Synopsis:Unfolding through the journal of a sixteen-year-old girl, The Moth Diaries is a compellingly brilliant portrait of obsession and fear set in the hothouse atmosphere of a girls' boarding school. It is a world of too many books and too little reality, where ideas become passions and passions obsessions. The unnamed narrator believes with increasing certainty that a schoolmate is a vampire, subtly and secretly killing her best friend and roommate, and responsible for an escalating series of disasters at the school. As she watches her friend's growing relationship with Ernessa, she gradually loses her grip on reality, her paranoia fuelled by reading le Fanu's vampiric novel Carmilla. Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in her own fevered imagination?

Review: Written as a journal by an anonymous narrator, The Moth Diaries describes a year in an all girls’ boarding school sometime in the sixties. It describes in claustrophobic detail the insular and self-contained lives of the boarders. The events of the outside world rarely intrude. The narrator is a tall, dark, intelligent Jew obsessed with her roommate, Lucy, who is small, blonde and vacuous. The narrator’s father had been a well-known poet who had first left her and her mother for another woman and then committed suicide. The narrator dwells on her father’s suicide, the reasons for it and the way in which he planned it so carefully.

Another girl arrives at the school – also tall, dark, intelligent, Jewish and fatherless. Very soon Lucy transfers her affections to the new girl Ernessa. Several unexplained and gruesome events occur. Then Lucy becomes ill, she loses weight and becomes deathly pale. At the same time a stir is caused by the arrival of a male English teacher. The class explore supernatural texts and it becomes obvious that, although the narrator implies she does not return the feelings, he has become smitten with her. It is not clear at any time whether this is real or her imagination.

The narrator becomes convinced that Ernessa is a vampire and is feeding on Lucy, slowly draining the life from her. The writings in the journal are ambiguous, and the reader never knows how much of what happens is real and how much is the narrator’s own psychosis. The foreword and afterword imply that the writer had a breakdown and spent a year in a mental hospital before going on to make a full recovery and lead a normal life.

It is a dark and sinister book with a pace that is slow and steady, inexorably building tension. Its style is pure gothic echoing Bram Stoker’s Dracula which it clearly references and expects the reader to know. The girls, cloistered away from society and ‘normal’ teenage interactions, live in tight-knit world where fear and fantasy intermingle and are easily cultivated into a kind of mass hysteria.

It is a fluent and well-written book aimed at the older reader. It would probably suit a top set Year 11 or A level student as the reader definitely needs to have a good understanding of the whole vampire legend and be familiar with Dracula to understand the sinister build-up and references.

2006-12-31