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phantomtomato) wrote2025-06-08 02:22 pm
phantomtomato) wrote2025-06-08 02:22 pm
Reading Roundup, Theme: Dark Academia
After reading The Secret History in May, and surprising myself with my enjoyment of it, I did the natural thing and immediately read four more Dark Academia(ish) books to explore the genre. I ended up with a pretty broad mix: scifi and fantasy and horror, a range of school types (primary, undergraduate, graduate), and both British and American offerings. Still, looked at as a whole, there were a lot of similarities which I think defined the books as (mostly) fitting the image of the aesthetic, for better and for worse.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
To start, the least-fitting of the bunch. This book came as a recommendation by way of a colleague who teaches a course called “Dark Academia.” They said that this book always ended up being the showpiece of the class.
To head things off, I don’t think this would be a common or expected rec for the DA genre. It is a speculative fiction novel set in 1980s-1990s Britain (Wales is mentioned!) in which our first-person narrator Kathy H. gives us a retrospective of her life. Her narrative is ostensibly a recollection of childhood friendships with Ruth and Tommy, met at a boarding school called Hailsham, but oddities in her story soon make clear that her childhood was not normal and that her world has very dark undertones. The prose is chatty and easy to read, so the effect is a discomfiting, tense sense of dread which does not match the lighthearted childhood stories.
Ishiguro is a good writer. This is my first of his books, but I can tell his skill. Nonetheless, the speculative fiction elements make this book something I would not pick up on my own, and I can’t rightly say that I enjoyed it. It is a haunting story and will stick with me, but it is also very firmly not my genre.
So let’s instead talk about my colleague’s choice to put it in the curriculum for a DA course. The idea of the course as I understand it is to interrogate the portrayal of education in fiction. If DA as an aesthetic idealizes the old library, what is the baggage of that aesthetic? Looked at that way, I think that Never Let Me Go fits.
Kathy never totally leaves her old school. Even years out from it, Hailsham lives on in her mind—past the school’s closure, past all her old friends’ deaths. A rumor about Hailsham’s exceptionalism is the last major mystery and plot point. In the second third of the novel, when we meet students who attended other schools, we see differences which mark a Hailsham education. The school is the most concrete institution in Kathy’s world, and she ties much of her identity and image to it so that to ask who her character is, absent reference to Hailsham, is impossible. And Kathy’s encompassing devotion to her school makes her naïve—she’s often blind to the horrors of her world or to the roots of her own despair, even as she pursues answers as to how the world works. There is always a loyalty to Hailsham, and so she accepts its faults with equanimity that it is probably not due.
In the end, I don’t think this book is “Dark Academia.” It is dark (in a usual spec fic way) and it has a school, but the school’s academics are too closely connected to the spec fic mystery to fulfill the aesthetic of DA. This is a book that can be used to comment on idealization of school, and in particular on the exceptionalism of exclusive schools. But it comes at that commentary so sideways, and that is all so secondary to the spec fic themes which I have avoided mentioning, that I think it is weird to call this a school novel. It doesn’t engage with the tropes of that genre. So although my colleague has reasons for teaching it, and I can guess those, this is really at most a reminder to question the aesthetics of schools and their self-mythologies.
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
Katabasis is the sixth novel by R. F. Kuang and the first of hers that I’ve read (thanks to a friend of a friend who had early access). It is a fantasy in which two rival graduate students of the same deceased PhD advisor journey into hell in order to retrieve their advisor’s soul. It takes place in a slightly alt-history version of 1980s Cambridge, and it is a critique of the abuses endemic to graduate school. As a fan of portal fantasies and a lover of navel-gazing books about academics, I am its core audience. Unfortunately, I think it was bad.
At the top level, Katabasis’ badness sorts itself along two lines: the novel’s pacing is bad, and its themes are so blunt as to be meaningless.
