That spooky Halloween season is here, and it's got nostalgic '90s kids thinking about a debate that raged in the schoolyards way back when: Which scary '90s kids TV show was better: Are You Afraid of the Dark? or Goosebumps? If we're being honest, AYAOTD, but Goosebumps scribe R.L. Stine wrote another series of horror books that might have been the spookiest teenage TV show of the decade had they been adapted for the small screen: Fear Street.

These compact, serialized murder mysteries about sexy teenagers and the haunted Shadyside, a town filled with more death and natural redheads than one could comprehend. They were dark, delicious, and full of twisted betrayal. Siblings turned against each other, girls stole each other’s boyfriends, money turned kids evil, and there may or may not have been legit ghosts, witches, a haunted street, and other supernatural weirdness.

While a trilogy of Fear Street movies is set to kick off in the summer of next year, those films can't make up for the missed opportunity. Here are five Fear Street books that were so juicy, so dramatic, and so spooky that they made Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer look like pristine boarding-school dramas filled with stable, kind-hearted kids doing charity work in exchange for cookies!