house’s attic, where her mom has moved the canopy bed, figuring it’s best to remove the trigger for Maggie’s bad dreams. As Maggie walks closer to the bed, she sees the girl from her room, who is very much alive. Maggie has assumed that it’s Miranda who has been haunting her, in the hopes of avenging her murder, but the girl she finds in the attic is Miranda’s sister Gena. Gena killed Miranda, and while she had been institutionalized, she escaped and has been living in the Travers’ attic the whole time they’ve been at the Fear Street house, sneaking out at night to stand over Maggie’s bed with a knife and plotting her next murder. Gena has seen the tense relationship between Maggie and Andrea and in a kind of sibling rivalry by proxy situation, has decided that Maggie has to die too. As Gena tells Maggie, “Miranda was mean—like you!” (139). Gena is Team Andrea all the way and when Maggie’s would-be murderer warmly greets her sister by name, she briefly wonders if Andrea might have been in on it the whole time, screaming “Do you really hate me that much?” (142, emphasis original). But Andrea is just as surprised by Gena’s rampage as anyone, becoming more and more horrified as Gena tells her “I did everything for you” (142), including eliminating the swim team competition by attacking Dawn and Tiffany and now, taking out Maggie. With their lives on the line, Maggie and Andrea finally figure out how to work together, wrapping and restraining Gena in the bed’s canopy cloth in a move that would be right at home in a Scooby-Doo episode, then calling for help.  In The Fever and Bad Dreams, Duffy and Maggie tell those around them that something’s going on and their lives are in danger. No one believes them—and at times, they even doubt themselves, but they refuse to be silenced and they never let their guard down. They contend with others’ doubt, ridicule, and pity, but emerge vindicated and victorious. In a world that all too often questions girls’ and women’s perceptions, the protagonists of The Fever and Bad Dreams refuse to be silenced, trust their instincts and awareness, and survive.  The post Not All in Her Head: <em>The Fever</em> and <em>Bad Dreams</em> appeared first on Reactor.