From the TBR Pile: Spotlight: Excerpt from The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison

By Margot Harrison
On Sale: September 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781525809880
Graydon House Hardcover
Price: $28.00
“A strange, riveting, brilliant fable. Like a fever-dream of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —LEV GROSSMAN

Four friends. A campus reunion. A dark new way to relive the past.

It’s been twenty-five years since The Midnight Club last convened. A tight-knit group of college friends bonded by late nights at the campus literary magazine, they’re also bonded by something darker: the death of their brilliant friend Jennet junior year. But now, decades later, a mysterious invitation has pulled them back to the pine-shrouded Vermont town where it all began.
As the estranged friends gather for a weeklong campus reunion, they soon learn that their host has an ulterior motive: she wants them to uncover the truth about the night Jennet died, and she’s provided them with an extraordinary method—a secret substance that helps them not only remember but relive the past.
But each one of the friends has something to hide. And the more they question each other, the deeper they dive into their own memories, the more they understand that nothing they thought they knew about their college years, and that fateful night, is true.
Twisty, nostalgic, and emotionally thrilling, The Midnight Club explores that innate desire to revisit our first loves, our biggest mistakes, and the gulf between who we are and who we hoped we’d be.

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Excerpt:

You are hereby formally invited to a reunion of the Midnight Brunch Club. October 27th through 31st, 2014, 12 Railroad Street in Dunstan, Vermont.

Come to celebrate the life of Jennifer (Jennet) Sherilyn Stark (1967–89) and revisit our shared past through the elixir of the pines. There are still secrets to be discovered; the past is not even past (Faulkner); we are boats against the current (Fitzgerald). Leave all doubts and inhibitions at home. RSVP to Auraleigh Lydgate.

The first time Sonia ever received an invitation from Auraleigh Lydgate was in the Dove-Cat room freshman year, on the first warm spring day in Vermont, forsythia bursting forth on the quad.

Sonia was bent over a Mac Classic when Auraleigh swept in, wearing a leather jacket and drop-waist minidress, and noisily slid out a chair. “Oh my God, I’m dealing with a roommate nightmare! Marina got this brilliant idea to backpack in Europe, so now Paul and I are short a person for the townhouse.”

“Paul Bretton?” Sonia couldn’t hide her surprise. He was the

newly elected editor of their lit magazine—quiet, earnest, and formidably intellectual. Auraleigh was rich and from LA and had a husky laugh that made boys’ eyes glaze over. They seemed like a complete mismatch.

“Yeah.” Auraleigh grinned. “No, we’re not dating. I like his espresso machine, and he likes my cooking. Hey, wait—do you have housing for next year?”

“I was just going to do the lottery.” This was only their second or third conversation, and Sonia, the daughter of an itinerant hippie who could only afford the college because of her mom’s job in the admin office, could barely understand why Auraleigh would talk to her to begin with.

When Auraleigh spoke again, Sonia almost thought she was hearing wrong: would she like to share the townhouse with them instead?

It cost more than the dorm, but Sonia barely hesitated in saying yes. She was tired of studying alone in the library and coming back to a silent room. She was tired of feeling like she didn’t belong.

Never mind that Auraleigh later admitted the invitation had been spur-of-the-moment, based more on what Sonia wasn’t than what she was. (You seemed quiet. I figured it would balance out my loud.) In that instant, whether Sonia realized it or not, she became part of a circle she would never quite be able to leave.

***

Crossing the campus of the New Mexico college where she had taught for the past decade, Sonia no longer felt the desert heat. Here was another invitation from Auraleigh, twenty-seven years later, but Sonia wasn’t the same person she’d been back then.

She climbed the library steps in a daze. At the entrance to the stacks, she pressed her ID card to the sensor. The light blinked red. She tried it again, then handed her card to the circulation assistant, a hungover-looking student who put down a copy of Teaching to Transgress to examine it.

“Semester ended yesterday.” The student had bangs in her face, too many barrettes doing too little work. She typed a number into her computer and peered at the screen. “This is invalid. Did you just graduate?”

“No, I’m faculty.” Were those bangs keeping the kid from seeing the fine lines and sags of middle age? But then Sonia understood. “I… My contract wasn’t renewed for next semester.”

The student handed her back the ID. “That’d be it.”

Sonia took the meaningless laminated rectangle that had given her access to every campus facility. She’d hoped to use the job databases that were only accessible from terminals in the chilly bowels of the library. To reach them, she would have traversed the concrete gallery hung with mementos of faculty achievements—including a one-sheet for the 1998 semi-cult film Retrophiliac, with her own name right after the director’s.

Instead she felt like a criminal. “I didn’t realize it would be invalid this soon.”

“You could apply for a temporary pass,” the girl said.

But Sonia was already headed back outside, through two sets of hissing doors and down the stucco steps into the furnace heat. She just needed to rest for a moment before cleaning out her office.

She found a shady table on the quad, sat down, and pulled out the mail she’d stuffed in her bag earlier.

The invitation.

Sonia turned over the heavy, cream-colored card and really read it this time.

You are hereby formally invited to a reunion of the Midnight Brunch Club. October 27th through 31st, 2014, 12 Railroad Street in Dunstan, Vermont.

Come to celebrate the life of Jennifer (Jennet) Sherilyn Stark (1967–89) and revisit our shared past through the elixir of the pines.

Of course—today, May 22, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jennet’s death.

The “reunion” was five days in October in Dunstan. Auraleigh had moved back to their college town to watch over her daughter, who was now a freshman there, and had gotten busy transforming a rundown Victorian into a cozy home. The reno must have gone well, or Auraleigh wouldn’t have invited all of them to stay there in high-foliage season.

Still, the invitation came as a surprise, because Auraleigh hadn’t called Sonia since December. During their last phone conversation, she’d grown borderline huffy when Sonia failed to show interest in the intricacies of spray-foam insulation. Since then, there’d been pictures on Facebook of the evolving home/B and B—gables, bathroom fixtures. Sonia had commented on a few of them, then gotten bored and stopped.

October was midterm season, packed with grading and tearful emails from students begging for conferences. Where would Sonia be next October? In a month, she would have no campus mailbox, no email address, no health insurance.

Take it as a sign from the universe! Auraleigh would probably say, flinging her arms out. Go back to LA! Follow your dreams!

Sonia tried but failed to tear the card in half. When you followed your dreams, you ended up like her mother—moving seven times in ten years, from the shabby-chic environs of Morningside Heights to the Vermont wilderness, always chasing a great love or transcendence in a commune’s soybean field. When you reached a certain age, you realized that the real dream, the only one that mattered, was safety.

As she shoved the card back into the envelope, her eyes again ran over the lines: There are still secrets to be discovered; the past is not even past (Faulkner); we are boats against the current (Fitzgerald).

Auraleigh had used only half the quote from The Great Gatsby; the next part was borne back ceaselessly into the past. Borne back into the past, against the inexorable current of time, by an elixir of the pines…

Sonia rose, her heart racing. In December, Auraleigh had asked if she remembered the boy with the time travel drug. Sonia had laughed and said, “Don’t be silly. That was a campus myth. There was no time travel drug.”

But she knew exactly who—and what—Auraleigh was talking about.

There was a way to go back, if you really wanted to—an elixir of the pines. People just weren’t supposed to know about it.

Sonia, who did know, had spent the past twenty-five years trying to forget.

About the author:

Photo Credit:
Daria Bishop

MARGOT HARRISON is the author of four young adult novels, including an Indies Introduce Pick, Junior Library Guild Selections, and Vermont Book Award Finalists. She grew up in New York and now lives in Vermont. The Midnight Club is her debut adult novel.