Open the pages of "Shelter," and you will be transported. Not simply awed by the sheer talent of author Jayne Anne Phillips, but moved across time and space into a breathless July more than 30 years ago at a camp for girls in West Virginia.
You will swelter with them in the heat, shiver in the dark in a hidden cavern, taste fresh-baked bread, feel love, fear evil and see death.
You will be there.
"There" is Camp Shelter, a summertime Eden with its own serpent, devil and crazed avenging angel. The novel, Ms. Phillips' eighth, is set in the slow, stifling summer of 1963, scant months before the shots in Dallas ripped through the American dream.
The girls' camp is run by the formidable Mrs. Thompson-Warner, who hectors her young charges incessantly about the subversive dangers of the Commie menace and the need for impeccable manners.
The story centers on two pairs of girls: Lenore "Lenny" Swenson and her best friend, Catherine "Cap" Briarley; and Lenny's little sister Alma and her best friend, Delia Campbell. The younger girls are just approaching teenhood; the older ones, womanhood. They are living in that magical space many women remember with longing and regret -- a time when bodies are newly mysterious, friendship is the most innocent and passionate form of love, and boys are alien creatures at once troubling and desirable.
The dangers these four face are as current as the nightly news. Their families have been wracked by divorce, infidelity and suicide, and they have been made unwilling pawns and confidantes by their foundering parents.
Delia has been devastated by the death of her father, and Alma is made to share a secret about his death that is far too heavy for a child to bear. Lenny is her father's favorite but longs to connect with her mother. Cap comes from a fractured home and loves Lenny like a sister, or maybe more.
While the camp would seem to be haven from troubles at home, it is also a place where lust and violence can find the girls out as easily as a blacksnake slithers over a rock.
Lust takes an innocent form in Frank, the camp's teen-age handyman, who encounters Lenny and Cap in the revivifying waters of the swimming hole. The three engage in a dizzyingly sensual coming-together that is both an awakening and a dream.
But lust clothes itself in ugliness in Carmody, the ex-con husband of the camp cook. He defiles his stepson, Buddy, in horrible ways and later threatens the girls. Carmody is sheer evil: a lewd, half-mad abuser of the weak and vulnerable.
Buddy fears and loathes the man he is forced to call Dad and service like a harlot. He does what little an 8-year-old can do to evade him and persuade him to move on. Buddy wants only to be left alone with his Mam, a huge and nurturing woman who sustains the campers with hot rolls and her son with deep love and abiding faith. Buddy also worships Lenny and shadows the girls up and down the camp trails like a forlorn woodland sprite.
Buddy is too frail to drive Carmody away. What he needs is a kind of supernatural strength, and that comes from Ms. Phillips' most astonishing character, the young man called Parson.
He is part madman, part destroyer, part saint. Himself abused as foster child -- and the accidental killer of a little girl -- Parson
lives in a world only partially connected to the one around him. He first meets Carmody in jail, where they share a cell in unholy communion. Later, he finds Carmody living with his wife on the outskirts of the camp.
Parson hires on with a work gang laying irrigation pipe and lives in a tiny shack in the woods, collecting snakeskins and animal skulls. He barely speaks. He watches Carmody, and he broods. As he remembers the hurts done to him, he is surrounded by a ghostly consort of shades and spirits -- his legion, Ms. Phillips calls it -- that hovers near, giving form to the voices he hears.
Parson is frightening and fascinating. He worships righteousness but might well do great harm as he pursues the pure and good. The reader cannot be sure, until the climactic moments, whether Parson will be subsumed by Carmody's evil or triumph over it.
With remarkable power, Ms. Phillips creates a feverish milieu -- vines snaking everywhere in the unrelenting heat and light -- and her language complements it. It twists from the simple to the ornate, the biblical to the profane. Her theme is the genesis of evil, whether it is innate or the result of the cruelties people inflict on one another. No one can answer this eternal puzzle, but a more compelling exploration you are not likely to encounter soon.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Shelter"
Author: Jayne Anne Phillips
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Length, price: 279 pages, $21.95