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The Night School
DEATH IS HIDDEN
George Washington High School has stood vacant for nearly forty years -- torched and gutted by riots, and abandoned to urban legend. Locals never go near it -- out of respect for those who died there. And out of fear...
BUT NOT FOR LONG
Today, a private corporation is bringing the crumbling Pittsburgh fixture back to life as an exclusive private school. But no one can shut out the voices that still echo in empty rooms. No one can escape the damp chill settling in the halls. No one can hide from what's entombed in the basement.
And no one at Washington Academy can ignore the truth--that the past can never be forgotten, no matter how deeply it's buried.
George Washington High School has stood vacant for nearly forty years -- torched and gutted by riots, and abandoned to urban legend. Locals never go near it -- out of respect for those who died there. And out of fear...
BUT NOT FOR LONG
Today, a private corporation is bringing the crumbling Pittsburgh fixture back to life as an exclusive private school. But no one can shut out the voices that still echo in empty rooms. No one can escape the damp chill settling in the halls. No one can hide from what's entombed in the basement.
And no one at Washington Academy can ignore the truth--that the past can never be forgotten, no matter how deeply it's buried.
- GenresHorror
336 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 4, 2006
31 people want to read
About the author
Michael Paine
21 books7 followersPseudonym for John Michael Curlovich
Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 24, 2024
I'm of two minds about this book.
On the one hand, I'm reading it in 2017, it came out ten years earlier, and even judging it by the horror standards of 2006 it barely earns a passing grade. The historical details behind Paine's story are compelling, detailing an incident in early US history involving George Washington that I'd never learned about in high school. Like much of history, those who study it are still split on exactly why it happened, but it's impossible to deny that a man who would later become a general and president was, as a Colonel, directly involved in a fifteen minute exchange that sparked off The French and Indian War, a seven year long running battle involving the British, the French, the Canadians, the Native Americans, and the Colonists. The controversy surrounding the death of a French officer by the name of Joseph Coulon de Jumonville seemingly at the hands of Washintgon was, as Horace Walpole wrote, "a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America that set the world on fire."
Damn, no wonder they skipped over this one in school. The US wasn't even a full-fledged nation and already one of our future presidents was igniting a war of world powers. This is awesome stuff, and if there's one reason to recommend The Night School, this is it. Of course, now I've kinda spoiled that for you so, uh, my bad...? Anyway, Paine's done his homework and all that's left is to connect this mid-18th century clusterfuck to a run-down, abandoned high school in 21st century Pennsylvania, and craft a compelling narrative to go along with it. Unfortunately, Paine's book goes off the rails within the first few chapters, and no matter what he does, he never quite manages to get it back under control.
First, I hope whomever served as his editor at Berkley got the LASIK surgery they so desperately needed. I noticed way too many misspellings, dropped words, and other grammatical errors for a professionally-published text. I don't expect perfection, as a handful of mistakes are bound to slip through any manuscript, but seriously I stopped counting after the first half-dozen, and I was barely 100 pages into the book. You expect this from vanity publishing houses or self-edited ebooks, not professionally printed paperbacks carrying a $7 price tag. Paine is no virginal author either, so there's no excuse for mistakes you'd expect from a Freshman Comp class to crop up with such frequency as they do here.
Second, there are way, way, way too many characters in here. The prologue introduces siblings Alexis, Tanner, and Matt at their home, then follows Matt as he drives into town to take a look at the soon-to-open George Washington Academy. From there, we're introduced to Sam, who owns the local saloon, and Hap, an elderly regular who makes ends meet selling horoscopes and fortunes on the street. Chapter one then jumps ahead a few weeks to follow D. Michael Canning, the new principal-to-be, and his chief of security Nick, documenting their first interaction with the building. Chapter two gives us two more main characters to follow in Matt and Diana who are newly-employed teachers, then dumps another glob of faculty, staff, teachers, students, the local Anglican pastor, and even the parking attendant, into the mix. Later chapters continue this trend, introducing new students, following them around for a bit, and watching them cause havoc before they're removed from the storyline. Lots of fodder you brought for those cannons, Mr. Paine, but not a whole lot else going on there.
