The Moth Diaries

Written in journal form, I found myself totally immersed in this story of a 16 year old girl, so beset with unresolved grief over the death of her father that she cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. Likewise, the reader needs to periodically stop to think whether they are reading testimony or dream. For a first novel, this is a marvelous example of a writer finding a voice. Thank you for this trip inside the deteriorating mind of a depressed adolescent. Also thank you for the afterword reconciling today with yesterday.

I know there is supposed to be ambiguity in this book, so that it's not "really" about a vampire but about a disturbed girl who imagines the new girl at boarding school is a vampire.However... honestly, I think that's a bit of a joke on reviewers that the author perpetrated to keep the book from being dismissed as "mere" fantasy. Yes, the heroine has a tragic past (father killed herself). Yes, she is taking a course on supernatural fiction... and ultimately has a dangerous flirtation with her teacher. yes, the new girl steals her best friend's affections.These are all red herrings-- and the reason nobody takes her seriously. It's like the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." This is a chilling book... and I can't imagine that the blonde best friend wasting away is named "Lucy" (did none of the reviewers even READ Dracula or Carmilla?) by accident. Real deaths happen, mysterious illnesses and other elusive things that have only one of two explanations: a "real" gothic vampire, or a psychotic narrator.To me the story only makes sense with the former... and that the narrator herself, as a grown woman, decides it must have been the latter is part of the novel's tragedy.This is a witty, sly, haunting modern version of Carmilla. Chilling and very sad... perhaps the saddest is how we blind ourselves to real danger and evil in the name of "normal."

There seems to be a rush among critics and reviewers to categorize Klein's book as a story either about female adolescence or vampires or perhaps some combination of the two. However, simply labeling The Moth Diaries as just another entry in the "outcast-coming-of-age genre" fails to do justice to the true subtlety and richness of what is amazingly merely Klein's first novel. While readers looking for a story about vampires or conflicted teen girls at boarding school will likely find what they seek in this book, those with broader, more developed literary tastes can certainly find more of substance "to hold on to." Just beneath the obvious plot lines so artfully summarized by the reviewer from Publishers Weekly lies an intelligent examination of the limitations of human perspective. Klein's narrator writes, "At Brangwyn [her boarding school], it was different. Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened." The insular nature of the school is just a symptom of the narcissism that consumes each of the girls in the school, and most importantly, that restricts us all. One of the sinister aspects of human life is that we can only experience it from one point of view, our own, and thus all of our thoughts and experiences are necessarily filtered through the lens of our own self-perception. So the impossible task becomes to judge our own perceptions impartially. Readers of The Moth Diaries are granted the power to witness the narrator's life as recorded in her journal, but with the unfair advantage of a distant perspective. We can quickly dismiss the narrator's obsession with Ernessa and Lucy as the tragic creation of a mentally ill young girl, but we must pause to consider if some detached reader would not pass similar judgement on us if he were to read the darkest secrets in our unpublished diaries. Perhaps the most touching moment in the book comes in the afterword when the narrator, now an adult cured of her illness but still unable to escape the plague of her singular perspective, marvels at her outwardly content daughters, "They've always been at home in the world." The narrator, still focused on her own sufferings, fails to realize that, while it may be true that not everyone imagines their social rivals to be vampires, no one ever feels completely at home in this world. It is hard to imagine something more relevant, or more worth holding on to, than a thoughtful book about the danger of being trapped inside one's narrow self-perception. This is particularly true at a time when every week scores of people are bombed or shot because two opposing groups of people fail to see the world from any perspective other than that of their own sufferingCertainly, there is more to Klein's book than meets the eye and far more than could be outlined in a brief review, but suffice to say that there is ample and real substance that will allow a diversity of readers

I have been waiting a long time for a book like this, one that would take the vampire legend seriously and write it from the inside, so to speak. This book, which reminds me so much of a great film by Roger Vadium called "Blood and Roses," is a true successor to Bram Stoker's classic. Lots of people have tried, of course, and some have been pretty interesting (Whitley Strieber's "The Hunger" is a good example), but in the end they are just empty genre exercises. Nothing is at stake. In this book, with its quiet and beautiful language, everything is on the line all the time and you really can lose your soul. Vampirism is a condition of existence, and another name for it is despair -- a despair so pervasive it seeps into every corner of reality. It's an invitation to a place elsehwere, to a new body and an unburdened spirit, and Rachel Klein makes the despair so palpable that it has to take physical form. Ernessa has to exist. Everyone in the book is under the same spell. Nothing is stable. Bodies, states of mind, family relationships are all changing. Even the school is beginning to disintegrate into chaos. And the least stable thing of all is the act of writing, where you transform feelings into words, events into stories, and stories into myths. Writing won't take the narrator all the way over to another reality, but it can lead her to the one act that will: suicide. (Query: what was the PW reviewer smoking that blinded him/her to the fact that this book isn't about teen delusions and insanity but is really about trying to stay sane when you take everything around you and inside you seriously?) The powerful thing about this novel is that the narrator is the same decades after she writes the journal. The razor blade is still there, hidden in the pages of the journal where she wrote her deepest thoughts, in case she wants to find out if there is a place where she can live forever.

The Moth Diaries may be Rachel Kleins first novel, but one would never know it by reading it. The tale of a young girl, struggling with her inner demons at a New England boarding school is a master piece, a real look into the soul of a teen girl. This book is a "must-read" for any teenage girl, or anyone who was.