Books Teen Horror Time Machine Haves and Have Nots: R.L. Stine’s The Rich Girl Always double-check the spelling on your counterfeit money, kids. By Alissa Burger | Published on August 27, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share One theme that ‘90s teen horror books address much more effectively than I remembered from my own teen reading is the way in which money and class shape their protagonists’ lives and experiences. While this isn’t often the central focus of the plot—which is much more preoccupied with murder, mayhem, and a wide range of human and supernatural horrors—authors like R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, and Diane Hoh often include details that highlight the stratified class hierarchy of young adulthood, including the often steep price tag of the “right” clothes and feasible post-graduation possibilities, from a college education to getting a job to help support their family.  Some of the protagonists of teen horror have never had to worry about money a day in their lives and likely never will: in Christopher Pike’s Weekend (1986), Robin and Lena Carlton are the heirs to a fortune, with a vacation house in Mexico and plenty of money to get Robin the very best medical care when she her kidneys are damaged by a poisoned beer. In R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, Reva Dalby’s father owns Dalby’s Department Stores; he gives Reva everything she wants and she knows that someday she’ll inherit it all, without ever having to climb the corporate ladder or put in a hard day’s work. In Hoh’s Nightmare Hall book Deadly Attraction (1993), when somebody sets Robert Q. Parker’s sports car on fire, it’s no big deal: his dad just buys him a new one and has it delivered to campus.  But there are plenty of other teens who aren’t nearly as lucky. Most of the people who live on Stine’s Fear Street have chosen the neighborhood for its low house prices rather than its atmosphere, but even Fear Street is a step up from Shadyside’s Old Village, where down-on-their-luck families, runaway teens, and criminals live in inexpensive apartments and run down homes. And while there are some trust fund kids like Robert Q. Parker attending Salem University in Hoh’s Nightmare Hall series, there are lots of other students who are there on scholarship or working campus jobs to pay their way through school. In the Fear Street book Killer’s Kiss (1997), going to college is Delia’s ticket out of Shadyside, and she’s willing to kill to get the scholarship that will make it happen. Leigh Janiak’s 2021 Fear Street trilogy on Netflix tapped into this class consciousness very effectively in the tension between Shadyside and Sunnyvale.  While the impact of money and social position are implicit in many of these teen horror books, it is often one part of a larger interpersonal dynamic or series of events. But with Stine’s Fear Street book The Rich Girl (1997) these concerns take center stage. Emma Naylor and Sydney Shue have been best friends for years, but their lives and experiences are very different: “Emma lived in a tiny, run-down house in the Old Village. Sydney’s sprawling mansion sat on five acres of land in North Hills, where everybody had plenty of money […] Emma works because she has to, Sydney thought. I work because Mom and Dad don’t want me to be spoiled. They want me to learn responsibility” (4). Emma is being raised by her mom, with no dad in the picture, while Sydney’s parents are happily married. Emma drives a beat up old car that is a hand-me-down from her uncle, while Sydney’s parents bought her a new car for her birthday (though they do make her pay for the insurance). Their lives and the options these young women have available to them are very different and while Emma needs good grades if she has any hope of getting a scholarship to go to college, she needs extra hours at the movie theater even more, because her mom needs knee replacement surgery, will be unable to keep her job as a waitress if she doesn’t get it soon, and they have no health insurance. Sydney listens to Emma’s predicament and has the self-awareness to realize that while they both work the same job, Sydney is the only one who could “walk away from it without worrying about how to pay for food or clothes. Or operations” (4). Sydney, Emma, and the other teens in these books are born into their parents’ circumstances, for better or worse, and like Emma, for many of them their jobs are more than a way to make a little extra spending money or build work experience: they help keep their families financially afloat, a pressure they are rarely ready to handle. But if they’re going to have roofs over their heads, food on the tables, and (in Emma’s case) be able to afford her mother’s operation, they don’t have a choice in the matter.  At the end of their shift, Emma and Sydney take out the trash and find a duffle bag full of money stashed in the dumpster, bundles of fifty-dollar bills that they estimate to be at least $100,000. While they are both looking at the same duffle bag and gobsmacked with the same disbelief, this discovery carries dramatically different weight for the two girls, which is reflected in their initial reactions. Sydney’s immediate response is that they need to take the money to the police, a course of action that horrifies Emma, who can’t help but think about the way this kind of money could change her life. The money would be more than enough to pay for Emma’s mother’s operation and as Emma tells Sydney, “You know what else I could do with this money? I could go to college. