It is strange to me that Bunnicula's author is also the Watcher's and the Misfits' author. Bunnicula succeeds best of the three, and I think so even though the latter two belong to my wonted age range. The Misfits doesn't have the alleged shocking nondevelopment of child abuse that made The Watcher so formulaic, and the dialogue among the children is okay. I really didn't need to see "he goes" that much as a dialog tag: can't a book's tone be immediate and topical without resorting to the present tense? and whatever is wrong with "he said" anyway?
Also the book was printed in a sans serif typeface, which always reminds me of books for remedial readers about motorcross.
It reminded me of Staying Fat for Sarah Burnes, not only because of the two fat protagonists. Maybe they have that Teen Problem Book tone (and not all teen problem books do have it: Freak the Mighty doesn't). There's a children's book whose title I forget about a girl who Read reads, which her family don't understand. She fixes herself a tray every day after school before retreating to her closet with Jane Eyre (so she's plump, too). Her mother tries to convert her to more "appropriate" stuff--presumably to turn her off reading so she becomes "appropriately" interested in skinning down--and I remember her first attempt's first line, something about a girl living with her father after her mother split, with her father "and my frog, Suki." Whatever that book is, however the line went, is a prime example of Teen Problem Book tone. Both Sarah Burnes and The Misfits were much better than that, of course. But not entirely immune.
I bought my two favorite non-Daughters of Eve (which I have had since a circa sixth-grade birthday) Lois Duncans, Stranger with My Face and Down a Dark Hall, in the same lunch hour bookstore run today and reread them after James Howe. You read it here first: 1975 to 1985 was the golden age of YA lit.