"Girls at Play" is a horror story—not in the usual sense, but in the way that "King Lear" is a horror story. It is, more precisely, a novel of interlocking horrors; of lonely women exiled from society by their own peculiarities; of an isolated girls' boarding school; of Europeans (with their obsolete convictions about white superiority) in an African land recently emancipated; of the Africans, proud, bitter, tempestuous and full of elemental hatred; of the collision between American goodwill, with its callow certainty that love can conquer primordial violence, and the stupid, sometimes sadistic, loathing with which the British respond to it; and, most of all, the horror of people lost in fear in a world turned upside down by invaders and their alien ideas.

Five schoolteachers—an Afro-Indian, an American girl from the Peace Corps, and three British women who cannot face life in England—find...