The pacing critique ties in to many parts of the writing. The story starts quickly, slows down through most of its run, and then hurries at the end. It uses flashback scenes to drip out reveals of critical backstory, most of which come as separate chapters that interrupt the flow of action in the present time—some crisis ends a chapter on a cliffhanger, and then we spend ten pages in the past to contextualize that cliffhanger. This is fine, in theory, if an author is careful not to let the flashbacks reset a dramatic build in tension. This novel is allergic to real conflict, however, and so most of those crises resolve without real sacrifice. The flashbacks are only part of the draggy pacing, unfortunately: the book also uses special lore chapters “On Chalk” and similar parts of the magic system to break up dramatic cliffhangers and their resolutions, and the characters and prose within a standard present-timeline chapter will often digress for a paragraph to explain some reference to a historical figure or academic concept. When none of these things happen, the conflicts simply wrap themselves up within a page, which is not better.
The good news is that none of the interludes on magic are essential, and one could skip those. The magic in this universe operates on handwaving and is always capable of doing what the characters need it to do.
So, for about half of the novel, things go like this: Alice, our female lead, and Peter, her rival/traveling companion, walk through hell’s desert to encounter some new location and the challenges therein. We see a flashback and/or lore dump which mostly reduces mystery, rather than building towards it. One or both characters perform some underwritten magic, or they may simply walk away from the threat. The challenge ends within a few paragraphs or pages, and they go back to wandering the endless wastelands of hell.
Events pick up at the climax, but by then, Alice and Peter are split and we’re stuck mostly with Alice alone, no respite. She’s a tiresome character, full of flaws which the narrative wields at the reader like a blunt instrument, and she requires a conversational companion who can provide some distraction from that. Even the emergence of stakes didn’t save this section for me, nor are we spared from yet another chapter of wandering in hell’s featureless desert without any aim.
Sometimes a poorly-paced novel is saved by its themes, which make plodding through the boring parts worthwhile for the moments of insight and subtlety, observations on the beauty or cruelty of the human experience. Not so here. This book has two themes: grad school is toxic and abusive, and academia is sexist. Yes, true; I can verify both personally. But what does Katabasis do with these? Well, nothing. It asserts those ideas and seems to think it has accomplished something.
If an interested stranger or an acquaintance asked me about the experience of grad school, I would give them an answer much like the descriptions in this book. Outside of closer friendships, the details are distracting and intimate. Katabasis hits the main notes: grad school can feel like the kind of competition in which there is no winning. The work fills all hours, so students neglect their health and happiness. Programs exert pressure on students without resorting to explicit threats, so it’s not easy to convey the toxicity to outsiders. Abusive advisors make their students feel like shit or like the coming of Christ, all just by how they discuss the student’s work. There is no “you,” no personhood, only the research.
This is important grounding. These need to be said in any critique of the system. But a novel must also transform them—it must make them visceral in their specificity, or construct metaphors and parallels which provoke new understandings, or theorize and transform and thus provide insight. The list alone is a Reddit post, a neutral-enough critique to be pulled out at a cocktail party. It’s not interesting unless it is entirely novel, and even then only shallowly so.
And this is where Katabasis stops, plus the equivalent for the theme of sexism. If these were not themes but background context for the characters to be shown in flashbacks and not revisited, that would be fine, but they’re not. Alice dwells on these ideas, carrying them forward into new scenes, new reveals, until I can no longer bear their repetition. I get that these are bad! What do you have to say about them, other than that they exist? The bluntness makes this unforgivable—it is an assertion of their importance, blind to the shallowness of the book’s engagement with them.
I did like some parts. Peter was my favorite character, and though he’s not much more than his archetype, I enjoy the soft sad-boy intellectual. His background chapter is fantastic for being a thoughtful depiction of his struggle with Crohn’s disease. I also appreciate the boldness of explaining a male love interest’s remoteness with “he was absent so often because he was busy shitting himself.” That is inspired, and made me care more about him.
The three guide characters encountered in hell (two ghosts and a cat) were all interesting, though awfully underdeveloped. But I was glad for them, and they included the coolest character in the book, Elspeth. They’re more the idea of an interesting cast than a real one, but they generally improve the sections that they are in. I similarly liked the potential of the secondary antagonists.
