The Moth Diaries

An isolated sixteen-year-old girls' boarding school student recounts in her diary her growing paranoia that a fellow classmate is responsible for her best friend's wasting illness as well as a series of other disasters, a suspicion she is unable to confirm or deny years later.

Lucy and Ernessa have become inseparable. Ernessa’s taken her over. She’s consuming her. Ernessa is a vampire.

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 an enigmatic, moody presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes.

Around her swirl dark rumors, suspicions, and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school and Lucy isn’t Lucy anymore, fantasy and reality mingle until what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare that evokes with gothic menace the anxieties, lusts, and fears of adolescence. And at the center of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in the fevered world of her own imagining?

Rachel Klein is an American novelist, translator, and essayist. Her stories and translations have appeared in The Chicago Review and The Literary Review. She currently works and resides in Brooklyn.