One good thing (probably the only good thing) about being in quarantine isolation with COVID-19 is that now I can catch up on my Goodreads reviews. Assuming I don't get so tired I just put my head down and fall asleep, which has been happening a lot today. Anyway...let's talk about The Haunted School. The story follows protagonist Tommy Frazer as he moves to a new town and a new school, Bell Valley Middle School. One day, Tommy gets lost on the third floor of the school while trying to retrieve art supplies, and hears children's voices coming from one of the classrooms. But when he goes inside, there's no one there; the classroom is empty. Is the school haunted? What is the nature of the ghosts that inhabit it? And what's with the weird display of mannequins Tommy finds, commemorating a class from the school from the 1940s?
This one was a pretty big letdown, despite all the good things I've heard about it. It's one of the most self-contradicting and plot hole-ridden Goosebumps books I've read yet, which took me out of the story almost completely. As an example of this, there is one point in the story where a character has a lighter, which obviously has lighter fluid enclosed inside. The character lights it, and now even the flame comes out the colour gray, obviously implying that the lighter fluid inside, to now be producing a gray flame, has now also turned gray. But then, like five pages later, another character has another item that has something coloured inside of it, and when they open the outer object, somehow the thing inside still has its colour? If everything is turning gray, even enclosed things like lighter fluid, how did this other thing retain its colour just because it's "closed up", as they say in the book.
Another example is when Stine said the gray kids couldn't exit the classroom they were in through the classroom door (I can't remember why). But then later in the book, they can somehow climb out the window of that same classroom, and later still can then re-enter the school itself through the front doors of the school, and run through the halls, and then apparently re-enter the same classroom, possibly through the very same door they apparently couldn't exit out of earlier. It makes no sense. Stine kept making these rules for how things worked, but then just pages later he would contradict his own rules and logic. The book had no consistency with itself.
On the plus side, the endings of Goosebumps books are usually complete crap, but this is one of the better ones I've ever read in this series; I loved it. But unfortunately, this book had so many inconsistencies, a lot of glaring plot holes, and such an empty "filler" plot, that I didn't really care about it anymore by the time the ending took place. With the great ending it had, and the incredibly cool concept of gray kids frozen in and lost to time, "haunting" this school, this was a huge missed opportunity by Stine.
I feel like this had more ingredients than most Goosebumps books to be one of the greats of the entire series, but Stine wasted the potential this one had with the boring, uneventful, messy plot it ended up having. This is one of the biggest missed opportunities in the entire original series, in my opinion, and is a very disappointing book that leaves me with an "empty" feeling. It was just so "meh", and it could have been so much more. And that's truly a shame.
CAWPILE rating:
Characters: 6.0
Atmosphere / Setting: 5.5
Writing Style: 4.0
Plot: 2.5
Intrigue: 4.0
Logic / Relationships: 2.5
Enjoyment: 3.5
= 28 total
÷ 7 categories = 4 out of 10
= 2 stars