THE NIGHT OF THE MOONBOW

by Thomas Tryon ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1989

Tryon divides his works between suspense (Harvest Home, The Other) and Hollywood nostalgia (Crowned Heads, All That Glitters). This time out he turns to suspense laced mildly with horror--and once again has written a novel, set in a Connecticut Bible camp in 1938, that shows a lively sense of time and place while working up a plot that comes to little but brazen suspense cliches clanging two-dimensional villains against an oddball hero. Teen-age Leo Joachim comes to Friend-Indeed on Moonbow Lake from an orphanage (before that he'd been in an asylum). He replaces a boy who has been cast out for bedwetting--at 14. As it happens, the departed lad had good reason for wetting the bed, having been terrorized by fellow campers in his cabin. Meanwhile, Leo--who collects spiders, plays the violin and is a wimp at sports--is himself soon being victimized. The ringleader against him is the cabin counselor, a star athelete whose attendance is underwritten by the German Bund and who is also venomous toward an older Jewish camper who befriends Leo. Most of the camp's adults pour cream on any unpleasantries that arise. When one of Leo's spiders (nonpoisonous) bites the cabin's best ballplayer and the lad dies, the cabin holds the death against Leo and attempts to crush him in a kangaroo court. Leo bears a horrible memory: he saw his stepfather, a butcher, stab Leo's adulterous mother and her boyfriend to death, and the inquisitorial boys throw this in his face, inciting Leo to violence. Should do well, although Tryon's unexplored but true metier might well be autobiography, which does not require tinny suspense.

Pub Date: July 10, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION