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Private School #1
Nightmare Session
Evil creatures, terror, and murder haunt the hallowed halls of posh Thale Academy, an exclusive Connecticut boarding school, and scholarship student Jennifer Field and her boyfriend, Lee, find themselves targets of the nightmare
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 6, 2019
This might have been better if I hadn't taken a two-week break in the middle of reading it (went home for Xmas and forgot to take it with me), but to be honest... I don't think so. I don't remember it being all that engaging from the start, and for a genre like this, which is notoriously shitty, being engaging is like, their big thing. That and the gory bits, and this one failed in both. But I didn't one hundred per cent hate it. Just pretty meh.
November 11, 2014
I read this series when I was much younger and recently found it again. It actually holds up fairly well. The story starts fairly normal with a scholarship student at a summer session of an elite boarding school. However, when another student dies, the faculty is being kind of creepy and you're getting more questions than answers it is time to worry. Luckily for Jennifer she has some good friends at school and a local boy are interested in helping solve the mystery.
April 15, 2025
Since it is the first book in a series, my expectations are set on low but hopefully will pick up as the story progresses.
Walking through Half Price Books and finding that someone had brought in the whole collection of Private School written by Steven Charles was literally a Christmas gift. I decided to get around to the books now for Old School April.
One thing that will be spoiled for you directly is just looking at the cover art: how can you not notice that there is a huge werewolf in the locker?
Eye catching in the detail but I'm getting The Howling vibes and more in line with the movie and the sequels. Gary Lang is the credited artist on the copyright page.
Thaler Academy is a private girls' school in Connecticut where a few male students from the local town of Staines are allowed to attend a few courses. The school is having the summer session before the fall classes which is a jump start for some students and a summer school for others. Jennifer Field is a scholarship student who has to work just a little bit harder than most of the other girls in order to attend.
Jennifer and a few of her new friends go to see a movie off campus and arrive back just in time for dinner but still under scrutiny of the school's dean, Mr. Dramond. There is a storm that night and Jenny is sure that she saw something during a lightning flash out in the woods.
A few days later, students are getting ready to go on a rock hunting, hiking expedition and Jenny sees a fellow biology student, townie Lee Fawkes. Sandy-haired and handsome, Lee is a little put off by the rich girls who go to the school since he has to work in his father's store to earn money.
Jenny doesn't fit the bill, so he asks her to go with him for a walk in the woods about the school grounds since it is acres wide. The friendly stroll becomes a nightmare when they hear a scream and then find the body of teenage girl, feet bare and bloody. Jenny recognizes the face as a fellow classmate named Grace and also notices that her appearance is that of someone who has been asphyxiated.
Lee runs to the school and comes back with the head nurse and the custodian, Miss Hoburn and Briggs respectfully. Briggs grabs the dead body of Grace and Nurse Hobart orders Jennifer to take a sedative to clear away the shock, giving Lee permission to escort her to her room.
The medicine gives Jenny some disturbing dreams and it doesn't help when she finds an abandoned building on the school grounds that use to be a science building, the lights on at night deep in the woods. Jennifer soon learns from a classmate named Marysue that the police were never informed about Grace being found dead.
Jennifer decides to do some research on Thaler and discovers that Dean Dramond only started as headmaster of the school this very summer. Jenny soon tries to get help from Lee since he is from town and her fellow classmates think that Jennifer is going crazy thinking about secret experiments and seeing monsters in the dark.
Yet Jenny knows that Grace had to have been murdered by something inhumanly strong ...
The momentum of this first book is very slow with just the normal exposition of school being a place of terror than literally turning into a nightmare. There is something creepy going on with werewolves that we don't fully know about until the end of the book yet still left ambiguous enough to give us five more books...
Nightmare Session is a plodding start to the Private School series and one can only hope it gets better from here.
Walking through Half Price Books and finding that someone had brought in the whole collection of Private School written by Steven Charles was literally a Christmas gift. I decided to get around to the books now for Old School April.
One thing that will be spoiled for you directly is just looking at the cover art: how can you not notice that there is a huge werewolf in the locker?
Eye catching in the detail but I'm getting The Howling vibes and more in line with the movie and the sequels. Gary Lang is the credited artist on the copyright page.
