When college freshman Simone Duchamps is invited to join the exclusive “French House” shortly after beginning her studies in French Literature at the University of Wisconsin she is thrilled. Having been warned that her tutor, Anne Boucher, is unconventional and uncompromising, “the devil herself” as one teaching assistant had put it, Duchamps is honored to be immediately taken under her wing. The French House was designed to simulate study in a foreign country–an environment for residential students with its own rules where only French was spoken. Duchamps has recently chosen to stop taking the medication that she feels has dulled her senses for years. Is this the reason she begins to feel that something strange is happening? Or are there dark secrets hidden in the shadows of the French House?

A beautifully paced novel, this debut work by Courtney Lochner is a tremendous mystery whose plot twists and turns run like a literary Möbius strip. Concerning itself with both the reliability and malleability of memory, THE FRENCH HOUSE frequently wrong foots the reader in the same way that the heroine Duchamps begins to question what is real and what is imagined. Are her decisions fueled simply by her desire to be intellectually and emotionally accepted or are they being guided by external forces?

The book is populated by a cast of carefully curated characters allowing the story’s fairy tale like elements to shine. It’s perfectly apt that the novel opens with a reference to Alice In Wonderland. And no surprise that, as the story progresses, logic and proportion begin to fall “sloppy dead” as Grace Slick might have put it. There are literary tricks and sleight of hand that Lochner pulls off with panache. Classic texts are cited, ostensibly as part of the student’s curriculum, works by Camus, Mérimée and Proust, each echoed within Lochner’s narrative and hidden hints that things are not as straightforward as they first appear to be. Even the heroine’s family name harks back to perhaps the greatest of the conceptual surrealists.

Courtney Lochner’s THE FRENCH HOUSE is a spellbinding and exhilarating literary thriller that begins as a coming-of-age story and turns into an innovative psychedelic mystery driven by psilocybin mushrooms and mind control. Feed your head.

~Kent Lane for IndieReader