If the rise in popularity of Dark Academia has taught us anything, it’s that readers love a campus novel with an eerie bent. Of course, the murder-y campus aesthetic extends well before the #darkacademia hashtag garnered over 100 million posts on TikTok. Arguably first, there was The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel that introduced readers to the clan of snobbish classics majors who end up murdering one of their own. But even before that, the campus novel genre has always had dark tendencies. Consider Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1935 novel Gaudy Night, perhaps the first murder mystery set on a college campus, or even John Williams’ quietly devastating Stoner, released in 1965 and to me a paragon of Midwest Gothic literature.
I tapped into that tradition in my novel, The Wayside, which takes place at Paloma College, a (fictional) liberal arts school in Northern California. The novel opens with a pair of hikers discovering the body of Jake Cleary, a student at Paloma, at the bottom of a cliff. Local police deem Jake’s death a suicide. But as Jake’s mother Kate uncovers the secrets of his life on campus, she becomes convinced that something even more sinister might have pushed Jake over the edge.
It’s not hard to see why college campuses are great fodder for thrillers, even beyond the ivy-bricked, ivory-towered settings that make such perfect mystery set pieces. What do you get when you throw thousands of ambitious young adults into an insular environment with highly specific, often unspoken codes of conduct and ask them to compete for success, attention, and romance? In the real world, you become a grown-up. In a certain kind of genre fiction, sometimes you get murdered.
In addition to The Secret History (at this point, a given), here are seven mysterious and unsettling novels set on campuses.
Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
The first in a trilogy by a Ukrainian husband-and-wife writing team, Vita Nostra lingers in some liminal space along the spectrum of dark fantasy, speculative fiction, and (stay with me here) metaphysical treatise. Briefly, it follows Sasha, a teenaged girl who’s recruited to enter a mysterious university. There, Sasha and her peers undergo increasingly bizarre tests, such as memorizing nonsense passages and listening to excruciatingly long recordings of absolute silence. The students are never told the purpose of these lessons—only that they’re of vital importance, and that progressing through them will result in uncanny changes in their biological and psychological makeups. If they fail, their instructors warn them, their loved ones will die.
This is an intellectually rigorous read, as we’re left to our own devices to uncover both the what and the why of Sasha’s byzantine education. The translation from its original Russian captures the bleak setting for a deeply unsettling sensory experience overall. But this is incredibly rewarding, too, and it’ll stay with you long after you read the final page.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo is a master of YA fantasy, and she brought all of that fast-paced plotting and dynamic worldbuilding to her first adult novel. Here Bardugo reimagines her alma mater, Yale, as an occult-inflected institution run by eight secret societies that engage in all kinds of fantastical activities, from necromancy to shapeshifting. Alex Stern, a high school dropout with a troubled history, gets an unexpected full ride to the school on the grounds that she join Lethe, the shadowy “ninth house” that’s tasked with policing the other houses—all of which are populated with the children of the rich and entitled, and who’d happily set forth on supernatural power trips that would threaten to upend the campus (and, potentially, the world) if not for Lethe keeping them in line. This is as much a send-up of the social politics on elite campuses as it is a smart, thoroughly entertaining fantasy.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
This tightly plotted thriller follows Mariana Andros, a recently widowed therapist whose niece, Zoe, asks her to come to Cambridge—Mariana’s alma mater, where Zoe is a current student—after her friend dies under mysterious circumstances. Mariana becomes convinced that Edward Fosca, a beloved Greek Tragedy professor and the de facto leader of a secret society that calls themselves “the Maidens,” played a role in the murder. When yet another Maiden is found dead, Mariana digs deeper into her theory that Fosca is guilty, despite a seemingly airtight alibi. Dark Academia fans will eat up the setting, plus the Greek mythology symbolism sprinkled throughout.
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
Another new entry into the Dark Academia canon, M.L. Rio’s debut novel opens with Oliver Marks the evening before he’s released from prison on charges related to the death of his former peer at an elite theater conservatory. Before he retires from the force, Detective Colborne, the lead investigator on Oliver’s case, asks Oliver to finally share what really happened the night of the murder. Like its spiritual predecessor The Secret History, this deftly explores the (sometimes murderous) tensions that arise among highly competitive, emotionally intertwined young people in an enclosed, pressurized environment.
Bunny by Mona Awad
Heathers meets Jennifer’s Body meets “Guy in your MFA” Twitter in this deliciously twisted novel. When Samantha Mackay enters a prestigious creative writing MFA program, she’s introverted, awkward, and can’t quite seem to find her place—which doesn’t bode well in a cutthroat workshop environment. Then she’s pulled into the “Bunnies,” a cabal of students who engage in less-than-savory extracurricular activities, including ritual animal sacrifice. And things only get weirder from there.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Pessl’s debut novel is ambitious, eclectic, scrappy, and wildly unique—probably why it garnered such extremes of praise and scorn when it was released in 2006. It’s very much a “black licorice” novel, but it appeals to my tastes. This follows Blue van Meer, a precocious teenager who enters a new private school and is soon drawn into the “Bluebloods,” a clique of rich and popular students. The group’s mentor, Hannah, is a cool film studies teacher who takes a special liking to Blue. When Hannah is found dead, Blue takes it upon herself to solve the case. This reads less as a mystery per se than a coming-of-age story that happens to include a murder, but I think its genre-bending, formally inventive nature is what makes it so compelling.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Set in a dystopian near-past, Never Let Me Go follows three friends at an English boarding school who come to discover that they’re human clones raised for the sole purpose of harvesting and donating their organs. Think Eton run through the Black Mirror wash. It’s hard to keep the twist under wraps almost twenty years after its publication (not to mention a movie adaptation starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield), but this will still break your heart and haunt your dreams.
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