Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) Joan Lindsey

This book is one whole dreamy vibe. A novel of high weirdness as told in the manner of E.M. Forster, it has all of the hot-house atmosphere of lush gardens, corsets and cursed destinies. The puritanical steel and whalebone repressed sexuality of the victorian era—out of which Freud derived the third great humiliation of man—splashes, like so much lemonade, upon the six-million-year rock that hangs over the drama like an ancient god of the telluric earth. Into this rock disappear three teenage girls and a headmistress during a St. Valentine’s day picnic in the year 1900. While the book leaves their disappearance an unsolvable mystery, Joan Lindsey would later make clear that the vanishing is magical, a transmigration into a time-scale out of this world. In that sense it is a classic faery story, an encounter with an eerie intention far older than anything human—the landscape itself. But the reader does not follow the teens into the chthonic faery realm as in other examples of the genre—Alice in Wonderland, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Matrix—but rather must stay behind in this stifling backwater of the British empire where the mysterious vanishing plays out an ineluctable curse upon those left behind, as neat and as cruel as any weird fate.

Movie poster for the Peter Weir adaptation