Product Description

A collection of contemporary scary stories set in school, including "Creature Teacher," "Extinguished Educators," and "Student Bodies."

Product Details

• Published on: 1997-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: School & Library Binding
• 141 pages

From School Library Journal

Gr 4-5--The best element here is the title. The book is billed as a collection of scary school stories but these tales about alien janitors, people-eating computers, hungry chalkboards, etc., seem thrown together rather than thoughtfully constructed. The format is also confusing. The beginning chapters seem to indicate that strange things will happen to a particular group of children but the focus broadens abruptly, leaving readers baffled. Characters who appeared in earlier chapters disappear without a trace. None of the figures, nor the stories for that matter, evokes much emotion. The tales are all flat and underdeveloped and that's a shame because the seeds for good stories are here. As an oral teller, Brown is superb and her other collections, The Walking Trees (1991) and Queen of the Cold Blooded Tales (1995, both August House), offer deeper, more developed stories. Choose one of them rather than this hodgepodge.

Molly S. Kinney, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Some Schools Were Never Meant to Be
At her publishers insistence, Robert Simpson Brown wrote "Scared in School," sometimes publishers do not know best and spoil what should have been a great collection of menacing stories instead of a full-length work. Each segment taken individually is vintage Brown.
Read each chapter as an complete story; the 13th Street School is a mecca for the weird, unusual and different. It was never meant to be in a novel form, but it is still fun to read for fans of the grotesque.
Nash Black, author of "Qualifying Laps," "Sins of the Fathers," and "Taxes, Stumbling Blocks & Pitfalls for Authors 2007.'