Dark Academia: Your Guide to the New Wave of Post-Secret History Campus Thrillers

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Ah, school days! The grassy quads, the tang of autumn in the air, the dying screams of murdered classmates. With atmosphere like that, it’s no wonder campus mysteries have been around since the Golden Age of detective fiction. All the greats took a crack at it—Dorothy Sayers in Gaudy Night, Agatha Christie in Cat Among the Pigeons, Ellery Queen in The Campus Murders—and later innovators like J. S. Borthwick, Pamela Thomas-Graham, and Lev Raphael helped diversify the subgenre. But in 1992, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was the first to break out of the cozy mold, becoming a crossover bestseller and changing the face of the campus thriller forever.

A lush, melancholy whydunit, The Secret History’s biggest innovation was to shift the focus away from sleuthing professors and toward students—often working-class outsiders struggling with impostor syndrome among posh classmates. By making the campus thriller a coming-of-age tale, The Secret History harnessed the intensity and volatility of young adult relationships, suggesting that the Dostoevskian combo of hormones and heady intellectualism could turn deadly.

Despite its success, The Secret History did not produce a rash of imitators at the time. But readers who grew up worshipping The Secret History have grown up and started writing novels of their own. I call it “Dark Academia,” after the gothic, bookish online aesthetic that adopts The Secret History as its foundational text. We are now living, belatedly, in the age of Tartt.

I first noticed the boom in dark campus thrillers when I was already writing my own. My third novel Bad Habits is set in a competitive graduate program and has many of the key Dark Academia elements: a fish-out-of-water protagonist from a hardscrabble background; a charismatic professor who inspires cultish devotion in her students; a gothic campus with lots of gargoyles; and, of course, as much sex and drinking as studying. (It is, after all, college.) Like many of its contemporaries, it checks the boxes.

But today’s Dark Academia thrillers are even darker than The Secret History. While campus novels (like campuses themselves) tend to fetishize a nostalgic British culture that never really existed—implicitly fetishizing whiteness, assimilation, and rigid gender norms—the books on this list reckon frankly with sexual harassment and abuse, class disparities, homophobia, and systemic racism.

I have some theories about why that is. For one thing, the cloistered campus life romanticized by Dark Academia belongs to a vanishing era. With the costs of higher education skyrocketing, the Ivies more competitive and exclusive than ever, and academic departments collapsing under bloated administration and the ever-shrinking tenure track, the sheltered college experience from the brochures looks more and more like an unattainable fantasy. Moreover, this is a largely a Trump-era trend, starting around 2014 but only kicking into high gear in 2017, and accelerating along with the atrocities of the Trump presidency. As of 2021, it shows no sign of slowing.

Perhaps there’s one more way to explain the Dark Academia trend. A generation of Harry Potter-loving children were raised on the idea that a perfect combination of pure heart, ancient birthright, and excellent study skills could dispatch any villain. All grown up and heartbroken by Rowling’s anti-trans hate speech and shallow commitment to diversity, they may rightly question whether hallowed halls and sacred traditions can ever be a place for real rebellion. Perhaps that explains why these books are rife with vigilantes, antiheroes, and revenge schemes. In the new novels of Dark Academia, there is no magic solution, no righteous war. There’s only survival.

Here, listed roughly in order of publication, are the novels of the new Dark Academia canon.

The Secret Place, Tana French (2014)

The fifth book in the Dublin Murder Squad series takes Detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway to St. Kilda’s, a boarding school where four young girls have discovered a secret power that sets them apart from their classmates. Although there’s a cold case to solve, the book’s hypnotic urgency comes from French’s dreamy depiction of the girls’ love for each other, and the bulwark they’ve built against the misogyny they see and experience around them.

Academy Gothic, James Tate Hill (2014)

This quick-witted debut has definite cozy vibes—visually impaired professor Tate Cowlishaw turns amateur sleuth after discovering a dead dean under his desk. But the hardboiled plot and gothic façade of Parshall College, ranked “Worst Value” annually by U.S. News and World Report, nudge it over the line from academic satire into dark academia. Hill’s prose is punchy and dark—think Richard Russo’s Straight Man with a Chandlerian twist—and he ekes deadpan humor out of Cowlishaw’s detective work without ever making it the punchline. (Of a dead body: “His hair smelled of women’s shampoo. He must have had a coupon.”)

