“The night didn’t listen to us—it had a noise of its own…”: Dark Academia
#ReadingList: horror, fantasy, literary fiction, YA, romance, & classics…
“Dellecher was less an academic institution than a cult. When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as its as offered at the alter of the Muses. Ritual madness, ecstasy, human sacrifice. Were we bewitched? brainwashed? Perhaps…
“It was just us—the seven of us and the trees and the sky and the lake and the moon and, of course, Shakespeare. He lived with us like an eighth housemate, an older wiser friend, perpetually out of sight but never out of mind, as if he had just left the room. Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.”
— from IF WE WERE VILLAINS by ML Rio
I feel like everyone’s aesthetic & expectations for this genre is a little bit different… For example, to me this genre encapsulates the feeling of oversized college sweatshirts, tortoiseshell glasses, scuffed leather oxfords, & the “dust & parchment”-scented candle smuggled into the dormroom; reading Dracula late into the night for your ‘Queering Classics: Monsters & the Gothic’ class while a (suspiciously?) vicious Fall thunderstorm rages outside.
It evokes old (haunted?) public libraries, secondhand bookstores crammed with too many stacks full of too many books (perhaps some that have gone unopened for centuries?), & staking out that one cozy corner in the university dining hall next to the fireplace where the lighting is perfect for reading your scavenged, dust-jacketless copy of the Library of America edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings.
It’s Saturday mornings by the river, the leather saddlebag you inherited from your father (missing these past three years?) doubling as a picnic basket & stuffed with an enormous thermos of tea & a thrifted wool blanket; Woolf’s Orlando open on your lap & no one else around save for a lone crew team, a few stray walkers, & a layer of mist (or are those ghosts?) lifting lazily off the surface of the water.
I know I’m not the only one who feels most at home in this aesthetic. My list features a lot of horror, a lot of literary fiction, a little bit of fantasy, mostly femme &/or queer-centered characters & themes, & a few books that lean heavily towards the fine arts (since that was half my major in college so it’s a strong association for me)—think artist MCs & their studio spaces, artists’ communities, & art museums.
I do feel like I’m missing a ton of potential titles for this list—like where are all the romance titles? I feel like there should be more romance titles on this list—but I do want to be getting these lists up asap & consistently so they can start being organic & I’ll add to & update them regularly but lmk if I’ve left off any of your faves from this subgenre in the comments!
Otherwise, I hope you find something you like! <3
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TBR:
WHERE SLEEPING GIRLS LIE by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (March 2024)
contemporary sapphic YA thriller mystery—“Sade Hussein is starting her third year of high school… at the prestigious Alfred Nobel Academy boarding school… With rumors swirling around her, Sade catches the attention of the girls collectively known as the ‘Unholy Trinity’… [soon] Sade realizes there's more to Alfred Nobel Academy and its students than she thought. Secrets lurk around every corner and beneath every surface...Secrets that rival even her own.” (Read more here.)
MADDALENA AND THE DARK by Julia Fine (Jun 2023)
historical fiction—“…two girls at a prestigious music school in 18th-century Venice are drawn together by a dangerous wager… a captivating read for fans of atmospheric, slow-burning stories about self-discovery, forbidden desire, & the unbreakable bonds of female friendship.” Have also seen this book tagged as: “fantasy”, “lgbtqia+”, “gothic”, & “fairy-tales/folklore”. (Read more here.)
THE MARY SHELLEY CLUB by Goldy Moldavsky (2022)
YA horror/thriller, also described as “for fans of a good slasher movie”—“Rachel is recruited by the Mary Shelley Club, a mysterious society of students who orchestrate Fear Tests, elaborate pranks inspired by urban legends and movie tropes. At first, Rachel embraces the power that comes with reckless pranking. But as the Fear Tests escalate, the competition turns deadly, and it's clear Rachel is playing a game she can't afford to lose.” (Read more here.)
CATHERINE HOUSE by Elisabeth Thomas (2020)
queer literary thriller—“Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world's best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years--summers included--completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire. Trust us, you belong here.” (Read more here.)
THE ATLAS SIX by Olivie Blake (2020) [Trilogy includes THE ATLAS PARADOX & THE ATLAS COMPLEX.]
fantasy—“The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake is a captivating read for fans of dark, immersive fantasy and academia, particularly those who delight in the thrill of secret societies, magical rivalries, and the cutthroat pursuit of knowledge and power.” (Read more here.)
BUNNY by Mona Awad (2019)
contemporary literary horror—“Bunny by Mona Awad is a must-read for fans of dark, atmospheric fiction who are drawn to complex explorations of female friendships, the blurred lines between reality and fantasy, and the intoxicating allure of cult-like communities, as well as those who enjoy literary fiction with a touch of horror and a healthy dose of satire.” (Read more here.)
[I loved her book, ROUGE. Read my review for it here.]
THE REHEARSAL by Eleanor Catton (2008)
“A high school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every space into a stage.” Kind of sounds like The Crucible meets Mean Girls meets If We Were Villains. #gimme (Read more here.)
NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Isiguro (2005)
speculative literary fiction—“Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it… Never Let Me Go… is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society.”
HANGSAMAN by Shirley Jackson (1951)
classic literary horror—“Jackson's chilling second novel, loosely based on her own experiences & the real-life disappearance of a Bennington College sophomore in 1946… Seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite longs to escape home for college… however, college life doesn’t bring the happiness she expected. Little by little, Natalie is no longer certain of anything—even where reality ends and her dark imaginings begin.” (Read more here.)
[This one & her first novel, THE ROAD THROUGH THE WALL, are the only two Jackson novels I haven’t read yet.]
Read & Loved:
Click on the star ratings beside the titles I’ve read to read my reviews/thoughts about the book.
