The hashtag “dark academia” arrives on the scene in 2005 to describe a scholarly aesthetic, accessorized with pocket watches, oxfords, and tweed blazers. The term has since found its way into the literary lexicon to define tragic stories set in institutions of higher education. As a genre, dark academia is best exemplified by Donna Tartt’s 1992 murder mystery, The Secret History. This poetic thriller follows a clique of Classics students at the prestigious Hampden College who spend their days fraternizing, drinking scotch, and translating Greek at the library. It seems that their polite young lives could not be any more picturesque. But when a savagely disfigured body is discovered in the woods near campus, the ivory tower begins to crumble. With fatally flawed characters and a vividly rendered sense of place, Tartt’s evocative prose is so compelling that readers might even find themselves sympathizing with a killer by the end of the story. Fans of M.L. Rio, R.F. Kuang, and Susanna Clarke will delight in this titillating and exquisitely morbid novel that ventures into the darker parts of intellectual curiosity.
#Read Alikes
“Much like Donna Tartt's The Secret History, M. L. Rio's sparkling debut is a richly layered story of love, friendship, and obsession...will keep you riveted through its final, electrifying moments."—Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest.
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny, " and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon, " and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, a caustic art school dropout, in the process.
Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike—particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana's niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge. Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister.
From the critically acclaimed author of The Book of M, a highly imaginative thriller about a young woman who discovers that a strange map in her deceased father's belongings holds an incredible, deadly secret—one that will lead her on an extraordinary adventure and to the truth about her family's dark history.
Six friends. One college reunion. One unsolved murder. Ten years after graduation, Jessica Miller has planned her triumphant return to her southern, elite Duquette University, down to the envious whispers that are sure to follow in her wake. Everyone is going to see the girl she wants them to see—confident, beautiful, indifferent. Not the girl she was when she left campus, back when Heather Shelby's murder fractured everything, including the tight bond linking the six friends she'd been closest to since freshman year. But not everyone is ready to move on.
