Fear Street - Missing

Fear Street - Missing is a young adult horror novel by R. L. Stine, published in 1990. It is an early entry in the sequence of books named for the street rather than one of the later numbered cycles.

The disappearance is the opening event rather than the mystery's answer. Mark and Cara Burroughs assume their parents are merely late, which is a reasonable reading until the pattern of other failures accumulates: a relationship ends abruptly, a girl vanishes, the authorities decline to investigate and the relative living in the house behaves secretively. The novel's technique is to make each individual event explicable and the sequence not.

The books in this line are connected by place rather than by continuing characters, which is why the front matter invites the reader to explore Fear Street rather than to follow a cast. The subjects also mention hate groups, so the plot involves organised malice rather than only a single antagonist, and the answer is placed in the Fear Street woods. Fear Street began in 1989 and its books are set in the invented town of Shadyside, where the street of the title supplies both the line's name and its recurring location.