something's very strange here

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Ines Murillo is a first-year at Catherine House, a prestigious but unusual college tucked deep in the woods of Pennsylvania.  The admissions process is extremely selective, and both rigorous and demanding.  It's entirely unclear what they're looking for, beyond intelligence, but fortunately for Ines, she has whatever it is, since the world outside suddenly seems like something from which she has to escape.  Once she gets there, though, she seems intent on continuing with the debauchery that got her into trouble in the first place.  She sleeps around, drinks too much (to be fair, wine seems to flow freely at all times), and skips class.  Can anything convince her to turn things around?  And what's really going on at Catherine anyway?

Reading the blurb for this book, which describes a secretive school that graduates powerful people, immediately made me think of that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the fraternity whose members got their power from a demon in their basement to whom they had to offer human sacrifices.  So, here's a spoiler: there's no demon in the basement of Catherine House.  What there is, isn't quite clear.  It has something to do with a "new material" called "plasm" which, if I understood correctly somehow allows all things to be connected.  The science behind it wasn't all that important to me.

Rather than the specifics of what's going on in the lab, this book is anchored by the atmosphere of the school.  Full of lush descriptions of damp rooms with peeling wallpaper and mismatched furniture and meals made of strange combinations of food, the sense of something a step beyond shabby gentility emerges.  Add to that some students who are, shall we say, very focused on plasm, and one gets a decidedly gothic feel.

For readers who enjoy a sense of nervous dread about what happens on the next page, this book will pull you to the end, while you nervously look over your shoulder.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.