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School is back in session. After the homeroom bell rings, grab one (or both) of these novels and enjoy a quick, humorous tutorial on how not to act while educating the next generation. Debut authors Gill Hornby and Lacy Crawford deliver a welcome dose of playground escapism.

British author Gill Hornby got the idea for her first novel, The Hive, while reading Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, a nonfiction book that Tina Fey used as the basis for her hit movie Mean Girls. In The Hive, Hornby observes that teenage girls aren’t the only catty females at school: Their mothers can be worse.

The children who attend the upscale British academy of St. Ambrose have started another school year, and their mothers are busy creating their schoolyard cliques and dramas to rival those of their children. Top mum Beatrice rules her minions with daily text invites for her famous workouts, which take place after the school drop-off. Will you be invited to Bea’s group run, her Pilates session or maybe, just maybe, the elusive power walk?

Then actual catastrophe strikes at St. Ambrose. The headmaster informs the parents that they do not have funds to complete construction of the new library. Here, the plot gets a bit cliché: Moms mobilize with Bundt cakes, lunch ladders and other fundraising events, but are too preoccupied to be bothered with their children.

Still, Hornby, the sister of author Nick Hornby, is a perceptive writer, using her comedic talents to investigate the minds of these women even as she exploits their ridiculousness. The Hive does just that—with a healthy serving of British humor thrown in for our reading pleasure. This is a book that might make any mother of school-age children just a little bit nervous.

A GATEKEEPER'S STORY

Lacy Crawford’s Early Decision is the story of five Chicago high school seniors, their college essay-writing process and their well-paid essay consultant, Anne. What makes this novel so fascinating is that Crawford has dramatized her personal experience in the college admissions world. For 15 years, she helped teenagers perfect their essays, gaining access to a network of mega-rich parents who relied on her to help their children earn acceptance to some of the best schools in the country.

Crawford expertly fictionalizes some of the crazy and vicious behavior exhibited by parents who claim they only want what is best for their child. Readers will be rooting for all five young adults—four wealthy, one from a working-class background, all relatable—to find their own voices and their own paths.

This is a winner of a novel. Part comedy, part exposé, it can open the door to debate about the intensity of the college application process. Early Decision should be required reading for every parent of a child who is embarking on the college admissions journey.

A survey of a few recent horror movies (The Conjuring, Insidious 2, etc.) suggests that hauntings OF the children, BY the children and FOR the children are in. And why not? There’s really nothing creepier than a threat coming either from a ghostly child or toward a living child from some post-mortem parental entity. Three books investigate this disturbing psychological terrain, with shifting degrees of subtlety and terror. All three authors are wise enough to know that they are on shaky spiritual ground putting helpless children at risk, whichever side of the grave the little ones happen to inhabit. The pleasure of reading these books is how such risks are managed . . . and how they inevitably become unmanageable.

John Boyne already has a track record placing his fictional children into grotesquely horrible circumstances. He scored his biggest success in 2004 with the novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (made into a successful film), about two children living literally on the opposite sides of the fence at Auschwitz. This House Is Haunted retreats to the safer haven of Victorian gaslight, where Boyne’s blithe attitude toward historical accuracy can have freer rein. Boyne seems to have as little reverence for literary models as he does for Holocaust scholarship. Stroke by stroke, scare by scare, this latest novel deliberately sets out to beat Henry James at the diabolical game he played in the best ghost story of all time, The Turn of the Screw. Boyne’s mimicry and mischievous corruption of both the form and the content of James’s tale are surely the book’s most uncanny elements. All the Jamesian paraphernalia is there: the clueless governess at the remote country estate who narrates the story; her predecessors who meet violent ends; the nervous bystanders who infuriate both the heroine and the reader with their stupendous reserve. Then there are the governess’ two charges: the sister, mature beyond her years, who is in close touch with the malevolent spirit of the house, and the brother who cannot understand what the hell is going on, so angelic a soul is he. Boyne has not “done his homework” on James so much as chewed on it like a dog. Literate horror fans will take wicked delight in the unpretty sight that ensues—especially the fact that the ghost of Boyne’s house is none other than . . . no, I won’t say it. It’s too horrible to report in this review (take that, Henry James!).

Susan Hill is a more elegant fashioner of Victorian-style ghost stories than Boyne (this is merely an observation, not necessarily a judgment in her favor). Her allure—whether in these two latest novellas or in her famous 1987 novel, The Woman in Black, adapted for the London stage in 1989 and playing there ever since—springs from the serene decorum of her prose, which remains mellifluous even at the most catastrophic turn of events. This set of novellas provides another “safe haven” for those fans who prefer to take their horror with a smooth pint of bitter. As both The Small Hand and Dolly unfold, one well-wrought paragraph after another provides a placid cupboard for hanging up the very fears the stories are meant to summon.  Susan Hill has the gift at once to spook and to lull to sleep. Fine bedtime reading, just before turning out the light.  

Now, dear reader, turn it back on. I mean, right now. You’re going to need it. The perilous pleasures and imperiled children that await you in John Lindqvist’s magnificent collection of stories, Let the Old Dreams Die, require constant illumination. The darkness of this writer’s imagination is profound, the terrors manifold and the writing merciless in its reckoning of every human being’s worst fears, groundless hopes and bizarre capacity to love against all mortal odds. It would be tempting to call Lindqvist a philosopher, so relentless are the questions his characters ask about the meaning and the meaninglessness of our existence. He’s more than that, though, for the philosophical component of each story is beautifully harnassed to a narrative force which impels events forward at terrific speed, always homing onto to the intersection where goodness is assaulted by death, where both goodness and love must make a choice whether to prevail or succumb. There are worse things than death in Lindqvist’s world: emptiness of heart, to name one. In this collection, the Vampire and the Zombie—and the children who heroically attend them—return from his two most famous novels (Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead). What a gift from Lindqvist to his millions of fans! Here are his most famous deathless creatures, back again from the dead, this time authorized by love to let the right death in, either for themselves or for those whom they have tormented. Having trouble handling the dead? This Halloween, you’ll have no better ally than John Ajvide Lindqvist.

The assassination has inspired fiction by writers from Don DeLillo (Libra) to Stephen King (11/22/63). Now, two journalists take their turns.

Jim Lehrer, former anchor of PBS’s “NewsHour,” was a reporter at the Dallas Times Herald when JFK was killed. His questioning of a Secret Service agent about the use of the “bubble top” on the presidential limousine was the impetus for the novel Top Down. This slender volume begins like a detective story but becomes a character study of the emotional toll on individuals involved in a national tragedy. The characters include a guilt-ridden Secret Service agent who gave the order to remove the bubble top for the Dallas motorcade, his plucky daughter and a reporter clearly modeled on Lehrer (right down to the crew cut).

If Kennedy Lived, by political commentator Jeff Greenfield, has a cheeky tone and a scenario that begins with JFK recovering from the assassin’s bullet. He goes on to serve a second term; Lyndon Johnson resigns the vice presidency to curtail an investigation into his finances; both Bobby and Jackie seem to stand by their man. But increasingly, the media takes shots and the public is losing faith. Ah, politics.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE:
On a tragic anniversary, remembering the life and death of JFK.