The phrase dark academia evokes haunted halls on elite campuses, dusty libraries and dour dorms, and toxic type-A friend groups. In fact, several of the books on this list contain one or more of those elements. But today’s dark academia is just as likely to eschew those aesthetics to grapple with subtler and more mundane darknesses.
The novels on this list explore the seductiveness of belonging; the ever-shifting balance of power and responsibility; the insidiousness of academic ableism; the commodification of education; the all-consuming nature of academic careers; the social prerogatives of institutions, and the damage that’s done when those institutions fail to live up to their promises; the abrupt cliff’s edge of what comes after.
They are, in other words, updating the curriculum. And in doing so, they often dislocate academia––pulling it out of classrooms in gothic halls and into other spaces. They take place at institutions ranging from private schools to agricultural colleges, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), post-apocalyptic research bases, and the various communities in which these institutions are located. They’re told from the perspectives of faculty, research staff, grad students and undergrads, and struggling alums from a wide range of backgrounds and lived experiences.
In most cases, they’re love letters to education. But they’re also do better letters––calls to action and acts of storytelling solidarity that I hope will inspire all of us to keep fighting for our institutions even as we re-imagine and re-shape them into something better, kinder, and more magical.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Magic schools don’t run on magic alone. Opening with lesson planning and risk assessment, nods to endless meetings and mundane administrative tasks like keeping the (possessed) photocopier in good working order, The Incandescent offers readers a long-overdue glimpse behind the scenes into the compelling lives of faculty and staff.
Doctor Walden, Director of Magic at Chetwood School, spends her days wrangling chaotic teenagers, faculty, and staff at her alma mater. She’s great at her job. But when an invocation in her class goes wrong, attracting the attention of a higher demon, keeping the school safe gets a lot more complicated. Walden must face the fact that she may be the biggest threat to her school.
These Mortal Bodies by Elspeth Wilson
Campus novels are often coming of age stories for good reason: leaving home to study means building a new life and making new connections, ones that transform us into something new in the process. The transformation isn’t always for the better.
Neurodivergent student Ivy Graveson hopes to find connection and belonging when she leaves coastal Scotland to attend an all-girls college at a prestigious university, but breaking into the tight-knit social circle of her elite classmates is daunting. And even as she learns more about her college and the secret societies that thrive there, she’s drawn inevitably and terrifyingly to the bodies of water surrounding her. After an intense year at college, Ivy must decide what matters more: belonging or becoming what she was always meant to be.
A Mastery of Monsters by Liselle Sambury
There are lots of things we learn at college, both on the curriculum and off. But some things we already know bone deep, long before we even think about matriculating.
In A Mastery of Monsters, protagonist August already knows she’ll do anything for her brother. When he disappears, she doesn’t buy the explanation that he left school due to stress. Instead, she follows the clues. An attack by an enormous creature with feathers and claws drives home how much danger her brother might be in. Her search for information about the creature leads her to Virgil Hawthorne who promises that he’ll help her find her brother, but only if she infiltrates a secret society on campus to help him first. Talk about navigating a hidden curriculum.
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The archives humanities scholars explore are rarely complete and never neutral, and The Bewitching is a breathtaking examination of the ways privilege has been wielded to warp archives, scholarship, and even lives.
Grad student Minerva is researching the life of little-known author, Beatrice Tremblay at a small liberal arts college in 1990s Massachusetts. But Tremblay’s papers aren’t held by the university, and the local family who owns them won’t give anyone––especially not an international student who has to work to pay tuition––access. When Minerva finally does get access, delving into Tremblay’s manuscripts dredges up an old darkness that is chillingly similar to the stories her Nana Alba told her as a child. Minerva must draw on her research skills as well as her family history and lived experience in order to survive, let alone graduate.
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
We’ve all gone to great lengths for a letter of recommendation, but anyone who’s braved the academic job market will find the premise of Kuang’s latest novel especially relatable.
Alice Law has worked hard and sacrificed to get where she is, studying Magick with Professor Jacob Grimes, “the world’s greatest magician,” at Cambridge. So when he dies in an accident that might be her fault, of course she’s going to follow him into Hell. Her future is on the line, and she needs his recommendation. Unfortunately, her academic rival has the same plan.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
If you’re in search of dark academia that explores the powerful intersections of queer scholarship, community history, and lived experience, Lessons in Magic and Disaster should be at the top of your TBR.
Literature grad student Jamie decides to teach her mother how to do magic as a way to nudge her back into the world after years spent grieving. But Jamie’s decision unravels her carefully constructed life, and she has to find a way to undo her mother’s magic use while juggling her dissertation on eighteenth-century literature, hostile students and a charged academic environment, and her own relationship trouble––or lose everything she loves.
Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd
Academic life is often full of unspoken assumptions about who gets to be a scholar, and under what circumstances. My debut, Higher Magic, explores what happens when those assumptions transmute into actions and people actively gatekeep “the life of the mind.”
First-generation grad student Dorothe Bartleby has one last chance to pass her Magic program’s qualifying exam. If she can’t, she’ll be expelled. But her anxiety and imposter syndrome make everything exponentially harder. Making matters worse, Bartleby discovers that students are disappearing after submitting accommodation letters. When the administration doesn’t believe her, she must learn to trust in herself or risk failing her students and her exam.
The Book of Autumn by Molly O’Sullivan
When higher education is hostile, toxic, or inaccessible, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is walk away. Set at an agricultural college in New Mexico and told as a scholarly report replete with footnotes, The Book of Autumn explores what happens in the aftermath of that decision––and what it might take to return and reclaim your academic (and magical) identity.
Marcella Gibbons has been struggling since she left her PhD program in anthropology in her second year. With out-of-control magic and an unfinished degree, she’s stuck working low-paying jobs to make ends meet. So when one of her former professors reaches out for help looking into a tragic incident on campus, Marcella grudgingly returns even though it means working with Max, the magical other half she cut ties with when she left. Taking the job will give her the funds she needs to properly start fresh, as long as the past doesn’t suck her in.
I’ll Make a Spectacle of You by Beatrice Winifred Iker
The boundaries between community history and scholarly research, folklore and fact are often bruise-mottled, bearing the marks of epistemic violence and appropriation.
Set at a fictional HBCU in Appalachia, I’ll Make a Spectacle of You explores them through the lens of Southern gothic horror.
When Zora Robinson’s thesis advisor offers her a strange diary and nudges her to research local folklore about a beast rumored to roam the woods around campus, she dives in. Pursuing graduate-level research in Appalachian Studies at Bricksbury University is her dream, after all. But the dream quickly turns into a nightmare in the face of a reticent community, a rumored secret society, and a disappearance she’s afraid is evidence that the beast is something more than folklore.
The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson
The darkness in academia doesn’t only gather around students. In The Salt Oracle, a salt-stained murder mystery unravels and reveals that the stakes of research ripple far beyond the confines of the lab.
Part of a vital research team in a broken, post-internet future, Auli studies the Oracle–a girl whose ability to channel ghosts helps scientists chart maps, forecast weather, and collate other important information. When Auli’s mentor lets her in on his scheme to create more Oracles the day before he’s murdered, she’s left to pick up the pieces and––when she’s promoted to fill his place––determine the fate of the Oracles, her research station, and everyone who lives on it.
