Customer Rating:  
Summary: Fun But Standard Work For Little
Comment: Anyone who knows the work of Bentley Little can guess what The Academy is about. Although I still enjoy his work and the gimmicks he comes up with, I really need more than an evil fill-in-the-blank that slowly takes over a fill-in-the-blank. Even the ending is what I predicted at the start of the book, and while it may be the logical conclusion, I was hoping Bentley would have put a deeper layer of thought behind this one.
His technical writing is always very proficient, but I felt a few plot lines and characters were skimmed over towards the end and left me feeling a little cheated. I also wanted to know more about certain evil characters and more details of the evil's origins. Still, it's not a bad novel by any means, but I'm still waiting for another "The Store", "The Policy", "The Association", or "Dispatch" from this living legend of horror.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing first encounter with Little
Comment: Not having a lot of experience in the Bentley Little world of literature but being a fan of the likes of Stephen King, I decided to give this novel a go. At first, it promised to be an exciting tale of a charter high school convertion gone bad; it turned out to be a disappointing, self-gratuitously sexually explicit contrite experiment of a piece of literature gone boring. While his characters seem right on (who of us haven't meet some of these teachers and their sturggles in real life?), the plot, however went nowhere to a disppointing "resolution". Perhaps (as I now read other reviews) a read of some of his earlier works, could revindicate his stake in the horror canon of the likes of King.
Customer Rating:
Summary: First half = 5 Stars; Second half = 2 Stars
Comment: For a synopsis, please look at Amazon's blurb & at prior reviews, which have done a fine enough job of summarizing the book's plot that I don't feel I have to reiterate it.
Here's my assessment: I still think Bentley Little's novel THE STORE is one of the best social horror novels ever written, and I thought his novel THE UNIVERSITY was nearly as good. The first half or so of THE ACADEMY was in that league -- unease that was rapidly building into terror as events at post-charter John Tyler High School began to escalate. However, the second half of the book was really disappointing. The "horrors" that occurred weren't much different from what Little has portrayed again and again in other novels (such as taboo-shattering perversions that, if you've read enough Little, you can get desensitized to.) It seems like Little is in kind of a rut, rehashing the same sorts of horrors. And the ending felt very abrupt and cobbled together. Overall, I found it very unsatisfying. Personally, I'd rather have a book with a weaker beginning and stronger ending that vice-versa. THE STORE and THE UNIVERSITY are much better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WOW...all I can say is wow...
Comment: As a longtime fan of Bentley Little, I was excited to read his newest book, The Academy. After finishing a previous book, I started in on this. It gets really crazy, really fast. The principal is a figure of insanity and creepiness. Her secretary minion is also quite crazy. Some of the teachers even become sadistic towards their students, and graphic sexual content is described in loving detail. This book is non-stop weirdness, and when it ends, you feel dirty and unclean, but in a good way. If you enjoy Bentley's books, this is a must-read!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Little is falling off
Comment: I've read a lot of Bentley Little over the past few years, and I must say this recent attempt falls very short of his classics like The Store. It seems that he's running out of story ideas, because his 'establishment is bad' is old and predictable.
There was no ingenuity in this book, and as one other poster said- it seemed like a lot of it was simply shock value. I had been looking forward to reading this book for quite some time, but am simply disappointed with the entire endeavor.
Read The Store, and stay away from this.
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