THE HAWTHORNE SCHOOL

The first suspense novel by a pseudonymous Chicago psychotherapist follows a 4-year-old boy and his mother into a school that’s all too perfect.

At wits’ end because her son, Henry, is miserable and miserably noncompliant at Happy Start Preschool, Claudia Vera, an artist-turned–massage therapist, takes him to visit The Hawthorne School. Even though she knows she could never afford it, she’s encouraged by her neighbor Maggie Timmerberg, who hints that parents can volunteer there to subsidize enrollment. Zelma Huxley, the ageless director of the school, is so taken with Henry that she instantly offers Claudia a similar deal, and the weeks that follow are idyllic. Henry loves the school, bonds closely with his teacher, Evelyn Applegate, and charms everyone, who agree that he’s the perfect little boy. Inevitably, however, storm clouds arise. Devin Richards, the man who abandoned Claudia and Henry weeks after his son was born, returns out of the blue and presses Claudia to withdraw the boy from the school. Claudia begins to sense that something’s not quite right about Zelma’s assistant, Niles Holloway, who befriends her with ferocious possessiveness. She feels Henry growing more distant from her day by day. Yet she’s so peaceful when she’s at the school and so unhappy when she’s away from it that she feels compelled to quit her job, take up residence at the school, and do Zelma’s bidding as the staff awaits the imminent arrival of Gabriel Hawthorne, the late founder’s all-powerful son.

As the horrors in this by-the-numbers fable of Stepford children become more literal, they get harder and harder to swallow.