Product Description

At an exclusive 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 her new and disturbing classmate. Ernessa is a mysterious, moody presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes. Around her swirl dark rumours, suspicions and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school, what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare of gothic menace, fuelled by the anxieties, lusts and fears of adolescence. At the centre of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in her own fevered imagination?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #452109 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"'The Moth Diaries delves deeper into the nueroses and psyche of female adolescence than anything I've ever read. It is dark and dangerous, gothic, brutally revealing, regularly shocking and perfectly controlled.' Guardian; 'A wonderfully Gothic story, even though it's set in the 1960s, and I adored every word of it... my advice is: read this terrific, skilful, fascinating book at once before they decide on casting.' Times Educational Supplement"

From the Back Cover
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 a mysterious, moody presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes.

Around her swirl dark rumours, suspicions, and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school, fantasy and reality mingle. What is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare of gothic menace, fuelled by the anxieties, lusts, and fears of adolescence.
And at the centre of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in her own fevered imagination?

About the Author
Rachel Klein received her BA and MA degrees in English Literature from the University of Michigan, where she received Hopwood Awards for both translation and short story. Her work has been published in the Chicago Review and the Literary Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Customer Reviews

A book to haunt me in years to come!
This book had me completely absorbed. It's rare for a book to linger on in my mind days after reading it. I still can't decide whether the narrator's experiences and feelings were real, or a product of her imagination.

Was Ernessa really a vampire who is sucking the life out of her friend Lucy? Perhaps Lucy distintegrates because of anorexia & possible abuse from her repulsive father? Maybe the author was simply projecting her negative feelings of grief & jealously onto Ernessa and making her out to be something gross and unnatural. However, weird going-ons, untimely deaths, & the dark gothic atsmosphere of the boarding school suggest that the narrator's experiences are very real.

Well-written and very compulsive, the book finishes off with more questions than answers.

THE MOTH DIARIES
Its hard to say you could enjoy this book but it did make a compelling and fascinating read. Don't read this book if you want easy answers as this book is not about that - its the questions and possibilities that stay with you for a long time after reading it. Its extremely well written and gets under your skin and I did find it fascinating and enjoyable, even if I craved a clear answer at the end. You really do feel like you are reading someone else's diary and it throws up so many things that happen during adolescence while avoiding all the usual clichés. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants something different to read.

Buffy The Metaphor Slayer
This pyschological thriller, despite its packaging, seems to me to be a long way from being a Gothic vampire story. It reads more like a modern take on the classic American short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" where the reader witnesses the mental disintegration of the female narrator from her own journal.

In fairness to the author, the prosaic forward removes all realistic chance of reading this book as a genuine ghost story, although I suppose the epilogue could be seen as being slightly ambiguous.

The interesting point raised in the narrative, is if the narrator has been "cured" of her madness...certainly this point, much more than imagined monsters, is left very much open.

Moths occur at several key times in the story, never fatally being drawn to flames, I am glad to say, this, a too obvious image for the brilliant "A" student obsessing over books, school, teachers, father, friends, is never used. Most tellingly, the narrator describes fruitless nights searching with her father for a beautiful moth they saw when she was younger.

As much as being about going mad, the book is about growing up, both themes are much more horrific than a castle full of vampires.