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Moonfall
reviewed by
MOONFALL jumps out of the gate fast with the suicide of a young teacher, but she's not the first to opt out of her contract with St. Gertrude's Home for Girls. In fact, lots of strange things have happened around the old converted abbey the locals call St. Gruesome's in homage to its gothic architecture, ghosts, and horrifying gargoyles, which—legend has it—fly off at night and steal babies. What's even stranger is that people have a tendency to forget what they think of St. Gertrude's and its bizarre nuns, so much so that Sheriff John Lawson still doesn't know whether or not he and his friends went there to spy on girls twenty-four years before, on Halloween, the night so many things happened that would change his life.
All sorts of pent-up feelings surface in John. Divorced, he finds himself feeling very protective of his son, Mark—especially now that Mark hangs out in the weird woods with Minerva Payne, the eccentric baker people refer to as the "old witch of the woods." Funny thing is, John somehow senses that Mark is a lot safer with Minerva than with the nuns of St. Gertrude's, a feeling confirmed when John investigates the school officially.
A new teacher, Sara Hawthorne, has returned to the school with an agenda of her own—to investigate her roommate's so-called suicide a dozen years before. Strangely, the sheriff has no file on that case. Is Sara delusional? Is she in danger? John Lawson can feel something's wrong, but he can't tie the strings together. Or can he, with the help of Minerva Payne? And does the lovely Sara favor John, the gallant sheriff, or Richard Dashwood, the school's creepy doctor (he of the incredible eyes). And what of the Mother Superior, Lucy Bartholomew, and the overly fond way she gazes at Dashwood, or the way she hates Kelly Reed, a student who reminds Sara so much of herself? What goes on in Moonfall at Halloween, and what's with everyone's love of the nuns' mincemeat pies?
Tamara Thorne deftly weaves sly humor and genuine chills into the fabric of this update of "Satan's School for Girls," blending in a generous helping of her own style of twists and turns. The chess game between the good guys and the bad is engrossing precisely because it's played out right up to an inexorable finale every bit as melodramatically cinematic as that of "The Exorcist" and "The Omen." Great fun.