Review: The Haunted High Series Complete Boxed Set: Books 1-5

The Haunted High Series Complete Boxed Set: Books 1-5 by Cheree Alsop
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An adequately engaging and admirable protagonist kept me slogging through the seriously inept copy editing and occasional timeline, plot, and worldbuilding issues, but all of those did detract significantly, and took my rating down to three stars.

Not just another Potterclone, which is what got me to buy it. You could make a few parallels, but they're not close; more a matter of characters that are superficially similar in their role but are taken in a completely different direction. That's good. There are too many made-from-box-mix supernatural school stories and not enough original ones.

In the first couple of books, the MC skips an absurd number of meals and nights' sleep. He's a 16-year-old boy, an athlete, and a werewolf; you'd think he needed a lot of food and rest. Fortunately, that settles down a bit after a while. Also in the first book, (view spoiler)[the vampire coven beats the MC almost to death, and the headmistress is aware of this, but they face no consequences and it doesn't prevent the vampire coven's leader from eventually becoming the MC's best friend after he gets over his anti-werewolf prejudice. The MC holds no grudge. Later, several other people also make sudden and implausible heel face turns from implacable and cruel enemies to apparently reliable allies, just because the protagonist does something that challenges their prejudice. (hide spoiler)] The kids never seem to face any consequences from absenting themselves from school without permission to do things that adults couldn't do, either (though the question of "why can these kids do it if the adults can't?" is at least addressed).

The main character is a bit of a paragon, but not a complete Gary Stu; a lot of people dislike him (at least initially, though they do tend to become his allies too easily), he can't automatically do everything (though sometimes he, and other characters, suddenly develop previously unforeshadowed capabilities at convenient moments), and things often don't go his way, at least not without a lot of effort and suffering (though sometimes he comes up with solutions on the fly which work despite, again, no foreshadowing of how they would do so). There's an in-universe, plausible explanation for why he's always getting into the situations he gets into: (view spoiler)[he's an alpha werewolf, genetically programmed to protect those he cares for at the risk of his own life. Which is a bit of a loss of protagonist agency, and genetic determinism, neither of which I care for, but at least it explains things. (hide spoiler)]

The copy editing is woeful. Mostly homonym errors (including multiple instances of it's/its and you're/your), but all of the common issues turn up at one time or another. One of the teachers is named Briggs, and when his name is used in the possessive it's almost always punctuated as "Brigg's" instead of "Briggs'". A number of missing commas before terms of address, which to me always screams "amateur". Lots and lots of sloppy typos, too, and several fumbled idioms. I have definitely seen worse, but this is a shockingly low level of quality for an author who claims to be bestselling and award-winning. If it was copy edited at all, it was either by someone who wasn't good at their job, or else started out so incredibly awful that even after a lot of work it's still bad.

The Kindle book is not formatted into chapters in a way that allows you to navigate between chapters or see how much reading time is left in the chapter you're reading.

A warning, too, that there's a great deal of suffering, violence, cruelty and torture in this one. There's a group setting out to destroy the "monsters," and I'll give you one guess as to who the true monsters are. I got a bit sick of all the cruelty after a while, and started to wonder how, given the death rate we're shown, the obviously large population of "mythics" manage to keep themselves hidden from modern society, especially when many of them can't pass as human. Also, why the school isn't bigger. Maybe there are several, but if so, wouldn't there be more separation of the different groups, since they supposedly can't work together at all? Even though going to school together (or anything that gets different groups interacting) is one of the strongest ways of breaking down exactly that kind of prejudice? There are several very large groups (and at least one individual) equipped with headquarters, vehicles, weapons, fancy and (presumably) expensive stun ammunition (necessary so that the protagonist is not a mass killer and can be shot repeatedly without dying, but not all that plausible otherwise), and no visible means of support. Are they dealing drugs? Knocking over banks? If so - or even if not - why do they not ping the radar of the mundane authorities? The worldbuilding doesn't bear close examination, in other words. In an action movie, you might get away with it by keeping the explosions and chases going as a distraction, but in book form it works less well, especially since the many prose errors kept throwing me out of my immersion, so the thinness of the logic in both the plot and the setting became especially noticeable.

Overall, it's a somewhat original and engaging story with a promising premise that unfortunately fails to reach a professional standard of quality in the execution. I won't be looking for more from this author.

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