An unusually usual day-to-day story in the Deep South, set in the gothic, swampy southern town of Wet Moon, a place fraught with lousy love lives, teen angst, and shadowy rednecks.

As Cleo Lovedrop heads off for college at the local art school, she's haunted by her melancholic past: a lost love, a lost child. Friends and enemies live their lives around her, as trouble and dissent brews amongst them: an unseen social assailant spreads slander about Cleo, she is forced to deal with her two brusque roommates, and discovers unsolved mysteries about the girl who lived in her room previously. Elsewhere, Trilby deals with unsettled emotional and sexual issues, and keeping her secret habits hidden from everyone. And Audrey comes to the realization that, despite all her efforts, she always causes her friends distress, while Fern, a peculiar, deformed girl who lives in an isolated mansion in the bayous, begins to notice Cleo and her friends. As the moon grows full and lunar rays shine down, lunacy and moon-calves run free.

Goths, friendship, romance, sex, betrayal, gossip, cats, murder, guilt, a squirrel monkey, and all the terrible and wonderful things people do to each other.

Review:

The Fourth Rail:

"The character stuff is terrific, true to life but with just enough of a sarcastic, cynical edge to be funny as hell or, on other occasions, touching or painfully reminiscent of one's own experiences"

"I have to say: this is a hard book to review. Do I start by talking about its college setting the the realistic dialogue and character interaction that fills this book? But if I make it sound too true to live-- which it is-- then that would ignore the gothic overtures and horror undertones. On the one hand, I'm reminded of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands... on the other hand, the Sundance film, Melvin Goes to Dinner. Perhaps David Lynch is the best balance: there's a bit of weirdness, a bit of normalcy, and a good amount of charm."

"It's refreshing to see a cast made up of so many different young women with so many varied body types, and they're all firmly grounded in realistic, detailed settings. Campbell combines the perfect facial expressions with everyday dialogue (or the lack of it, when silence is called for). Everything's ultimately physical, with the girls joking about the disgusting state of the school restrooms and characters identifying one another by smell. The attention the author pays to outfits and poses is refreshing, especially during a silent scene where Cleo examines her body in the mirror, trying to make herself something other than what she is. Every young woman has done something similar, wanting to reconcile herself with what she's supposed to be but obviously not."

"There's a lot going on under the surface of Wet Moon waiting to be unearthed by the reader, even while on the surface you can just enjoy reading about the lives of several friends."

"Campbell has a real eye on how to draw people, and reading Wet Moon is like you're getting a glimpse into someone else's life."