Overall, I don’t recommend this. The lead is difficult to deal with beyond what I write here, the prose is bland, the magic and the settings are uninspired. It does stand out for being a Dark Academia book about graduate school, but really, just go (re)read one of the comp titles.
And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh
This was a true and clear Dark Academia novel, playing the concept straight. An unnamed protagonist narrates from twenty years in the future, describing his time as a Cambridge music student (two Cambridge books in a row!). The odd Northern duck out, he quickly sets his sights on joining the friend circle of wealthy, attractive Bryn Cavendish. Both men share fraught relationships with their fathers (the narrator’s father was an alcoholic who passed away; Bryn’s father is a famous stage magician who is separated from the family), but Bryn’s glamour and flair for the sinister captivate half of campus. In the present, our narrator hints at the knowledge he has about Bryn’s mysterious death.
Up front: I think this novel was quite bad, and definitely the worst of the lot in this post. It hangs its hopes on the narrator’s infatuation/obsession with Bryn, and if you don’t agree with Bryn’s appeal, then the story really falls apart. Bryn, let me be clear, is an amateur stage magician. All of his dark mystery comes from magic tricks of the literal “pick a card” type, and I am constitutionally incapable of finding stage magic sexy. It has the opposite effect for me, landing as quite goofy, and the contrast between this goofiness and the treatment of Bryn by the narrator and the narrative causes an intractable friction in the premise.
Let’s place that aside and look at the obsession and the story. The conceit of a narrator in the present looking back at their earlier self is extremely common, perhaps almost definitional?, of Dark Academia. The obsessive, idealistic, naïve, or mistaken framing of that narrator makes them unreliable. For me, the best of these narrators are obvious in their flaws relative to the story, so that you’re able to read the book on two levels simultaneously: the way the narrator perceives it/understands their experiences, and something closer to the way things actually were. This requires an author to balance hints about or peeks at ground-truth reality with what is believable for the narrator to share, but that’s a rich space for illustrating our narrator’s biases or adding humor to the story.
And He Shall Appear has a transparently, deeply unreliable narrator. My issue with him is not that he’s written as too good or trustworthy relative to the story being told. Rather, my issue is that the book does not do a good job (or much of a job at all) of providing those hints at reality to balance out his flaws. I spent the length of the book being frustrated by this narrator: his obsession with Bryn was unrewarding and embarrassing for him, and he continually threw aside kindness and common sense to pursue Bryn and Bryn’s social circle. At the end, the epilogue reveals that the narrator has been misrepresenting the story throughout, and this is framed as a dark twist—but it is infuriating, because it is only a twist in that the seams of the narrator’s delusions were left out! The things that I, as a reader, had been annoyed by for the whole book are proven correct, but it’s presented back to me as though it is shocking. I was left mostly feeling let down by the failures of the storytelling.
Beyond this, the book was extremely derivative of its influences, the comp titles being The Secret History and If We Were Villains. The prose was dire; the author crammed a metaphor into every single paragraph and relied heavily on the sentence construction of an assertion followed by a descriptive sentence fragment.
The dialogue isn’t any better, with the characters not remotely speaking like college students from 2004.
One of my biggest critiques is that And He Shall Appear does not follow through on its drama. I like a low-stakes story. This isn’t that. This is a high-stakes story which does not deliver. We are promised black magic, a death, addiction, and class commentary. And yet the answer to those is passivity. The result of all the build-up is nothing: no magic, no murder, just a lonely adult drunk twenty years on. All of this for a guy that the narrative only ever manages to tell us is worth this obsession. And then there’s not even any school in it.
If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio
I’m glad that I ended with this novel. It helped me understand why there is so much hope for Dark Academia as a contemporary genre.
