Rachel Klein

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?

The Moth Diaries

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?

Emmett

Thoroughly enjoyed swimming around in Klein's rich, vivid prose. It's a book of obsession: with people, with death, with clues both real and imagined (with both blending into themselves, indistinguishable). The isolated, almost ethereal atmosphere of a boarding school, secluded, hushed, away from everybody else, makes the ideal foreign, unreal location for these series of creepy happenings and for such a deep, strangling, consuming thought to take hold. Everything is intense there: from the thoughts which stretch out and grasp every inescapable detail both mundane and chilling to the close-knitted (too close?) relationships the girls share, which might be disturbing if not for the convenient excuse of their boarding school - old, perhaps elite and therefore these things become a classical element, almost forgiveable but as the main character puts it in an almost languid manner, rehashing these experiences in generous detail, it all sounds rather unsurprising, 'I've heard it all before; girls that go too far'. 

Klein's writing permeates the pages and soaks it with the vitality of a girl and the exuberant, sparkling drink of her experience. It entrances and it swallows.

Was a little disappointed when I kept my eyes peeled for further plot development with Mr Davis but found little else except that piece of startling detail.

Lucia silva

"¿Sabe alguien el punto exacto en el que termina la realidad y otra cosa, completamente incomprensible se apodera de todo? Si miras dos líneas paralelas, sabes que nunca serás capaz de ver el punto en el que se tocan, tan solo el punto en el que parecen converger. No obstante, en teoría, ese punto existe y todo es posible ahí."

después comento bien esto.

The Moth Diaries

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