“Alright just remember, everything is illusion and reality, except for the grade you get at the end of the term.”

5. Private School: Academy of Terror – Steven Charles

The fuzz are in on it! The conspiracy Jenny and her friends are uncovering anyway. In this second in the series, which also isn’t really a whole story, Jenny, her townie boyfriend Lee, Marysue (who is a southern lady and will never let anyone forget it), and Conrad aka Zucco get chased by those green eyed werewolf-looking things, well, one, into finding a murder victim who used to be the dean of Thaler. He also apparently wrote a pamphlet about Thaler which is kept in a section of the library that’s coated with dust. Very scary. I do like a nice “alone in the library” scene. I’ve written some of that sort myself. Plus these girls are plunged into darkness. I do think Esther never should have let them stay in there without a chaperone though, bad form, student library assistant.

Anyway, the murdered former dean has something worth finding in his house, which the four break into after the ladies get chased by the werewolf sort of through the woods. Jenny gets what seems like a concussion, but she’s chipper, so they can break into his house and find star charts and not realize Sirius is the dog star, which I believe will come up later, and then…they find out someone they trusted is one of them. Them. The aliens. Because this series is about aliens and not werewolves. For me, this is not a bonus as I like werewolves better. I was never into the alien parts of the X-Files. I was in it for the monster of the week episodes, they were funnier. But, personal preferences aside, I don’t recall reading any other YA series from the 80s about aliens (on purpose) and since this one snuck them in, fine. Let’s see if the series actually concludes somehow within six volumes though. That is more of a problem than aliens who look like werewolves.

 

Hen Wen is a pig trustworthy enough to leave in the library alone, even if she was looking for aliens and not pamphlets revealing a dark history.

 

Speaking of being plunged into darkness, Hen Wen is napping in Henebrae, axe by her side in case anyone comes sneaking around shoplifting her novels or something.