If We Were Villains is the story of seven Shakespearean Theatre students, currently in their four year at the fictional Dellecher Classical Conservatory. Dellecher is an arts school in rural Illinois with a prestigious, harsh reputation—each year, half of the students are not invited back, leading to things like a seven-person senior class in a major. The Dellecher drama program only studies and performs Shakespeare, making for a heavily-referential novel. It is a frame story, narrated in both the present (10 years on from school) and the past by one of the thespians, Oliver Marks, who explains the death of one of his friends during that final year at Dellecher.
This book takes a lot of risks and pulls them all off more or less completely. The first bold choice that I noticed was the structure: the novel is broken into acts and scenes instead of traditional chapters. The scenes are quite short, usually a few pages. This brevity could be distracting—it imposes a sharp break between most events, and few scenes represent any substantial amount of time. It’s an obvious reference to theatre, but that alone would not make it work. I think that I enjoy how Rio uses this structure to move us quickly through lots of scenes without the burden of writing out transitions, allowing all of the central characters and many of the side characters to bloom on page. It is a big cast, but I feel reasonably able to describe all of them, and everyone had significant interactions with most of the others. That impresses me.
The other structural conceit is that many conversations lapse into script format. Again, it is showing its influences. This allows Rio to save space for packing in more short scenes, but I could see it being disruptive for some readers (or simply a bridge too far for cleverness). I did not mind it.
I minded the immense amount of dialogue which was merely quotation of Shakespeare. The characters have some full conversations this way, and some rehearsal and performance scenes are rendered in great detail. Although this was my bridge too far for cleverness, I respect that it was a fully intentional choice and one which supported both themes and characterization. Alas, I am not a Shakespeare nerd, nor do I wish to be one.
But this consistent throughline of Shakespearean theatre really served to distinguish the book from the others I tried in this journey, because it made the academia part of the story so present. Dellecher was not a character, and the school and its campus were not so well balanced as in The Secret History, but with that caveat, the theatre program shined. We got to see so many school-based experiences for the characters. We see them in their classes, in rehearsals, and in performances. They eat meals at the cafeteria and attend official school events and unofficial dorm parties. We really get to know them as students, and learn their relationships to one another as classmates and friends, which is ultimately so key to caring about their crises and conflicts. I am surprised to say that they generally were quite likeable, and not in a love-to-hate way. I didn’t think that a dark academia book could showcase broadly nice, fun personalities alongside drama and vice and murder while keeping those darker elements believable, but this did. I would describe it as a story which really utilizes heroic tragedy and one well-placed villain. It understands that grief and guilt and loyalty can produce the same horror as more straightforward cruelty.
In keeping with this, the end, although not happy, finds ways to show hope. Really, the entire framing device suggests this: Oliver is in conversation with named characters, sharing this story of what really happened back then as a way of closing the book on those events. When contrasted with Richard’s narration to an unstated audience in The Secret History, and the briefer and bleaker glimpses of the future there, the relative gentleness of this one is apparent.
I do wish we had more perspective on the era in this novel. The final school year takes place in 1997-1998, and I think there would be a lot of depth gained by occasional comments on how the theatre students do (or do not) interact with desktop computers, or television, or phone calls. They almost never make phone calls, I guess because they all live in the same dorm. But I enjoy that sort of interplay between the cloistered fantasy and the wider world, and it could have shown up here. Also, Rio clearly does not think in terms of clothing, and the outfit descriptions were pretty lame—which I wouldn’t notice except that the set and costume descriptions were great, so the street clothes felt like a missed opportunity for more characterization.
I recommend this book to anyone looking for a recent take on Dark Academia, especially if you’re otherwise leery of cynicism. I came into this without any sense of the plot or relationships, and I really enjoyed encountering them without spoilers. It was a rewarding book for letting the mystery unfold at its own pace.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
To start, the least-fitting of the bunch. This book came as a recommendation by way of a colleague who teaches a course called “Dark Academia.” They said that this book always ended up being the showpiece of the class.
