Talking About Books: Party Line

29th February, 2024

It’s not exactly a book review, but where the hell else am I going to talk about a book all about a mysterious 976 number?

In my last post, I talked about the 1-900/976 empire of the eighties and nineties and how they sought to capitalize on what teens thought was cool. As luck would have it, I actually have a teen fiction novel all about those numbers, specifically about the chaos of the party lines.

Party Line, written by A. Bates, is a book that I found in a dumpster behind an abandoned store in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania one day. I don’t know why I went up to it, but I found loads of old books and interesting things. Along with a handful of interesting stuff including Party Line, which shows its battle scars from this mildew-ridden front page, I got a cool coupon book from the area from 1989, which was when Party Line was published, a TV repair guide from the fifties with some cool test patterns archived inside, and a bagful of other garbage. Anyway, I took the book back home to Florida and proceeded to sit on it for a couple of years, laughing to myself at the concept of a horror novel written about one of these hotlines. It may be the most dated book I own at this point. If you went up to anyone today and asked them if they knew what a 1-900 number or a “party line” was, they’d probably comment on how you’re due for your colonoscopy.

I thought about the book some more after my latest blogpost and decided to give it a read. What I found was a decently alright, but very nostalgic read. (I kinda missed reading book fair-type books because they just seem fun.)

Party Line begins when Mark Carney calls up the ubiquitous party line after getting stumped on his latest story, a thriller about a man with one arm seeking revenge. His mom’s been upset about the phone bill and he knows he shouldn’t do it, but Mark’s problem is not unlike any other seventeen-year-old high school kid - he can’t talk to girls. So he decides that doing it long-distance over the phone where no one knows what he looks like or what his name is could be a better idea! (Nothing’s changed.)

On the discount-rate party line, because Mark’s not cool enough to pay $0.89 for each additional minute, Mark finds a man with a deeper voice who keeps making inappropriate advances towards the teenage participants. (Again, nothing’s changed.) He quickly becomes aware of the creep as he keeps dialing. The next morning, his buddies talk about how they can’t get girls and what girls like and other things that make you laugh back at your high school self for a moment. (Although, I think the teenage readers of the late eighties would relate more…)

Mark lives with his single mother, who is the epitome of every struggling single mother you’ve ever read about. No car, no husband, and a dead-end job where she has to walk back home in the snow every day. Her issue is that she’s too tired to do anything after work. After I suddenly found myself relating to the novel on a personal level, I dried my tears and continued on. Despite the fact that his pickup habits are harming his mother financially, Mark gets back on the party line for another night of failed romance. He encounters the creep again, along with a girl named Janine who teaches him how to utilize the power of the mighty touch-tone phone to trick the system into thinking he’s hung up. (Pressing two numbers creates a “sign-off” dial tone, essentially fooling everyone on the line and making him able to eavesdrop onto any conversation.)

And eavesdrop he did! Mark hears the creep with many names coerces the young Nicky (who is described as being around thirteen) into meeting in person. Later on, Mark’s mom shows up with the latest paper, revealing that a girl that looks eerily similar to Nicky has gone missing. There’s only one thing that Mark can think to blame… the party line!

But he’s more focused on girls. And getting lots of them. After overhearing a conversation between two familiar-sounding girls on the line (who later turn out to be his classmates), Mark thinks he knows exactly what girls want - and he might be right. For a bit. He woos his classmate Marcy after his horror story got good marks at school (although he suspects his English teacher is the creep on the line for some reason) and the two eventually go out on a date to a local self-defense course with their friends. Run by the frightening Vince, who claims he lost his friend because he couldn’t fight, the kids are treated to some lifelike demonstrations and learn some skills of their own. Foreshadowing…

Mark calls up the party line again and hooks up with Janine, meeting her outside an old church to discuss the missing child again. Mark falls for her and suddenly has two girlfriends, thinking he’s won the lottery. His buddy Robbie disagrees and tells him he doesn’t have anything figured out after all. Marcy dumps his ass after he explains that he’s not sure if he wants to commit because he has another girlfriend and Mark is back in the dark on girls. (Or maybe he’s just normal since most people only have one girlfriend…) After that, he and Robbie then find two cars in an old man’s garage and begin to fix them up to buy them. It’s around this point when you start to suspect that Party Line isn’t a horror novel, but instead over a hundred pages of details about cars (I’m not complaining) and Mark being bad at dating. But there’s still hope. He meets up with Janine again, then once more once his car is fixed up and he buys it off the old man. The two have a plan to lure the creep from the party line onto Janine at the zoo, only to find out… that it was Mark’s friend. A few days later, when more girls go missing and Mark won’t stop talking about his new Jeep, he has a laugh as his other friend tells him he’s been using the party line to meet girls. Janine is meeting up with him later and Mark jokingly says to give his friend a chance, only for him to be dead wrong when his friend says the name of another girl.

Whoops! Turns out Mark just lured a child predator right to his girlfriend. And, after running around aimlessly and hopping in the Jeep again, Mark finds out that it was Vince, the self-defense instructor with the dead friend (HINT: IT WAS HIS WIFE), who had kidnapped Janine all along.

The ending is weird. Mark somehow fights back against him and drives his car (we never learn what happens to the Jeep after the keys are lost) with Janine tied up in the back, meets some cops once he’s on death’s doorstep, and wakes up in a hospital. The explanation for the kidnapping was that… Vince was lonely and just wanted a friend. Well, what was all that creeping around with underage girls for? What a sicko! Anyway, Janine reveals to Mark that she had been using a fake name all along like everyone else on the party line (the author does this in a rather confusing way, saying “Alise” instead of “Janine” out of nowhere) and they live happily ever after, or something like that.

So what’s the deal with Party Line? It barely had any horror. The title would make you believe that it’s a thriller about a haunted 1-900 (or 976) number that makes people go missing. In the end, it was maybe twenty pages of a kidnapping thriller, thirty pages about restoring cars, and the rest was devoted to figuring out girls in a woefully dated manner. It’s your average dime-a-dozen late-eighties teen novel. But it really brought back memories of reading a bunch of these kinds of books that I salvaged from the thrift store (as I’m a little after their time, although I didn’t have “new book” money) and it kept me oddly captivated. I’m a pretty pathetic writer, since I fell out of love with reading sometime back in high school and could never really find that spark again. But Party Line was such a stupid read that it had my full attention for the night.

One interesting part was the whole deal with Mark naming his Jeep.

I could've sworn this was originally a horror novel... (Page 112)

I suffer from the consequences of perceived object sentience (gotta love Aspergers) and I related pretty hard here.

Now, would I recommend Party Line in 2024? If you grew up reading these kinds of books, totally. I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a copy, but I’d pick it up if you see it at a thrift store. Or in an abandoned shop, which is where I found mine. All in all, questionable themes and unrelated automotive tangents aside, it serves as a great time capsule of the time when the mighty 976 (or 1-900) premium-rate phone number dominates the world. So, keep looking up! Because you never know what shitty Scholastic novel you’ll find in YOUR local abandoned shop.

- Lcd101