phantomtomato

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 ostensible 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.