To head things off, I don’t think this would be a common or expected rec for the DA genre. It is a speculative fiction novel set in 1980s-1990s Britain (Wales is mentioned!) in which our first-person narrator Kathy H. gives us a retrospective of her life. Her narrative is ostensibly a recollection of childhood friendships with Ruth and Tommy, met at a boarding school called Hailsham, but oddities in her story soon make clear that her childhood was not normal and that her world has very dark undertones. The prose is chatty and easy to read, so the effect is a discomfiting, tense sense of dread which does not match the lighthearted childhood stories.
Ishiguro is a good writer. This is my first of his books, but I can tell his skill. Nonetheless, the speculative fiction elements make this book something I would not pick up on my own, and I can’t rightly say that I enjoyed it. It is a haunting story and will stick with me, but it is also very firmly not my genre.
So let’s instead talk about my colleague’s choice to put it in the curriculum for a DA course. The idea of the course as I understand it is to interrogate the portrayal of education in fiction. If DA as an aesthetic idealizes the old library, what is the baggage of that aesthetic? Looked at that way, I think that Never Let Me Go fits.
Kathy never totally leaves her old school. Even years out from it, Hailsham lives on in her mind—past the school’s closure, past all her old friends’ deaths. A rumor about Hailsham’s exceptionalism is the last major mystery and plot point. In the second third of the novel, when we meet students who attended other schools, we see differences which mark a Hailsham education. The school is the most concrete institution in Kathy’s world, and she ties much of her identity and image to it so that to ask who her character is, absent reference to Hailsham, is impossible. And Kathy’s encompassing devotion to her school makes her naïve—she’s often blind to the horrors of her world or to the roots of her own despair, even as she pursues answers as to how the world works. There is always a loyalty to Hailsham, and so she accepts its faults with equanimity that it is probably not due.
In the end, I don’t think this book is “Dark Academia.” It is dark (in a usual spec fic way) and it has a school, but the school’s academics are too closely connected to the spec fic mystery to fulfill the aesthetic of DA. This is a book that can be used to comment on idealization of school, and in particular on the exceptionalism of exclusive schools. But it comes at that commentary so sideways, and that is all so secondary to the spec fic themes which I have avoided mentioning, that I think it is weird to call this a school novel. It doesn’t engage with the tropes of that genre. So although my colleague has reasons for teaching it, and I can guess those, this is really at most a reminder to question the aesthetics of schools and their self-mythologies.
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
Katabasis is the sixth novel by R. F. Kuang and the first of hers that I’ve read (thanks to a friend of a friend who had early access). It is a fantasy in which two rival graduate students of the same deceased PhD advisor journey into hell in order to retrieve their advisor’s soul. It takes place in a slightly alt-history version of 1980s Cambridge, and it is a critique of the abuses endemic to graduate school. As a fan of portal fantasies and a lover of navel-gazing books about academics, I am its core audience. Unfortunately, I think it was bad.
At the top level, Katabasis’ badness sorts itself along two lines: the novel’s pacing is bad, and its themes are so blunt as to be meaningless.
The pacing critique ties in to many parts of the writing. The story starts quickly, slows down through most of its run, and then hurries at the end. It uses flashback scenes to drip out reveals of critical backstory, most of which come as separate chapters that interrupt the flow of action in the present time—some crisis ends a chapter on a cliffhanger, and then we spend ten pages in the past to contextualize that cliffhanger. This is fine, in theory, if an author is careful not to let the flashbacks reset a dramatic build in tension. This novel is allergic to real conflict, however, and so most of those crises resolve without real sacrifice. The flashbacks are only part of the draggy pacing, unfortunately: the book also uses special lore chapters “On Chalk” and similar parts of the magic system to break up dramatic cliffhangers and their resolutions, and the characters and prose within a standard present-timeline chapter will often digress for a paragraph to explain some reference to a historical figure or academic concept. When none of these things happen, the conflicts simply wrap themselves up within a page, which is not better.
The good news is that none of the interludes on magic are essential, and one could skip those. The magic in this universe operates on handwaving and is always capable of doing what the characters need it to do.