Thaler Academy is a private girls' school in Connecticut where a few male students from the local town of Staines are allowed to attend a few courses. The school is having the summer session before the fall classes which is a jump start for some students and a summer school for others. Jennifer Field is a scholarship student who has to work just a little bit harder than most of the other girls in order to attend.
Jennifer and a few of her new friends go to see a movie off campus and arrive back just in time for dinner but still under scrutiny of the school's dean, Mr. Dramond. There is a storm that night and Jenny is sure that she saw something during a lightning flash out in the woods.
A few days later, students are getting ready to go on a rock hunting, hiking expedition and Jenny sees a fellow biology student, townie Lee Fawkes. Sandy-haired and handsome, Lee is a little put off by the rich girls who go to the school since he has to work in his father's store to earn money.
Jenny doesn't fit the bill, so he asks her to go with him for a walk in the woods about the school grounds since it is acres wide. The friendly stroll becomes a nightmare when they hear a scream and then find the body of teenage girl, feet bare and bloody. Jenny recognizes the face as a fellow classmate named Grace and also notices that her appearance is that of someone who has been asphyxiated.
Lee runs to the school and comes back with the head nurse and the custodian, Miss Hoburn and Briggs respectfully. Briggs grabs the dead body of Grace and Nurse Hobart orders Jennifer to take a sedative to clear away the shock, giving Lee permission to escort her to her room.
The medicine gives Jenny some disturbing dreams and it doesn't help when she finds an abandoned building on the school grounds that use to be a science building, the lights on at night deep in the woods. Jennifer soon learns from a classmate named Marysue that the police were never informed about Grace being found dead.
Jennifer decides to do some research on Thaler and discovers that Dean Dramond only started as headmaster of the school this very summer. Jenny soon tries to get help from Lee since he is from town and her fellow classmates think that Jennifer is going crazy thinking about secret experiments and seeing monsters in the dark.
Yet Jenny knows that Grace had to have been murdered by something inhumanly strong ...
The momentum of this first book is very slow with just the normal exposition of school being a place of terror than literally turning into a nightmare. There is something creepy going on with werewolves that we don't fully know about until the end of the book yet still left ambiguous enough to give us five more books...
Nightmare Session is a plodding start to the Private School series and one can only hope it gets better from here.
July 24, 2023
I bought this book because I found out recently it was written by Charles Grant under the Steven Charles Pseudonym. This is a young adult horror series featuring a high school student named Jennifer Field who is attending an isolated and very elite private high school called Thaler. She encounters various terrors. I've only read this first one but will probably read the others. There appear to be 6 total volumes, all published between October of 1986 and early 1987. They are short books and quick reads. I'd probably consider them of novella length. The last 2 have a connected storyline.
The series titles are:
Private School #1: Nightmare Session
#2: Academy of Terror
#3: Witche's Eye
#4:Skeleton Key
#5: The Enemy Within
#6: The Last Alien
As for #1, I enjoyed it. It has Grant's atmospheric horror but ends with a surprising amount of action. The end seemed a bit easily resolved but that may be the nature of YA fiction at that time. There were a number of YA horror series released around that time, probably related to the success of the Goosebumps books. As for the plot, I will only say that it involves experiments gone awry, and the exact nature of the experiments and the purpose of them are never revealed here. Maybe they are later in the series.
The series titles are:
Private School #1: Nightmare Session
#2: Academy of Terror
#3: Witche's Eye
#4:Skeleton Key
#5: The Enemy Within
#6: The Last Alien
As for #1, I enjoyed it. It has Grant's atmospheric horror but ends with a surprising amount of action. The end seemed a bit easily resolved but that may be the nature of YA fiction at that time. There were a number of YA horror series released around that time, probably related to the success of the Goosebumps books. As for the plot, I will only say that it involves experiments gone awry, and the exact nature of the experiments and the purpose of them are never revealed here. Maybe they are later in the series.
November 23, 2018
I loved this book when I was younger and re-reading it, it felt quite dated and I feel like it is really more adapted to a younger audience. However, I still enjoyed it quite a lot and will continue on with the series, to finally know the end after all those years.
December 19, 2022
I have been looking for years...and I mean years... for this book I could barely remember and finally found it. The internet can be a wonderful place sometimes. I must reread
April 1, 2023
Guileless in a charmless way. There’s a weirdness in its ineptness but the weirdness would need a real artist to make it take off. Here it’s just a skeleton of what might have been.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews