hy it is titled The Night School, I have no idea, since all classes and most of the horror happened during the day like any normal high school, but apparently the publishers and the author are sufficiently removed from high school that just calling it High School didn’t seem scary enough.

I did finish the book.  But only because my husband challenged me.  I ranted and raved to him about how I already knew what would happen and which characters would live and which would die and who would end up with whom.  He said I might be wrong.  So I sat down with a notepad and made a list of all the major characters.  I labeled my list ’83’ for the page I was on in a 325 page book.  And then I made my predictions.  I was dead on.

The book starts with the Morgan teenagers at Christmas, bright, blond, blue eyed Tanner and his bright, blond, blue eyed sister Alexis, putting up the Christmas tree and happy in spite of their filthy rich parents going off to someplace exotic for the holidays and leaving them home.  (Poor little rich kids.)  Enter Matt, their brother.  He has dark hair (Pay attention to description in these books because it will clue you in to the outcome of the character. Beautiful people are important, for good or bad.  Nondescript, too
tall, too pale, too athletic and muscular, and anyone middle-aged who
hasn’t "aged well" is going to end up dead) and is also the jock of the
siblings (Also remember the stereotypes.  Sports=Bad and Paine takes
that cliche and rams it down our throats while doing essentially
nothing with it).

Dark haired, jock brother breaks in on the blonds’
Christmas cheer with attitude and humbug and throws a ball, hitting
younger brother Tanner in the head, because this is what athletes do,
of course, all of them, everywhere.  He then decides to not join the
fun but to instead go investigate the abandoned school that is about to
be renovated to become their ritzy, new private school.  They are
forced to switch schools because their uncle is on the board.

Ritzy, new private school will be in the ghetto (yeah.  sure.  I
believe that one) but it’s an okay ghetto with a bar and a bartender
named Sam (seriously) who reads a lot and likes classical music.  Matt
goes to the abandoned school in the ghetto, meets some nice people,
including a ninety-something fortuneteller named Hap who becomes a tell
for the characters.  You know who lives and dies based on their
relationships with Sam and Hap.  Hap warns Matt not to go in there.
Matt, doing drugs along the way, of course, snarls at him and goes in
anyway.  He does come out, but then he goes home and  proceeds to
commit gory suicide in front of the cute, blond siblings.

You’re getting the idea.  We meet the school principal (not nice to
Hap).  A teacher named Matt (did Paine run out of names or something?
There is also an Alex to get confused with Alexis) who is burned out
from teaching in a ghetto, clearly not this one which is a nice ghetto,
and happy to be working with rich kids now (the author points out twice
that he doesn’t notice Hap, though there is no reason why he should).
Through Matt (the teacher, not the dead brother), we meet others on the
faculty: Peter Morgan, uncle of the blond kids and CEO with all the
stereotypes therein–he is middle-aged, good looking, has a mistress,
and an S&M thing; Diana, beautiful English teacher with attitude
and also Morgan’s mistress; "hatchet faced" (i.e. fodder) school
secretary Mrs. Newburg, and several middle-aged to late middle-aged and
nondescript (Paine even uses that word for some of them) teachers who
have names essentially so we know what to call them when they die later.

Beyond the stereotypes (oh, and the rich kids, even the good ones,
all do drugs and everyone looks the other way because they are rich.
And Tanner and Alexis are both bonking the same cousin, Uncle Peter’s
son, because rich kids are like that, of course), there are two other
major problems with this novel.  First, Paine did no research, turning
a few of the horror scenes into humor.  Nitric acid doesn’t just sit
out in chemistry class and if you get up in the middle of class and
pour yourself a couple of beakers of it, no matter how distracted the
teacher or how stoned the students, someone will notice you.  And the
wrestling scene.  Has Paine ever been to a wrestling match?  Rather
than shocking and horrifying me, all I did was roll my eyes and then
read the scene aloud to my husband between giggles.

Secondly, Paine is confused.  He seems to think more death and more
violence and more horrible ways to kill more innocent people will
increase the tension.  Look at the two legendary masterpieces of
ghostly literature, The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw.
The two books combined don’t have Paine’s body count in one scene and
yet there is tension (if not fear.  I wasn’t scared, but then that is
such a personal thing.  I know of no story as blood chilling as Mort
Castle’s "Pop Is Real Smart" from Moon On the Water and a friend of mine reacted with a shrug.  But if you want to know what really scares me, read about the roach).
The tension in those stories is created through atmosphere, writing
style, interesting characters you care about, which isn’t the same as
liking them.  There are escalating incidents, little things that lend
to the sense of elongating the madness and soon that madness with cease
to stretch and finally snap.

At the climax of The Night School there is a double digit
body count of mostly nameless, un-introduced characters.  Our main two,
blond brother and sister (who the reader wishes would bite it, but,
alas! they are introduced as the good kids and become close to Hap and
Sam, so no amount of tiresome, rich kid behavior signals that they die)
watch the school collapse from across the street and wonder if they
should call 911.  They do.

I will give the novel some credit.  The ghost, when we learn who he
is, the blonds being slow to start researching (I mean, really slow.  I
bet you some goth or weirdo like I was in high school started
researching at the very first mention of a ghost or curse and knew all
about it ages before brother and sister get around to cracking a book.
Not to mention Alexis has a difficult time finding it.  For something
so hard to research, Wikipedia
did fine for me.), is an interesting concept and the whole idea of how
far will and institution go to protect the good name of our cultural
icons, in this case George Washington, is an issue to explore.  If only
it had been given more room and less given to debauchery of teachers
and teenagers and bloodletting.

Final analysis: I will never read another Michael Paine novel again
unless forced.  The copyright page lists the copyright owner as John M.
Curlovich and I think I’ll avoid him too, just on principle.  If you
value your reading hours, spend them someplace else.