So, for about half of the novel, things go like this: Alice, our female lead, and Peter, her rival/traveling companion, walk through hell’s desert to encounter some new location and the challenges therein. We see a flashback and/or lore dump which mostly reduces mystery, rather than building towards it. One or both characters perform some underwritten magic, or they may simply walk away from the threat. The challenge ends within a few paragraphs or pages, and they go back to wandering the endless wastelands of hell.
Events pick up at the climax, but by then, Alice and Peter are split and we’re stuck mostly with Alice alone, no respite. She’s a tiresome character, full of flaws which the narrative wields at the reader like a blunt instrument, and she requires a conversational companion who can provide some distraction from that. Even the emergence of stakes didn’t save this section for me, nor are we spared from yet another chapter of wandering in hell’s featureless desert without any aim.
Sometimes a poorly-paced novel is saved by its themes, which make plodding through the boring parts worthwhile for the moments of insight and subtlety, observations on the beauty or cruelty of the human experience. Not so here. This book has two themes: grad school is toxic and abusive, and academia is sexist. Yes, true; I can verify both personally. But what does Katabasis do with these? Well, nothing. It asserts those ideas and seems to think it has accomplished something.
If an interested stranger or an acquaintance asked me about the experience of grad school, I would give them an answer much like the descriptions in this book. Outside of closer friendships, the details are distracting and intimate. Katabasis hits the main notes: grad school can feel like the kind of competition in which there is no winning. The work fills all hours, so students neglect their health and happiness. Programs exert pressure on students without resorting to explicit threats, so it’s not easy to convey the toxicity to outsiders. Abusive advisors make their students feel like shit or like the coming of Christ, all just by how they discuss the student’s work. There is no “you,” no personhood, only the research.
This is important grounding. These need to be said in any critique of the system. But a novel must also transform them—it must make them visceral in their specificity, or construct metaphors and parallels which provoke new understandings, or theorize and transform and thus provide insight. The list alone is a Reddit post, a neutral-enough critique to be pulled out at a cocktail party. It’s not interesting unless it is entirely novel, and even then only shallowly so.
And this is where Katabasis stops, plus the equivalent for the theme of sexism. If these were not themes but background context for the characters to be shown in flashbacks and not revisited, that would be fine, but they’re not. Alice dwells on these ideas, carrying them forward into new scenes, new reveals, until I can no longer bear their repetition. I get that these are bad! What do you have to say about them, other than that they exist? The bluntness makes this unforgivable—it is an assertion of their importance, blind to the shallowness of the book’s engagement with them.
I did like some parts. Peter was my favorite character, and though he’s not much more than his archetype, I enjoy the soft sad-boy intellectual. His background chapter is fantastic for being a thoughtful depiction of his struggle with Crohn’s disease. I also appreciate the boldness of explaining a male love interest’s remoteness with “he was absent so often because he was busy shitting himself.” That is inspired, and made me care more about him.
The three guide characters encountered in hell (two ghosts and a cat) were all interesting, though awfully underdeveloped. But I was glad for them, and they included the coolest character in the book, Elspeth. They’re more the idea of an interesting cast than a real one, but they generally improve the sections that they are in. I similarly liked the potential of the secondary antagonists.
Overall, I don’t recommend this. The lead is difficult to deal with beyond what I write here, the prose is bland, the magic and the settings are uninspired. It does stand out for being a Dark Academia book about graduate school, but really, just go (re)read one of the comp titles.
And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh
This was a true and clear Dark Academia novel, playing the concept straight. An unnamed protagonist narrates from twenty years in the future, describing his time as a Cambridge music student (two Cambridge books in a row!). The odd Northern duck out, he quickly sets his sights on joining the friend circle of wealthy, attractive Bryn Cavendish. Both men share fraught relationships with their fathers (the narrator’s father was an alcoholic who passed away; Bryn’s father is a famous stage magician who is separated from the family), but Bryn’s glamour and flair for the sinister captivate half of campus. In the present, our narrator hints at the knowledge he has about Bryn’s mysterious death.
