THAT NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY

Think libraries are staid, respectable, and boring? Think again.

The night before graduation at his mercifully unnamed Vermont university, Davey Kebede plans a secret after-hours reenactment of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a ritual designed to overcome the fear of death, in the William E. Woodend Rare Books Library, where his stint as an assistant is coming to an end. Since the ritual isn’t something he can stage on his own, he invites Soraya Abbasi and Mary Xiao, his two competitors for a full-time position at the Woodend, to join him, along with Kip Pickens, the son of philanthropists who’ve thrown their money around this campus and others; Applebee’s bartender Ro Tucci, whose job this evening is to supply drugs; his girlfriend, classics student Umu Owusu; and, just to round things out, mousy physics undergraduate Faye Bradshaw, who kicks off the festivities by announcing that she’s not going to take the acid Ro has brought for everyone to drop. As if on cue, the lights go out, and you’d never guess what happens next. By the end of the night, most of this crew will be history, and not in an Eleusinian way. Davey notes that “we’re not in an Agatha Christie novel,” and he’s absolutely right. Both the setup and the execution are far less realistic than those of And Then There Were None, and the variety of means to these violent deaths is more redolent of an old dark house movie or a drug-addled teen horror flick that just happens to be set in the stacks of a well-funded library.

Like the participants in this ritual, you need to be in the mood for this one. Pass the joint.