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting that scholarship anymore. And I could buy some decent clothes!” (12-13). Sydney isn’t convinced and as she wrestles with the ethical conundrum of what they should do with the money, Emma loses patience with her in an outburst that shows just how different their worldviews are, saying “You don’t understand what it’s like to be really poor. What it’s like to want something you can’t have. But I do. And I’m telling you, we’ve got to keep this money!” (13, emphasis original). In spite of Sydney’s earlier self-awareness, Emma’s words catch her by surprise, as she wonders “Has Emma always resented me for being rich? […] Did I just not see it? I never made a big deal about having money. I never bragged about myself or put her down for being poor” (13). As sensitive as Sydney tries to be to Emma’s vastly different circumstances, she still has some blind spots and as a result of her privilege, will never see the world in quite the same way that Emma does.  The girls come to a compromise and decide to bury the money, wait a couple of weeks, and if no one has claimed it, they’ll keep it. Neither one of them wants the money in their house in the meantime though, so they bury it under a willow tree in the Fear Street woods, swear one another to secrecy, and call it a night. But of course, it’s never that easy. Sydney’s boyfriend Jason is waiting for her when she gets home and when she’s a bit cagey about where she’s been, he jumps to the conclusion that Sydney has been out with another guy. Sydney is intimidated by his anger (which is a pretty big relationship red flag in and of itself) and placates Jason by letting him in on the secret. Jason and Emma don’t like each other, but Sydney is still shocked and horrified when his immediate response is that they should kill Emma so they can keep the money all for themselves. He laughs it off as a joke, but Sydney starts to wonder about Jason’s true intentions when Emma falls down the stairs at school and says Jason pushed her. He admits that he bumped into Emma by accident and apologizes by doing some work on her car for free, which is a nice gesture … until Emma discovers that her brake lines have been cut, which almost results in Emma and Sydney getting into a bad accident.  After a couple of near-death experiences, Emma decides that the best path forward is to offer Jason a third of the money, in the hopes that if he’s an equal partner with them, he’ll be more complacent and less murder-y. But why would he settle for a third of the money when he could kill the girls and take it all? Sydney is running back to the car for a sweater while Emma and Jason dig up the money when she hears a struggle: she comes back to find Jason dead and Emma wielding a bloody shovel, claiming self-defense. While Sydney panics, Emma disposes of the body, weighing Jason down with a rock in Fear Lake, shoveling the dirt back over the money, and getting them the heck out of there. They wait for Jason’s body to be found and the questions to start, but instead, his moldering corpse pays Sydney a visit and both girls get anonymous notes calling them murderers. Emma thinks Sydney is losing it and Sydney is too terrified to reach out to anyone else about what’s going on, leaving her alone with her terror and her now-dead boyfriend.  Except he’s not really dead. Emma and Jason have been seeing one another behind Sydney’s back, pretending they hate each other to keep her from suspecting anything. Emma’s financial need is much more pressing than Jason’s, but he does have a taste for expensive sneakers and high-end electronics that his parents’ middle-class funds can’t quite satisfy. When the girls find the bag full of money, Emma and Jason come up with a plan: they’ll fake Jason’s murder and undead return, play on Sydney’s guilt and horror, and drive her crazy. Emma has no doubt that Sydney’s parents will put her in a really top notch mental health facility, thinking “It will cost them a fortune […] But so what? They can afford it” (129).  Neither Emma nor Jason seem to have any regrets, quickly moving past Sydney’s trauma to hightail it to woods and dig up their bag full of money, then on to the mall for a shopping spree. The first thing Emma wants to buy is a beautiful leather jacket, but as she pulls out some of their ill-gotten cash to pay for it, she gets a nasty surprise: the money is counterfeit. And the counterfeiting isn’t even convincing, with the typo “UNTIED STATES OF AMERICA” and an image of a Benjamin Franklin whose “eyes were crossed and he wore a backwards baseball cap over his wig” (132). Apparently, none of the teens noticed this unsubtle artistic license, with greed and obliviousness leading them down a path of fake murder and shattered sanity.  In some ways, the chain of events of The Rich Girl reads like an old-school E.C. Comic, in which unscrupulous people get their comeuppance, but it feels incomplete. As the story ends, nothing really bad has happened to Emma and Jason, aside from a snooty salesperson laughing at them, and Sydney is still in bad shape, with no clear indication of whether or not she’ll ever recover from believing she was an accomplice to a murder and haunted by her dead boyfriend. And while Emma’s initial motivation for keeping the money to pay for her mother’s operation is an understandable one, her desire for it and the lengths to which she is willing to go to keep it make her monstrous.  At the end of The Rich Girl, nobody wins. Emma and Jason have done terrible things in the pursuit of false fortune and Sydney’s future is uncertain. Even the title is open to interpretation: who is “the rich girl” and what is Stine’s lesson (if there is one)? If Sydney is the rich girl, her wealth can’t protect her from the people she thought she could trust, but who are all too willing to betray and destroy her. And if Emma’s the rich girl, lost in her imaginings of the way this money could change her life, that wealth proves meaningless and illusory. In The Rich Girl, all that glitters definitely isn’t gold, and a bag full of money can’t make you rich if it isn’t real.[end-mark] The post Haves and Have Nots: R.L. Stine’s <em>The Rich Girl</em> appeared first on Reactor.