Up front: I think this novel was quite bad, and definitely the worst of the lot in this post. It hangs its hopes on the narrator’s infatuation/obsession with Bryn, and if you don’t agree with Bryn’s appeal, then the story really falls apart. Bryn, let me be clear, is an amateur stage magician. All of his dark mystery comes from magic tricks of the literal “pick a card” type, and I am constitutionally incapable of finding stage magic sexy. It has the opposite effect for me, landing as quite goofy, and the contrast between this goofiness and the treatment of Bryn by the narrator and the narrative causes an intractable friction in the premise.
Let’s place that aside and look at the obsession and the story. The conceit of a narrator in the present looking back at their earlier self is extremely common, perhaps almost definitional?, of Dark Academia. The obsessive, idealistic, naïve, or mistaken framing of that narrator makes them unreliable. For me, the best of these narrators are obvious in their flaws relative to the story, so that you’re able to read the book on two levels simultaneously: the way the narrator perceives it/understands their experiences, and something closer to the way things actually were. This requires an author to balance hints about or peeks at ground-truth reality with what is believable for the narrator to share, but that’s a rich space for illustrating our narrator’s biases or adding humor to the story.
And He Shall Appear has a transparently, deeply unreliable narrator. My issue with him is not that he’s written as too good or trustworthy relative to the story being told. Rather, my issue is that the book does not do a good job (or much of a job at all) of providing those hints at reality to balance out his flaws. I spent the length of the book being frustrated by this narrator: his obsession with Bryn was unrewarding and embarrassing for him, and he continually threw aside kindness and common sense to pursue Bryn and Bryn’s social circle. At the end, the epilogue reveals that the narrator has been misrepresenting the story throughout, and this is framed as a dark twist—but it is infuriating, because it is only a twist in that the seams of the narrator’s delusions were left out! The things that I, as a reader, had been annoyed by for the whole book are proven correct, but it’s presented back to me as though it is shocking. I was left mostly feeling let down by the failures of the storytelling.
Beyond this, the book was extremely derivative of its influences, the comp titles being The Secret History and If We Were Villains. The prose was dire; the author crammed a metaphor into every single paragraph and relied heavily on the sentence construction of an assertion followed by a descriptive sentence fragment.
There was a pause. Taut, like the moment before a falling object hits the ground.
And then, Bryn gave a laugh like thunder, a heatwave breaking, flashed his eyes at Kenny. The others followed his lead, and Kenny smiled stupidly as if everything was fine. Although I laughed weakly along too, disappointment twisted like hunger pangs.
The dialogue isn’t any better, with the characters not remotely speaking like college students from 2004.
One of my biggest critiques is that And He Shall Appear does not follow through on its drama. I like a low-stakes story. This isn’t that. This is a high-stakes story which does not deliver. We are promised black magic, a death, addiction, and class commentary. And yet the answer to those is passivity. The result of all the build-up is nothing: no magic, no murder, just a lonely adult drunk twenty years on. All of this for a guy that the narrative only ever manages to tell us is worth this obsession. And then there’s not even any school in it.
If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio
I’m glad that I ended with this novel. It helped me understand why there is so much hope for Dark Academia as a contemporary genre.
If We Were Villains is the story of seven Shakespearean Theatre students, currently in their four year at the fictional Dellecher Classical Conservatory. Dellecher is an arts school in rural Illinois with a prestigious, harsh reputation—each year, half of the students are not invited back, leading to things like a seven-person senior class in a major. The Dellecher drama program only studies and performs Shakespeare, making for a heavily-referential novel. It is a frame story, narrated in both the present (10 years on from school) and the past by one of the thespians, Oliver Marks, who explains the death of one of his friends during that final year at Dellecher.
