IT'S not easy to write about a book like Prom Nights from Hell. In fact, it's down right difficult to write specifically about Prom Nights from Hell. The easiest way to go would be to focus on the 'from Hell' part and make continuous jibes as to that being where the book has come from. Or is heading to. But to save the time and effort of many a teenage reader, this review will attempt to be far more professional than that. No matter how tempting it may be to simply write off this book as bad.

Prom Nights from Hell is a collection of short stories by five contemporary young adult fiction writers, including the currently laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank, Muse-inspired Twilight writer Stephenie Meyer. Meyer stays away from the teen vampire fare her readers are accustomed to, and presents the only story that takes place entirely at a prom — from hell.

What makes this particular prom hellish are things that may seem normal when you get a few hundred 17-year-olds together in a room — the usual cat fights, a variety of 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl snaps heel and runs sobbing into the arms of another, boy finds a whole new girl to go home with' incidents, etc. Things begin to seem suspect when all these events seem to be connected to the new girl — who turns out to be more than just a 'mean girl'.

She is, in fact, a demon trying to create enough havoc to gain some demon-brownie points and climb her way up the demon hierarchical ladder. That's of course if her meddling half sister or some pesky angel doesn't get in the way. No sarcasm intended here. It is not any deeper than this, it is not a metaphor for something intelligent and it really is just this silly.

The other stories in this collection are just as vapid as Meyer's. In The Exterminator's Daughter, Meg Cabot gives us a young high school student who is trying to take out her best friend's prom date with a crossbow. No broken hearts here, but the boy's father is Count Dracula, who just happened to have turned our heroine's mother into a vampire some years ago. Meanwhile, her absent-minded professor cliché of a father is desperate to come up with a 'cure' for vampirism that could 'save' his wife.

In Madison Avery and the Dim Reaper, a young girl is caught in limbo after death, with an amulet stolen from a 'reaper' that allows her to remain on the mortal plane. Writer Kim Harrison attempts to create a mythology of 'reapers', but the story (like the others) is flat and incomplete — Harrison could really do with taking a few lessons from Terry Pratchett about Death.
If further proof of this collection's vacuous nature is needed, Lauren Myracle's The Corsage is a fine example. What the author claims is a story 'inspired by' W.W. Jacob's classic The Monkey's Paw, is very simply a retelling that is hormone-driven drivel. Replace the actual monkey's paw with a dusty old floral corsage, throw in a fortune teller dressed in Juicy Couture and you've got a version that barely retains a fraction of the tension and fear the original created.

Myracle's version holds firm to the 'careful what you wish for,  it may just come true' moral of The Monkey's Paw, but offers no new perspective on the classic story. Its only redeeming factor could be that perhaps it will lead teen readers to Jacob's masterful portrayal of parental love, desperation and desire.

Each of these stories is fairly flat. The characters are one dimensional. There is no excuse for this as the short story genre offers ample chance for characters and plot lines to be developed to maturity — writers like Guy de Maupassant, Roald Dahl and, more recently, Kazuo Ishiguro have proven that very little resonates as purely as a well-crafted and intelligent short story. The writers who have contributed to Prom Nights from Hell seem to have submitted unedited chapters from books that never took off — not one of these stories can carry its own weight.

Each writer simply spreads her net too far and too wide and is unable to deal effectively with everything caught in it. Uninteresting introductions, underdeveloped character arcs and disgracefully bad denouements make this a very quick and eventually very unsatisfying read.

It is worth noting that it is not the premise of this collection that renders each writer incapable of producing solid work. The idea of drawing parallels between adolescent angst and the paranormal has been very effectively utilised by a number of extremely talented individuals — English magic realism writer Angela Carter being one of them. Carter's story The Company of Wolves is an incredibly taut, well-written and frightening take on Little Red Riding Hood, an allegory that focuses on a young girl's coming of age.

 In fact, Carter's entire collection, The Bloody Chamber, had a huge impact on contemporary understanding and engagement with classic fairy tales and all of the writers featured in Prom Nights from Hell should be made to read Carter's work before they attempt to create what is now being called 'teen/young adult paranormal romance'.

Demons in prom gowns and angels in tuxedoes. Grim reapers as perfect dates and crossbows at the annual prom. Wishes that come true and a sudden superhero saving Sybil, the oracle of Cuma. If Prom Nights From Hell manages to capture our local pre-teen and teenage market, it will only be because these readers do not know any better. And neither will they be better off for it.

Prom Nights from Hell
By Meg Cabot and Kim Harrison
Harper Collins, New York
ISBN 0-06-125309-6
305pp. Rs595