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Summary
Summary
An isolated sixteen-year-old girls' boarding school student recounts in her diary her growing paranoia that a fellow classmate is responsible for her best friend's wasting illness as well as a series of other disasters, a suspicion she is unable to confirm or deny years later.
Lucy and Ernessa have become inseparable. Ernessa's taken her over. She's consuming her. Ernessa is a vampire.
At an exclusive girls' boarding school, a sixteen-year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her growing obsession is her roommate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy's friendship with their new and disturbing classmate. Ernessa is an enigmatic, moody presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes.
Around her swirl dark rumors, suspicions, and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school and Lucy isn't Lucy anymore, fantasy and reality mingle until what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare that evokes with gothic menace the anxieties, lusts, and fears of adolescence. And at the center of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in the fevered world of her own imagining?
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A chilling debut, in the best gothic style, about the odd goings-on in a girls' boarding school in the late 1960s. If Picnic at Hanging Rock had been written by Anne Rice, the results might have approximated this tale, which is at once lurid and refined. Presented as a teenager's journal, it's written by an unnamed narrator who is a student at the Brangwyn School outside Philadelphia. Highly intellectual and somewhat aloof, she was sent away to Brangwyn after her father (a well-regarded New York poet) committed suicide some years earlier and her mother sank into a deep depression. At school, she associates with a fairly intense clique of girls who argue over books and ideas in a way that only the young can. They run a wide range of personalities-from the timid Lucy (quiet and restrained to the point of invisibility) to the brash Charley (who eventually leaves for another school and becomes a flower child). Two of the strangest are Dora (a pothead intellectual who quotes Nietzsche from memory and plans to write a novel based on his philosophy) and the intense loner Ernessa. One night Dora is found dead, having fallen from the roof of her dormitory. As shocked as they are, the girls are not terribly surprised: Walking along the gutters was a common prank, after all, which most of them had done as dares at one time or another. But rumors begin to circulate that Dora's death had a sinister edge and was somehow brought on by Ernessa. Was Ernessa a bad influence? A provocateur? A spoiled brat and a liar? Or was she-a vampire? The girls are taking an English class called "Writers of the Supernatural," after all, and it's possible that all that Hawthorne, Saki, and Le Fanu has gone to their heads. Or there may be more to it than that. . . . Genuinely gripping: a brilliantly original tale written in a completely believable adolescent voice.
