The Girlfriend

The Girlfriend is a young adult horror novel by R. L. Stine, published in 1991. It is one of the novels Stine wrote for teenagers in the period when his Fear Street books were being established.

The premise is a choice made badly. Scotty has a girlfriend, Lora, whom he describes in ideal terms, and while she is out of town he begins something with Shannon, who he has only just met. The novel's engine is the asymmetry between what he intends, which is a brief episode, and what Shannon intends, which is to keep him permanently. He has no intention of leaving Lora, and the story lets the reader see what he has not: that Shannon's plans do not end when the weekend does.

That makes it a domestic thriller rather than a supernatural story, and the threat is a person rather than a creature. Stine wrote most of these titles at around this length, designed to be read in a single sitting. The book is built on a single decision and its consequences, and the threat is social rather than supernatural, which is the register Stine used for older teenagers rather than for his Goosebumps readership.