If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio (2017)

M. L. Rio’s debut about ambitious young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory is catnip for fans of the Bard, of course, but anyone with a love of skulls and black velvet will want to sink into its high-gothic atmosphere. We know from the outset that Oliver, the quiet outsider who always gets stuck with the leftover roles, is more than he seems; we meet him in prison. The story of how he got there is as dark, twisted, and lush as the plays it draws from.

The Lying Game, Ruth Ware (2017)

Ruth Ware has a way with a gothic setting, so it’s no surprise that her boarding school novel The Lying Game is at the top of this trend. Four women reunite in an old mill house after the discovery of a body in the salt marsh threatens to reveal a shared secret from their school days. With sly allusions to Wuthering Heights, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and more, this is a satisfyingly gothic read with a distinctive literary bent.

Give Me Your Hand, Megan Abbott (2018)

Of course the queen of brainy thrillers, with a gift for exploring friendship and ambition among high school girls, has an entry in the Dark Academia genre. In Megan Abbott’s ninth novel Give Me Your Hand, a sought-after post-doc reunites old friends with a complicated past, only to put them in competition for the favor of a brilliant scientist and mentor—with murderous results. Adding to the intrigue, the subject of the research study is premenstrual dysphoric disorder—a not-so-subtle suggestion that women’s rage, ignored for far too long, is a force of nature.

Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo (2019)

No dark academia list would be complete without this absolute barnburner of a book, with its roots in the real-world secret societies of the Ivies and its heart in a dark, violent fantasy every bit as enticing as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.

Hex, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight (2019)

When this dark comedy of manners opens, biology PhD candidate Nell Barber is in denial about her expulsion in the wake of a lab accident that left one of her colleagues dead. Nell’s depression and unrequited longing for her beautiful, brilliant former advisor Dr. Joan Kallas lead her into increasingly bizarre entanglements and toward another, possibly fatal, catastrophe. Though it doesn’t have a traditional thriller plot, Hex’s weird, wild narrative voice, along with its witchy lists of poisons and antidotes, makes it a thrilling Dark Academia read.

Trust Exercise, Susan Choi (2019)

A metafictional puzzle of a novel set in a Houston performing arts high school, Trust Exercise adopts trauma itself, and the way stories grow around it, as its central mystery. This is a notoriously difficult book to discuss without getting into spoiler territory; let’s just say it joins a subset of Dark Academia thrillers that concern themselves with abusive teacher-student relationships. But Choi’s metaphysical mystery goes beyond questioning authority, and interrogates the structure of authorship itself.

A Student of History, Nina Revoyr (2019)

In this slim, subtle L.A. noir, Rick Nagano, a first-generation college student pursuing a doctorate in history, stumbles on a transcription job for an oil fortune heiress just as he’s struggling with rent and stuck in his dissertation. At first uncomfortable in her moneyed world, Rick gradually begins to enjoy his access to high society; but as buried secrets come to light, he finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into morally compromised ground. Riffing on Gatsby, A Student of History portrays scholarship as its own form of exploitation, and Los Angeles as a racially divided town whose uncomfortable history is woven into the fiber of the everyday.

Bunny, Mona Awad (2019)

Mona Awad’s bizarre version of a campus novel is a funny, ferocious horror story all dressed up in Mary Janes and eating a miniature cupcake. Imagine if Heathers were set in a famous MFA program (Awad herself went to Brown), with the costumes supplied by Modcloth; add in some nightmarish occult rituals, exploding forest creatures, and a pervasive sense of the difficulty of artistic endeavor. Call Bunny “dark kawaii.” Call it whatever you want. It’s genius.

The Swallows, Lisa Lutz (2019)

Lisa Lutz’s follow-up to The Passenger features another tough, wise-cracking protagonist—English teacher Alex Witt, who lands at the second-rate Stonebridge Academy after leaving her last teaching job in disgrace. From her new students’ creative writing assignments, she learns about The Darkroom, a secret place where girls’ reputations, and sometimes their lives, are ruined. Teaming up with a senior girl named Gemma who’s had enough, Alex vows to help destroy The Darkroom in a story that skewers the “boys will be boys” attitudes of complicit faculty as much as the misogyny of the boys themselves.

Good Girls Lie, JT Ellison (2019)

T. Ellison’s standalone entry into the Dark Academia genre, Good Girls Lie, starts off with a bang—a presumed suicide dangles from the wrought-iron front gates of The Goode School, an all-girls “Silent Ivy” in Virginia where the usual secret societies and mean girls abound—only to dive into the perspective of an avowed sociopath. Or is she? Ellison’s boarding-school suspense novel is packed with masterful twists that unpack lie after lie, starting with the first: “Goode girls are always good.”

