How many times have you watched American Psycho? I’ve lost count. But I’m excited to report to you that director Mary Harron is returning to our genre as she’ll begin filming this summer in Montreal on her adaptation of Rachel Klein’s novel The Moth Diaries. The novel tells the story of odd goings-on in a girls’ boarding school in the late 1960s. The unnamed narrator, a student at the school, is intellectual, somewhat aloof and associates with a intense clique of girls. When Dora is found dead one night, a tragic accident is initially suspected. Check out a more detailed synopsis by reading on.
Haunted by the death of her poet father, and coming to terms with the usual trials and tribulations of adolescence, the narrator of Klein’s first novel is a boarder in an all-girls school in the 1960s. Less than usual are the series of events that unfold in her diary: the arrival of a new girl, Ernessa, who seems to have stepped out of a Gothic novel; the death in mysterious circumstances of two of the narrator’s friends. Are the events connected? The narrator thinks so, eventually believing that Ernessa is a vampire. Klein cleverly leaves the reader in the dark as to what has really taken place, while convincingly portraying the hothouse atmosphere of the school and the voice of the narrator – a voice which combines precocious literary detachment with Gothically inspired imagination. A debut with promisingly subtle depths beneath its entertaining surface.