More frustrating is that we never learn what makes any of these people tick. There's nothing wrong with having a huge cast, but with so many perspectives to keep track of and no way to know who the main protagonists are, many of these people all melt together like a bunch of unwrapped Tootsie Rolls left out in the sun. It's a horror novel, there's slaughter and carnage galore, but so much of it is perpetrated on people Paine never gives us the chance to know that the end result is, "Too bad for, uh, whoever he was...". Violence is all well and good in a book like this, and we expect the first couple deaths will be secondary or tertiary characters, but by the time we hit the halfway mark in the story, the deaths should start to impact us because we should know these people. Even at the end of the book, when two people I assumed would be survivors are decapitated during the climax, it happens so quickly and with so little build-up or fanfare that my reaction was, "I guess that just happened," and I moved on. I didn't care because Paine had done nothing to make me care about them.
Even Jumonville, who should have been played up as a terribly sympathetic villain, the ghost of a man wrongfully executed, is straight out of Cardboard 101: he died unhappy without receiving a proper burial, so therefore everyone else in the school is doomed, and I'm not even being facetious -- he literally tells one of the characters this in so many words. A bunch of wealthy, spoiled high school kids aren't exactly the most sympathetic of victims, so if you aren't going to give us sympathetic victims, then we as readers need a sympathetic bad guy. If we have neither, then who the hell can we root for in all of this? I don't know, but neither does Paine, and as the author that's an albatross hanging around his neck, not mine.
Finally, and this is a problem common to many horror stories, the conclusion is brought on too quickly. By the time you realize it's over, it's ended in the most cliched way imaginable with the school falling in on itself as students and teachers run pell-mell up and down the street away from the wreckage while others watch from the safety of their nearby homes, presumably gloating, "What the fuck did you expect? We told you the place was cursed!" There's a lame attempt at an open-ended conclusion, with Paine dangling the "is it truly over?" chestnut in front of us, but there's nowhere else for this story to go even if it wanted to. Needless to say, there was no sequel.
* * * * *
So, why three stars given I just spent the last several hundred words excoriating it for all its flaws? Because on the other hand, one of my biggest guilty pleasures in the world is reading Z-grade horror, and in the 1980's no publisher in the English-speaking world did trash horror like Zebra. Zebra were the guys you turned to when everyone else turned down your manuscript about mutant garbage dump slime devouring a small town, or a demon invasion repelled by ruggedly-independent survivalist True Believers down in Texas. Berkley should know better, but as soon as I realized I was reading the equivalent of an 80's Zebra horror, my whole perspective shifted, and I found myself quite entertained at Paine's painfully-serious attempts at shocking my cerebrum with increasingly-outlandish acts of violence and brief allusions to homosexual behavior among high school students. In 2006, this is nothing: teens of that generation were far more tolerant and open to the idea of a Gay/Straight Student Alliance, interracial dating, and same-sex couples sneaking off for a bit of kissy-face in the bathroom than they were thirty years ago, so reading it today hardly raises an eyebrow. The revelation that one of the students might be bisexual is hardly cause to pull out the fainting couch.
But in the 80's? Holy crap, did Paine miss his opportunity. Had he carved out some of the more modern-day technology like cell phones and references to Google, and set the story in 1980's Pennsylvania, this would have been perfect. (Hell, for all I know, this was a 'trunk novel' Paine wrote twenty years earlier, then dusted it off, gave it a quick editorial pass to modernize it, and mailed it off to fulfill a book contract). When I realized this I shifted my mindset back to the days of my youth and read it through those eyes, and holy hell did this get so much better. It's a shame Paine couldn't find a time machine and send this manuscript back to himself three decades earlier with a Post-It on top saying, "Send this to Zebra" because I guarantee it's exactly what they were looking for, and he'd have found a perfect niche of readers who loved this kind of thing.
So there's where the three stars came from: get yourself in the proper mindset, ignore the modern tech, and pretend you're reading this under the covers with a flashlight back when you were a kid. That's where you need to be to enjoy The Night School. Don't read this like an adult, don't analyze it like an adult, just go with the flow and enjoy all the sword-slicing, face-melting, blood-spilling carnage. I burned through it in two hours with this mindset, and if reading this review made you want to track down a copy, I guarantee you'll do the same.
On the one hand, I'm reading it in 2017, it came out ten years earlier, and even judging it by the horror standards of 2006 it barely earns a passing grade. The historical details behind Paine's story are compelling, detailing an incident in early US history involving George Washington that I'd never learned about in high school. Like much of history, those who study it are still split on exactly why it happened, but it's impossible to deny that a man who would later become a general and president was, as a Colonel, directly involved in a fifteen minute exchange that sparked off The French and Indian War, a seven year long running battle involving the British, the French, the Canadians, the Native Americans, and the Colonists. The controversy surrounding the death of a French officer by the name of Joseph Coulon de Jumonville seemingly at the hands of Washintgon was, as Horace Walpole wrote, "a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America that set the world on fire."
