cover image Adams Fall

Adams Fall

Sean Desmond, Desmond Sean. Thomas Dunne Books, $22.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-312-26254-9

Restless ghosts roam the august halls of Harvard in this debut psychothriller, a younger sibling to The Shining. In his senior year at Harvard, the unnamed narrator's life is falling apart. Having faithfully toiled in his classes for three years with good results, he is now burnt out as he goes through the motions of composing his senior thesis, and completes his application for study abroad with all the animation of a zombie. He is bored with his girlfriend, Rosie, and haunted by memories of her ex, Billy, the narrator's freshman roommate and former best friend, who hanged himself in their room. The protagonist copes by frantic boozing, drug taking and clandestine sex with his glamorous classmate, Maeve. But he begins to suffer headaches and spells of d j vu while restlessly pacing the dorm's old underground tunnels and its roof. He can't figure out why his grades slip perilously and his health declines, until he meets a spectral visitor from the past who appears to be enjoying himself at the narrator's expense and hints at sexual secrets. Things go terribly wrong on Halloween, when the narrator, in a mushroom-induced paranoia, wakes up with a fearsome image of Maeve dead in the underground tunnels. To his horror, he finds that the ghost, a former Adams resident, is merrily reconstructing two deadly scenes from the past, using the narrator and his circle as stand-ins. Newcomer Desmond shows a flair for character development and wry observations about Ivy League life. Even if his plotting is unoriginal and the dialogue a bit flat, this is an entertaining debut and a suitable Halloween release. (Oct.)