The Truants, Kate Weinberg (2019)

In her first year at an east Anglian university, Jess Walker, her wealthy roommate, and an unsettlingly handsome post-doc form an uneasy love triangle that gets even more complicated when Jess falls under the sway of a charismatic professor named Lorna. The crime plot in this lushly written debut is ultimately overtaken by relationship drama, but the constant nods to Agatha Christie will delight mystery fans as well as anyone with an interest in the power of stories and storytelling.

White Ivy, Susie Yang (2019)

A crime novel, an immigration story, and even a bit of a family saga, White Ivy gets at the heart of the American fascination with prep schools and Ivy League colleges: by emulating British customs and fetishizing white Anglo-Protestant history, they produce a caricature of whiteness for anyone who can afford the price tag. In a tale that recalls classic stories of American strivers by Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, Yang shows this caricature as hollow at best, malevolent and corrupting at worst. More than a thriller, White Ivy is an American tragedy.

Catherine House, Elisabeth Thomas (2020)

Elisabeth Thomas’s debut is an absolute banger. The eponymous school, Catherine House, is an experimental, racially diverse, alternate-college experience—something like Deep Springs College, but set on a crumbling gothic campus in backwoods Pennsylvania. More than most books on this list, The Catherine House is intensely focused on the peculiarities of the school itself—its obscure rituals, its amorphous yet all-encompassing intellectual rigor, the contrast between its state-of-the-art research and dank, threadbare decor, and, of course, the disturbing and unnatural secrets it conceals. The world-building is top-notch, the paranoia is real, and this book is a delight to read.

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell (2020)

Though not technically a thriller, Russell’s debut My Dark Vanessa is definitely crime fiction; it takes the daring approach of hiding its crime in plain sight. The suspense in this tale of sexual abuse and rape at a boarding school is in wondering when the Vanessa of the title will acknowledge the crime that was committed, knowing that this admission will make her a victim. An intense and immersive dive into a young girl’s experience of grooming at the hands of a master manipulator, this story comes with a hefty trigger warning, but it’s worth it—My Dark Vanessa is unflinching and unsentimental despite its lush prose, and refuses to grant the easy comforts of absolution or revenge.

These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever (2020)

This luxuriously written debut gives us a schoolboy romance that starts in class discussion and quickly turns intense—even dangerous. Set in the Watergate era, These Violent Delights scratches the nostalgia itch while never shying away from the ethical quandaries of the era. Moreover, Julian From is one of the most memorable Dark Academia characters in recent memory—a poor little rich boy with a sadistic streak that makes his vulnerability all the more winning, he has protagonist Paul—and the reader—toggling back and forth the whole book long, wondering whether he’s a sociopath or a beleaguered saint.

They Never Learn, Layne Fargo (2020)

Fargo’s book is the rare one on this list that features a professor in the lead—but in keeping with the Dark Academia aesthetic, she’s not a detective, but a serial killer. Antihero Scarlett is sultry yet calculating, deeply committed to pleasure, and bent on exacting her revenge on campus rapists. In They Never Learn, Fargo cleverly interweaves chapters about Scarlet’s shocking habit of murdering men at her college with a parallel story of a young student that will have readers wishing she would bump off a couple more.

The Orchard, David Hopen (2021)

Hopen’s debut The Orchard takes place in a “modern Orthodox” yeshiva in a wealthy Jewish suburb of Miami, where an intellectually serious student joins the inner circle of a charismatic rabbi whose discussions of the Torah tend to get very, shall we say, metaphysical. Perhaps the title on this list most indebted to The Secret History, it’s a refreshing take on the genre, and one that makes good on its promise to shine light on the workings of privilege in every culture.

 Looking forward to:

All the Girls Are So Nice Here, Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

A debut adult fiction from a former YA writer, All the Girls Are So Nice Here promises mean girls aplenty and a pulse-pounding I Know What You Did Last Summer premise.

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, Ashley Winstead

A college reunion brings together a group of friends once shattered by a vicious crime in this thrilling debut, reminiscent of Cruel Intentions, Heathers, and, of course, the Secret History.

For Your Own Good, Samantha Downing

Featuring a chilling protagonist whose unorthodox teaching methods might just prove deadly, For Your Own Good is giving off major Dexter vibes, and we’re here for it.

Kill All Your Darlings, David Bell

An academic thriller that begins with a professor passing off his missing student’s work as his own, and ends with him being implicated in an unsolved murder? Sounds like Wonder Boys times Patricia Highsmith. Yes please!

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