Damn, no wonder they skipped over this one in school. The US wasn't even a full-fledged nation and already one of our future presidents was igniting a war of world powers. This is awesome stuff, and if there's one reason to recommend The Night School, this is it. Of course, now I've kinda spoiled that for you so, uh, my bad...? Anyway, Paine's done his homework and all that's left is to connect this mid-18th century clusterfuck to a run-down, abandoned high school in 21st century Pennsylvania, and craft a compelling narrative to go along with it. Unfortunately, Paine's book goes off the rails within the first few chapters, and no matter what he does, he never quite manages to get it back under control.
First, I hope whomever served as his editor at Berkley got the LASIK surgery they so desperately needed. I noticed way too many misspellings, dropped words, and other grammatical errors for a professionally-published text. I don't expect perfection, as a handful of mistakes are bound to slip through any manuscript, but seriously I stopped counting after the first half-dozen, and I was barely 100 pages into the book. You expect this from vanity publishing houses or self-edited ebooks, not professionally printed paperbacks carrying a $7 price tag. Paine is no virginal author either, so there's no excuse for mistakes you'd expect from a Freshman Comp class to crop up with such frequency as they do here.
Second, there are way, way, way too many characters in here. The prologue introduces siblings Alexis, Tanner, and Matt at their home, then follows Matt as he drives into town to take a look at the soon-to-open George Washington Academy. From there, we're introduced to Sam, who owns the local saloon, and Hap, an elderly regular who makes ends meet selling horoscopes and fortunes on the street. Chapter one then jumps ahead a few weeks to follow D. Michael Canning, the new principal-to-be, and his chief of security Nick, documenting their first interaction with the building. Chapter two gives us two more main characters to follow in Matt and Diana who are newly-employed teachers, then dumps another glob of faculty, staff, teachers, students, the local Anglican pastor, and even the parking attendant, into the mix. Later chapters continue this trend, introducing new students, following them around for a bit, and watching them cause havoc before they're removed from the storyline. Lots of fodder you brought for those cannons, Mr. Paine, but not a whole lot else going on there.
More frustrating is that we never learn what makes any of these people tick. There's nothing wrong with having a huge cast, but with so many perspectives to keep track of and no way to know who the main protagonists are, many of these people all melt together like a bunch of unwrapped Tootsie Rolls left out in the sun. It's a horror novel, there's slaughter and carnage galore, but so much of it is perpetrated on people Paine never gives us the chance to know that the end result is, "Too bad for, uh, whoever he was...". Violence is all well and good in a book like this, and we expect the first couple deaths will be secondary or tertiary characters, but by the time we hit the halfway mark in the story, the deaths should start to impact us because we should know these people. Even at the end of the book, when two people I assumed would be survivors are decapitated during the climax, it happens so quickly and with so little build-up or fanfare that my reaction was, "I guess that just happened," and I moved on. I didn't care because Paine had done nothing to make me care about them.
Even Jumonville, who should have been played up as a terribly sympathetic villain, the ghost of a man wrongfully executed, is straight out of Cardboard 101: he died unhappy without receiving a proper burial, so therefore everyone else in the school is doomed, and I'm not even being facetious -- he literally tells one of the characters this in so many words. A bunch of wealthy, spoiled high school kids aren't exactly the most sympathetic of victims, so if you aren't going to give us sympathetic victims, then we as readers need a sympathetic bad guy. If we have neither, then who the hell can we root for in all of this? I don't know, but neither does Paine, and as the author that's an albatross hanging around his neck, not mine.
Finally, and this is a problem common to many horror stories, the conclusion is brought on too quickly. By the time you realize it's over, it's ended in the most cliched way imaginable with the school falling in on itself as students and teachers run pell-mell up and down the street away from the wreckage while others watch from the safety of their nearby homes, presumably gloating, "What the fuck did you expect? We told you the place was cursed!" There's a lame attempt at an open-ended conclusion, with Paine dangling the "is it truly over?" chestnut in front of us, but there's nowhere else for this story to go even if it wanted to. Needless to say, there was no sequel.
