"Beach House" is a 1992 horror novel by R.L. Stine, most famous for the Goosebumps series of books. This book predates the Goosebumps series, and is written for older readers, although it still is more tame in terms of content than the average adult horror novel. The book is told in two time periods, with four sections that go between 1956 and "contemporary times". It is also written as a psychological thriller, with supernatural elements kept ambiguous until the end. To really discuss this book, I will have to discuss those supernatural elements, so spoilers on this 30+ old book: there is a supernatural explanation for what is going on.
The story begins in 1956, with a group of young teens having fun at a beach resort in some undescribed location. Rock n Roll is just starting, and the kids are into it, but these are also kind of generic kids---not super rebellious, not super good, just teenagers having fun. Part of that fun involves teasing and bullying a kid who is slightly different, Buddy, who is too square. Two of them, Ronnie and Stuart, pants Buddy in the water, and despite the pleas of their girlfriends, Amy and Maria, they taunt and play keepaway. This leads to Buddy becoming enraged and planning revenge on all of them, the boys and the girls. All of this seems to be tied in with the existence of a mysterious, uninhabited Beach House that we should probably guess is important because its described as eerie and also is the title of the book. In Part II of the book, we are brought to "This Summer", presumably 1992 or so, and we meet another group of typical teens at the same beach resort. The main characters here are Ashley, whose main problem is that her boyfriend, Ross, is too possessive of her, when she wants to just have some flirty fun at the beach. She meets a rich boy from town, Brad, which increases her boyfriend's jealousy as he offers her private tennis lessons. There are a few more characters thrown in, probably as red herrings, but there are a few standard themes: romantic jealousy, low-grade bullying, class consciousness and resentment, and men white knighting women. Some of these are combined: Ross is jealous at Brad for being rich, and a character named Dennis attacks Ross when he seems him yelling at Ashley. This gives us several possible plots and suspects for what is going on, as we go through another section in 1956 and "This Summer" before concluding the story.
And this is where I have to give spoilers to the mystery: the abandoned Beach House is actually on a time warp, and Buddy and Brad are the same person---after discovering the time portal, Brad goes back to the 50s, becomes "Buddy", and has his revenge there. This is actually a good horror/mystery twist, as we realize that the descriptions of the characters match up perfectly. Not knowing that this was a supernatural story, however, I didn't guess that particular twist. At the climax of the book, Brad/Buddy's time travelling adventures and murders catch up with him, and Ashley and Ross are reconciled. And about that-
One reason I described so much of the plot of this book is that it is important to understand why I think this book is important and demonstrative. Especially because, despite some objections, I generally think that R.L. Stine is a very good writer when it comes to capturing psychological dynamics in a succinct way. And this book actually does that in a realistic and instructive way. It describes teenage life with no heroes: when we first encounter the teens teasing Buddy, we don't like them because they are bullies, but also recognize why they might not like him. The romantic jealousy and manipulation all seems real, as does the resentment of the town residents who have to cater to the rich. R.L. Stine paints an entire panorama of what teen life is like, and lets us choose and guess where the threat is coming from. But that is also a failure point of this book, both in terms of its literary quality and its social message. After establishing that bullying and jealousy are threats, at the end of the book, the real danger comes from outside, and from something not related to real life. All of the normal violence and harassment that teenagers have to face is just a normal part of growing up, and the only real threat comes from a supernatural quarter. The reason this doesn't work from a literary standpoint is that so much effort was put into describing a milieu of low-level hostility with some realism, only to have the plot resolved out of left field through the supernatural. And it also is an odd social message, because statistically speaking, most women are at more risk from a jealous boyfriend than they are from a time traveler coming back through a portal in an abandoned beach house. So while I like how well R.L. Stine described a certain setting, and advanced a plot, I feel that by the end of the book, he in some ways failed to fulfill the premise of his book. This might seem like a burden to put on one novel, but it is curious to see the development of concepts like awareness of sexual harassment and bullying in the early 90s, and then the failure to come to a conclusion about those concepts. Especially since the core notion that concludes this book, that sexual harassment or jealousy from within a social group is a normal part of growing up, while when it comes from outside of the group, it is an evil threat, still persists in our society.