What is going on in Crawley Hall, home of the Humanities at the University of Inivea? Staff are becoming deathly ill. Ceilings are collapsing. There appears to be an infestation of maggots, often dropping from collapsing ceilings. The new Dean, Phillip Vermeulen, has instigated draconian cutbacks to the infrastructure budget, while at the same time “refreshing” targeted tenured faculty, i.e. firing them. A sink hole has opened up on one side of the building. And what is with all those hares milling about outside and sometimes inside? These are just the conditions that Dr. Edith Vane has to take in stride as she negotiates her way through the upcoming term anxiously awaiting the publication of her dissertation on housewife memoirist Beulah Crump-Withers which will justify her tenured spot on the faculty and help her to avoid refreshment. Oh, and now she’s started seeing things as well. It could be a difficult term.

Suzette Mayr’s comic-horror campus novel is both completely over the top and intimately grounded in the reality of current academia. The uninitiated may think that everything here is horrific. But for anyone with a smattering of experience of university life and work, virtually all of the craziness of Edith’s life (with the exception of the rampant hares and possessed building, I suppose) is just exactly what life and work is like at a small to mid-size university. Realism. Gritty realism. Which is about as horrific as anything you can dream up. So much so that the eerier aspects of Mayr’s story barely register as uncanny.

A very enjoyable though unsettling read. But a bit disheartening if you’ve been through the grind that Edith is faced with yourself.

Gently recommended. ( )