Customer Reviews

Haunts of San Jose

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As a San Jose-area native who likes to read ghost stories, I was excited to find a book about supposed hauntings in my hometown. Boy, was I disappointed.

This book reads like a first draft that was printed without the benefit of editing, proofreading, or any corrections. There are run-on sentences, fragments, and stories that mush together with no segues. It's actually jarring. There are also factual errors that should have been caught immediately. The book claims that Sarah Winchester married her husband in 1882. In the very next sentence, it states that her husband died in 1881. Come on, she wasn't THAT into ghosts! (Sarah and William Winchester married in 1862. A typo, yes, but a glaring one.)

I bought this book hoping for some good Halloween reading, but the writing is so poor that it actually hurt my eyes to read it. I will be exchanging it for what I hope is a better tome.

"Haunts of San Jose" offers some rich local historical information, but Lee takes too much personal credit in the pages in terms of first-hand knowledge of hauntings to the extent that he reads as if he either knew all along of a haunting or discovered it himself. However, he pulled most of his information from shadowlands.com; thus, the "I" is not himself in some cases, but someone else, which he does not clarify. Essentially, it appears he cut and pasted the exact wording from the said website rapidly without much concern for wording or grammar.
As for grammar, his failure (or the publishers, whichever) to proofread and edit his sentences makes for a glitchy, confusing reading at best. Many of his paragraphs do not flow or connect to one another with specifics and details.

At times, he begins to discuss one idea but then drops it and moves on to another. The most glaring error was with the recounting of what he called "Happy Hallow" which should have been "Happy Hollow." He begins discussing the ghost of a murdered young woman, leaves out details regarding her many appearances, and then jumps to an unrelated story of policeman's sighting of the ghost of the man. Neither story is explained clearly nor detailed, which seriously disappointed me since I know of the hauntings at the park; again, he does not explain anything clearly, disregarding his audience completely and dismissing altogether, the purpose of writing. If leaving details out was intended to create mystery, it only did so in the sense that the reader is left wondering how anything connects or why it is worth reading. He is much too general and vague when he should have explained or given deeper background. But his concern seemed to be with getting published, not with writing well.

Overall, this book was a series of missed opportunities to give consistent, historical detail behind each haunting and to entertain his audience with local lore, but Lee left his book terribly uneven, focusing on details that only interested him personally, not making clear distinctions between multiple hauntings at a given location, and showing no transitions between paragraphs.

Schiffer Publishing LTD dropped the ball with editing and proofreading the punctuation and grammar with Lee's book from commas to semi-colons, verbs to transitions between ideas. Clearly, it is easy to get published nowadays to make a quick buck.