The Secret History

A couple of friends from my yoga blog recommended this book.  I grew up on a steady diet of dark Anne Rice books.  I love dark books.  And this was certainly a dark book.

At an elite, small university in Vermont, six students take their Greek education very seriously.  Four of the students try to recreate a bacchanalia.  It goes horribly awry and a local farmer ends up maimed to death.  One of the excluded friends, Bunny, a character that seems to have no conscience or morals, finds out about the incident and begins to blackmail his friends as he struggles with what they did.

The group, led by eccentric Henry, are constantly in a worried frenzy that Bunny is going to tell someone what they did.  Apparently their only solution to the problem is to kill Bunny.

The story, told by one of the friends, chronicles how they came to the decision and how that decision ruins their lives.

"It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did.  But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do.  Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs."  p. 199

"After dinner, I went back to my room.  I dreaded the thought of the night ahead, but not for the reasons one might expect--that I was worried about the police, or that my conscience bothered me, or anything of the sort.  Quite the contrary.  By that time, by some purely subconscious means, I had developed a successful mental block about the murder and everything pertaining to it.  I talked about it in select company but seldom thought of it when alone."  p. 317

Brush up on your classics and your Greek.  This book is full of delicious literary references and I'm sure I only understood half of them.