The book that gave rise to the whole genre of “dark academia”, and a well-crafted tale of self-absorbtion within a closed-off community of scholarship. That kind of self-absorbtion is hardly unusual in academia of course (speaking as an academic) – although it seldom leads to murder.

The structure, pacing, and writing are all impeccable, and readily let a reader picture the sleepy New England college campus setting (inspired by Tarte’s alma mater Bennington College). It starts with a retrospective, the narrator reflecting on the murder around which the plot revolves before changing the his first-person linear narrative. The characters are well-drawn if perhaps a little stereotypical: the narrator is a working-class outsider who finds his way to a selective college and the company of a group of far more wealthy and self-contained students, whose entire academic experience is orchestrated by a professor with a deep and charismatic commitment to the relevance of the classics to the modern world. They will end up turning on each other under the pressure of the murders (plural) that they commit: the first in a pursuit of Dionysian ecstasy gone wrong, and the second to cover-up the first.

The book is written to almost obscure the time in which it happens: I wondered for a long time whether it was set in the 1920s, before I eventually decided it was more probably in the 1980s. Perhaps that’s a comment on liberal arts college life, of study set apart from the outside world. Not quite the academia I recognise, but as an act of world-building it’s superb, and as a plot it’s well-observed and well-crafted with plenty of twists and uncertainties.

5/5. Finished Sunday 7 June, 2026.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)