This book takes a lot of risks and pulls them all off more or less completely. The first bold choice that I noticed was the structure: the novel is broken into acts and scenes instead of traditional chapters. The scenes are quite short, usually a few pages. This brevity could be distracting—it imposes a sharp break between most events, and few scenes represent any substantial amount of time. It’s an obvious reference to theatre, but that alone would not make it work. I think that I enjoy how Rio uses this structure to move us quickly through lots of scenes without the burden of writing out transitions, allowing all of the central characters and many of the side characters to bloom on page. It is a big cast, but I feel reasonably able to describe all of them, and everyone had significant interactions with most of the others. That impresses me.
The other structural conceit is that many conversations lapse into script format. Again, it is showing its influences. This allows Rio to save space for packing in more short scenes, but I could see it being disruptive for some readers (or simply a bridge too far for cleverness). I did not mind it.
I minded the immense amount of dialogue which was merely quotation of Shakespeare. The characters have some full conversations this way, and some rehearsal and performance scenes are rendered in great detail. Although this was my bridge too far for cleverness, I respect that it was a fully intentional choice and one which supported both themes and characterization. Alas, I am not a Shakespeare nerd, nor do I wish to be one.
But this consistent throughline of Shakespearean theatre really served to distinguish the book from the others I tried in this journey, because it made the academia part of the story so present. Dellecher was not a character, and the school and its campus were not so well balanced as in The Secret History, but with that caveat, the theatre program shined. We got to see so many school-based experiences for the characters. We see them in their classes, in rehearsals, and in performances. They eat meals at the cafeteria and attend official school events and unofficial dorm parties. We really get to know them as students, and learn their relationships to one another as classmates and friends, which is ultimately so key to caring about their crises and conflicts. I am surprised to say that they generally were quite likeable, and not in a love-to-hate way. I didn’t think that a dark academia book could showcase broadly nice, fun personalities alongside drama and vice and murder while keeping those darker elements believable, but this did. I would describe it as a story which really utilizes heroic tragedy and one well-placed villain. It understands that grief and guilt and loyalty can produce the same horror as more straightforward cruelty.
In keeping with this, the end, although not happy, finds ways to show hope. Really, the entire framing device suggests this: Oliver is in conversation with named characters, sharing this story of what really happened back then as a way of closing the book on those events. When contrasted with Richard’s narration to an unstated audience in The Secret History, and the briefer and bleaker glimpses of the future there, the relative gentleness of this one is apparent.
I do wish we had more perspective on the era in this novel. The final school year takes place in 1997-1998, and I think there would be a lot of depth gained by occasional comments on how the theatre students do (or do not) interact with desktop computers, or television, or phone calls. They almost never make phone calls, I guess because they all live in the same dorm. But I enjoy that sort of interplay between the cloistered fantasy and the wider world, and it could have shown up here. Also, Rio clearly does not think in terms of clothing, and the outfit descriptions were pretty lame—which I wouldn’t notice except that the set and costume descriptions were great, so the street clothes felt like a missed opportunity for more characterization.
I recommend this book to anyone looking for a recent take on Dark Academia, especially if you’re otherwise leery of cynicism. I came into this without any sense of the plot or relationships, and I really enjoyed encountering them without spoilers. It was a rewarding book for letting the mystery unfold at its own pace.
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The only other one I've read of your list is Never Let Me Go, and yeah I'm not sure I'd ever have called that a DA book. Like you, it's not really my genre, and although bits of it have stuck with me I can't say I enjoyed it and I've never felt compelled to re-read it.
(As an aside - I've read one other by Ishiguro, which is The Remains of the Day - I don't remember much of it other than finding it really slow, but I wonder if that's one of those books I read when I was a bit too young to get it properly.)
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NLMG is hardly DA, but my colleague’s other course selections were more towards the “earlier influences” end of the spectrum—Brideshead Revisited, Picture of Dorian Grey. And I’ve already read Brideshead, but I was curious about Ishiguro’s writing. Remains of the Day is a favorite of some others around here, and I see it in e.g. Yuletide every year—I suspect I would like it, but not feel fannishly towards it.
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The ending of And He Shall Appear sounds like the most annoying kind of 'twist', argh.
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