PSYCHIC SUMMER

Michael and Arnold and Howard and Francois rent a Fire Island beach house (1966), intent on weekend sun, good food, and earthly pleasures. Fooling around with a homemade Ouija board, they make contact with Zena, drowned in 1873, and her evil sister Bethlene; cryptic messages come across the board as the juice glass spells out the information--smoothly when Zena is in control, violently when Bethlene takes over. Francois is terrified, Howard prefers the local bar, but Michael and Arnold are game; so are friends and neighbors who try the table, especially Arnold's Sharma (whose background encourages belief) and Melissa, whose seductiveness provokes the envious Bethlene into repeated obscenities. Is Arnold, already reading Rosemary's Baby and reincarnation books, just suggestible? Maybe, but no one can explain the flying ashtray or his near-fatal crash or the hidden alarm clock or the missing astrological charts or the fuzzy shapes in the Polaroid picture or the starfish on the coffee table--which may keep people reading. No explanation materializes but Zena's troubled spirit is assuaged when her story is told on a late-night talk show. You don't have to be psychic to know who'll make contact with this silly sisterhood--the ones out in the sun too long.