* * * * *
So, why three stars given I just spent the last several hundred words excoriating it for all its flaws? Because on the other hand, one of my biggest guilty pleasures in the world is reading Z-grade horror, and in the 1980's no publisher in the English-speaking world did trash horror like Zebra. Zebra were the guys you turned to when everyone else turned down your manuscript about mutant garbage dump slime devouring a small town, or a demon invasion repelled by ruggedly-independent survivalist True Believers down in Texas. Berkley should know better, but as soon as I realized I was reading the equivalent of an 80's Zebra horror, my whole perspective shifted, and I found myself quite entertained at Paine's painfully-serious attempts at shocking my cerebrum with increasingly-outlandish acts of violence and brief allusions to homosexual behavior among high school students. In 2006, this is nothing: teens of that generation were far more tolerant and open to the idea of a Gay/Straight Student Alliance, interracial dating, and same-sex couples sneaking off for a bit of kissy-face in the bathroom than they were thirty years ago, so reading it today hardly raises an eyebrow. The revelation that one of the students might be bisexual is hardly cause to pull out the fainting couch.
But in the 80's? Holy crap, did Paine miss his opportunity. Had he carved out some of the more modern-day technology like cell phones and references to Google, and set the story in 1980's Pennsylvania, this would have been perfect. (Hell, for all I know, this was a 'trunk novel' Paine wrote twenty years earlier, then dusted it off, gave it a quick editorial pass to modernize it, and mailed it off to fulfill a book contract). When I realized this I shifted my mindset back to the days of my youth and read it through those eyes, and holy hell did this get so much better. It's a shame Paine couldn't find a time machine and send this manuscript back to himself three decades earlier with a Post-It on top saying, "Send this to Zebra" because I guarantee it's exactly what they were looking for, and he'd have found a perfect niche of readers who loved this kind of thing.
So there's where the three stars came from: get yourself in the proper mindset, ignore the modern tech, and pretend you're reading this under the covers with a flashlight back when you were a kid. That's where you need to be to enjoy The Night School. Don't read this like an adult, don't analyze it like an adult, just go with the flow and enjoy all the sword-slicing, face-melting, blood-spilling carnage. I burned through it in two hours with this mindset, and if reading this review made you want to track down a copy, I guarantee you'll do the same.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2019
3.4 stars
Communist ghost wreaks havoc!
If you're a horror fan then you'll find an outstanding premise and shocking death scenes. In my book 3 stars means- ( I'm glad I read the book but I doubt I'll read it again.) I give The Night School 3 and 1/2 stars. I enjoyed the horror enough to perhaps reread "The Night School" 5-10 years from now.
The Bad? Michael Paine must be a " far left" SJW because the book overflows with anti-American themes, trashing the 1st President George Washington at every opportunity. All the characters drink or take hard drugs. Everyone, even the 96 year old wise black man. I can't elaborate more unless I dish out numerous "Plot Spoilers". I won't do that because I was surprised several times.
The Ugly- Plot holes abound. The writing is fairly simple and strains credibility even for horror fiction. That being said, the horror premise is primo.
My recommendation? If you plan on reading over 250 horror novels in your lifetime take a chance on "The Night School".
Communist ghost wreaks havoc!
If you're a horror fan then you'll find an outstanding premise and shocking death scenes. In my book 3 stars means- ( I'm glad I read the book but I doubt I'll read it again.) I give The Night School 3 and 1/2 stars. I enjoyed the horror enough to perhaps reread "The Night School" 5-10 years from now.
The Bad? Michael Paine must be a " far left" SJW because the book overflows with anti-American themes, trashing the 1st President George Washington at every opportunity. All the characters drink or take hard drugs. Everyone, even the 96 year old wise black man. I can't elaborate more unless I dish out numerous "Plot Spoilers". I won't do that because I was surprised several times.
The Ugly- Plot holes abound. The writing is fairly simple and strains credibility even for horror fiction. That being said, the horror premise is primo.
My recommendation? If you plan on reading over 250 horror novels in your lifetime take a chance on "The Night School".
August 19, 2021
Kinda crap with weak characters and a lot of nonsense. I wasn't impressed.
January 14, 2026
I don't know what to say.
August 4, 2016
This is a story of a haunted high school in a inner city bought to be turned into a fancy boarding school. Needless to say, things do not go well from construction to students being murdered. If only they had listened to the locals. Not very scary.
November 2, 2008
It's a book that i wouldn't read again..
June 10, 2010
Spoiled rich and bigoted white people get what's coming to them.Stupid.
November 6, 2014
I read this book back in 2006. It's one of the scariest books I have ever read. I really enjoyed it. The stuff about George Washington was very interesting.
May 30, 2010
cleaning the shelves...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews