“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (Prologue and Chapter One): Narrator brags he is a liar and says he joined other students who committed murder.

The Prologue announces that the story will be how Bunny, one of the college students in a small seminar, comes to be murdered by the other students in the seminar, including the narrator.

But since the second word of the prologue’s first sentence is “snow,” and since each of the next two paragraphs begins with “It is difficult to believe,” the prologue would seem to be a warning to the reader that the story will involve some kind of lie or snow job.

Indeed, the first chapter begins with the first-person narrator Richard Papen’s acknowledgement that his “fatal flaw” is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” That is, he is a liar. As Richard later says, “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s lying on my feet. It’s sort of a gift I have” (1, p. 25).

Richard is one of six students in a college seminar on the ancient classics. The professor is Julian Morrow, who, it seems to me, runs the class like an evil cult. The seminar’s first principle is to lose one’s “self” with the kind of ancient ritual “madness” (1, p. 34) wherein “the personality was replaced” (1, p. 38). The seminar has a violence-promoting slogan, repeated four times in chapter one: “beauty is terror” (1, pp. 37, 40).

Near the end of chapter one, Richard gets a note from one of the other seminar students, Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, inviting Richard to lunch on Saturday. The note’s stationery and the place planned for the lunch are formal and adult. But “the handwriting [on the envelope] was crabbed and childish as a fifth grader’s, in pencil. The note within was in pencil, too, tiny and uneven and hard to read” (1, p. 41).

The childish handwriting may not mean that Bunny has a child-aged alternate personality, but the description of odd handwriting seems like something that would not have been included unless there were some reason. Of course, it could be a red herring.

1. Donna Tartt. The Secret History. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.