FORGOTTEN BOOK: KIRKWOOD FIRES

 Kirkwood Fires by "Deborah Lewis" (Charles L. Grant) (1978)

When Val Carpenter's best friend from school wrote her and offered her a position teaching English for the summer semester at a private school outside of Savannah, Val jumpes at the chance to leave her native New England and the pver bearing, drunken uncle who was her guardian.  As Mary Roberts /rinehart would pur it, had she but known...

Kirkwood School fir Young Ladies was located on an isolated estate, surrounded by both deep woods and swamps.  A storied institure, it had been preparing older girls for the gentile adulthood since before Reconstruction.  Now, near the turn of the Twentieth century, it had fallen on harder times.  Each year, the school offered a special summer session for girls whose families, albeit prominent,  could not afford to pay for the regular school year.  Ten girls were attending this summer's session; interestingly, all of the students were strikingly beautiful.

Kirkwood was run by Mrs. Baine, the autocratic owner and headmistress, known (behind her back) by students and staff as the Dragon.  Assisting her was her husband, Thaddeus, whose self-inflted ego often his behind his wife's skirts.  Charles Morgan, the Assistant Headmaster, appeared to be a friendly counterpart to the Headmistress.  The one other male teacher that semester was Jordan Casey, a tactituen and mysterious man who had been hired on the spot without references; Casey's handsome looks made reportedly set mny of the students' hearts aflutter.  Sara Parsons, the other instuctor for the summer seesio, had been Val's best friend since their childhood school days.  The servants at the school were all local Negroes, some of the older ones had been there back when they were slaves and before they were "Christianized.".

As the summer session continued, Val began to sense an disturbing aura of menace about the school.  There were dark warnings about leaving the school grounds, especially at night.  Val began receiving mysterious unsigned notes, obstensibly meaningless but with hidden threats behind them.  Many of the local Blacks teneded to shun the place, especially at night.  There were rumors of strange fires, and Val could often hear strange, faint music from the distant woods at night.  Also, Sarah had subtly changed.  There were hints that the summer session was somethig other than had been described.  Then Val stumbled upon a secret pagan ritual in the woods, attended by dozens, mainly Blacks, but with a scattering of Whites.  

One of the students developed a sudden fever and, within hours, died.  Val later discovered that the dead girl's older sister, a student al Kirkwood the year before, had also died in the same mysterious way.  That same semeste, another student and an instructor had been killed by a falling tree.  Someone locked Val in her bedroom with a deadly copperhead snake.  And the son of a local farmer -- a boy with only one leg -- has gone missing, and the father suspects he his being held at Kirkwood.  Suddenly, another student dies unexpectedly and Val discovers a cache of stolen letters and an ominous note hinting at some mysterius cabal, referencing some being known as "Zambe."   The, Jordan Casey mysteriously vanishes.

Things are rapidly coming to a head.  It is looking likely that Val may not survive the next few days before the summer semester ends...

Kirkwood Fires is a notch above many of the paperback Gothic romanaces of the late Seventies.  It's author, Charles Grant, was one of the premier horror writers of the time.  A respected writer and editor, Grant was a proponent of "quiet horror," eschewing much of the graphic nature of the field at the time, relying instead on a slow build-up of tension and suspense.  Grant published well over a hundred books -- including four Gothics as "Deborah Lewis" -- and was best known for his series about the fictional cponnecticut town of Ozrun Station, as well as for his eleven anthologies in the ground-0breaking Shadows series of horror stories.  Grant's writing garnered him a World Fantasy Award and two Nebula Awards, as well as a World Fantasy Award for the first volumes on the Shadows series.  He was equally adept at humor as he was at horror -- one the the best titles ever for a book was his 668:  The Neighbor of the Beast.  Among his many pseudonyms were Felicia Andrews (for historical romances, which outsold anything else he wrote), Steven Charles, Lionel Fenn, Geoffrey Marsh, Mark Rivers, Simon Lake, and Timothy Boggs.  (Yeah, there was a watery theme among many of his pen names.)  He wrote the tie-in novel for the abysmal movie Hudson Hawk, noting that it took up the most painful ten days of his writing career.  Hius two original X-Files tie-in novels were best-sellers.  His legendary newsletter Haggis deserves a printing from some ambitious small press, if only for its serialization of the unpublished novel Lancelot and Blanche.  He died much too early, leaving two children and his second wife, the "Gila Queen" Kathryn Ptacek.

A number of his books have been made available in e-Book format.  Check them out.