GREEN FUSE BURNING by Tiffany Morris (2023) ★ ★ ★ ★ .75 (Indigenous literary horror novella)
“These markings were gomgwejui’gasit, the suckerfish writing. She'd had a few informal lessons in these symbols so long ago and now she held her arms up in the dwindling light and tried to remember. Heaven as a star, Creator as a triangle. The phrase teased at the edge of her memory, at the edge of understanding, but the glowing script remained inscrutable. In truth, she couldn't make sense of any of it—this space or her body inscribed with this ancient language. She'd become alien in her own body, alien in the landscape she and her ancestors had called home, transformed into some unearthly being.”
WOMAN, EATING: A Literary Vampire Novel, by Claire Kohda (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ .75 (literary horror fiction)
“The skin on a neck appears to me as different from the skin anywhere else on a body… It is too blank compared with skin everywhere else, as though it is asking to have marks made on it, like very expensive calligraphy paper, or cold-pressed Fabriano. Often, I wonder whether the urge I have to make art is the same as the urge to consume and destroy the blankness of a human neck.”
A LESSON IN VENGEANCE by Victoria Lee (2021) ★ ★ ★ (YA slowburn thriller)
“‘I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who also chooses to be agnostic as to the existence of deities or fairies in the garden. Yes, there’s always a chance it’s real. But is that what you really believe?’ … I think that once we’re out there in the forest, under the moonlight, she’ll see things differently. Who knows what lurks in the woods, which beings rule the cold space beneath the trees?”
[I really wish I liked this one more than I did. I’m going to give it a reread in a couple years & see if it changes my opinion…]
LOTE by Shola von Reinhold (2020) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (literary fiction)
“Like Europeans in a Henry James, we would be creatures of genteel penury, full of education, artifice, a little vampiric, duping all the dull rich people around us. Except we were Black, except were poor, except we were basically self-taught (by their standards), except we were infinitely more subtle and fabulous…”
LEGENDBORN by Tracy Deonn (2020) ★ ★ ★ ★ .5 [Trilogy includes BLOODMARKED & OATHBOUND.] (YA fantasy)
“I stand at the statue and claim the bodies whose names the world wants to forget. I claim those bodies whose names I was taught to forget. And I claim the unsung bloodlines that soak the ground beneath my feet, because I know, I just know, that if they could, they would claim me.”
ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER by Olivie Blake (2020) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (adult literary romance)
“With Regan, everything came down to sacredness. She liked, in the time between docent tours, to wander her favorite parts of the Art Institute, which she typically selected to match the religiosity of her moods. Which was not to say she gravitated to religious art specifically; more often she aimed to match her private longings with the god (who was sometimes God, but not always) being worshipped through a polished frame. In early Catholic paintings, she looked for awe. In modern work, for sleekness. In contemporary, the vibrancy of dislocation. Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.”
PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke (2020) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (literary speculative fiction)
“Raphael is better represented by a statue in an antechamber that lies between the forty-fifth and the sixty-second northern halls. This statue shows a figure walking forward, holding a lantern. It is hard to determine with any certainty the gender of the figure; it is androgynous in appearance. From the way she (or he) holds up the lantern and peers at whatever is ahead, one gets the sense of a huge darkness surrounding her; above all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.”
OLIGARCHY by Scarlett Thomas (2019) ★ ★ ★ ★ .75 (literary contemporary fiction)
“As Bianca walks to the headmaster’s house she imagines herself a fawn in the dark night, snow falling gently on her ruddy fur, and she thinks about Princess Augusta coming here to drown herself, and wonders if she meant to, or if she just thought she could swim. Was she trying to get the black diamond back? Because, really, what the fuck would you do once it was gone? It must be found, the black diamond. Only then will the light return. The pellucid, desperate light.”
NINTH HOUSE by Leigh Bardugo (2019) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [Duology includes HELL BENT.] (adult fantasy)
“…this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.”
IF WE WERE VILLAINS by ML Rio (2017) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (literary mystery)
“The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent… He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”
“books and roses,” & “a brief history of the homely wench society,” in Helen Oyeyemi’s WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS (2015) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (literary short stories)
“But I want to read everything. When it comes to books and who can put things in them and get things out of them, it’s all ours. And all theirs too.” — from “a brief history of the homely wench society”
“Montse wandered among the shelves until it was too dark to see… there were more books here than could possibly be read in one lifetime. Books on sword-swallowing and life forms found in the ocean, clidomancy and the aurora borealis and other topics that reminded Montse how very much there was to wonder about in this world: there were things she’d seen in dreams that she wanted to see again, and one of these books, any of them, might lead her back to those visions, and then further on, so that she saw marvels while still awake.” — from “books and roses”
WHITE IS FOR WITCHING by Helen Oyeyemi (2009) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (sapphic literary horror)
“How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?”
THE HISTORIAN by Elizabeth Kostova (2005) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (literary epistolary mystery—very slowburn, very much in the style of Stoker’s original… Read more here.)
“For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth—really seen it—you can’t look away.”
THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt (1992) ★ ★ ★ ★ Read more here.
“Senior year, I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence. Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow.”
THE NAME OF THE ROSE by Umberto Eco (1980) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (classic literary fiction)
“…at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.”
“Family Treasures,” in Shirley Jackson’s DARK TALES (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★ .5 (classic literary short stories)
“Anne Waite was a most unfortunate girl, although… Anne felt herself to be free and unconfined, accepting the ordinary regulations of institutional community life as a concession to the authorities, rather than as an imposed obligation. The university was large, and Anne was small, yet the university was more strictly bound by iron rules than Anne, and was, on the whole, Anne would have said, more unfortunate.”
What are some of your favorite Dark Academia books? Let me know in the comments! <3