a dark academia booklist

sixty something dark academia novels and half-dark academia novels, in four categories, with commentary

In my post defining the dark academia novel (read it, it’s good), I went deep, deep, deep into how I think dark academia works as a genre. I think it is a genre, a real genre rather than a set of social media or book marketing buzzwords. I think treating it as a genre that exists enables us to have meaningful follow up conversations, including discussing how dark academia interacts with the canon, racism, and exclusion from lily-white ivory towers. Putting that essay together involved a lot of scrolling and jotting. I approached ‘defining the dark academia novel’ by trying to assemble a corpus of dark academia and dark academia-adjacent books and working out where they all fit together and how they linked to and spoke to each other.

To summarise briefly, my hallmarks for whether something was dark academia were that it had to be dark and it had to be academia. In practice, that meant it had to include at least some of the things on this list:

• a visually, aesthetically dark gothic setting (candles, stars in the sky, dark rooms, gothic corridors)

• the dark side of human nature (murder, jealousy, icky sex stuff)

• the dark side of academia (colonialism, exploitation, gender dynamics, class)

• academia as a setting (it’s at a school, college or similar)

• academia as a motivation, character and key theme (we did this murder because of the play we were reading in class)

A truly very dark academia book would ideally tick all five. You probably have to have two or three to count at all, but there are exceptions in both directions. I can think of several books that tick almost all the boxes but no one on the internet really thinks of when they think dark academia.

In my original essay I proposed a four-way split in the genre. So a book can be dark academia in four ways:

• core dark academia (realism for grownups, e.g. The Secret History)

• pre dark academia (books published before the 90s which may have dark academia themes or may just be the kind of book you imagine a dark academia protagonist reading, e.g. The Picture of Dorian Gray)

• speculative dark academia (usually fantasy or magic realism, e.g. Babel)

• young adult dark academia (e.g. A Study in Drowning).

I offered in that article to post the full booklist if anyone wanted, and people did want. The other thing I really loved in the response to that essay was people suggesting more books that followed the rules, came close to the rules, broke the rules. There’s a vast hinterland of maybe and nearly dark academia books here. So putting this follow up together will mean both typing up the research I originally did and, more excitingly, incorporating some of the rabbit holes that commenters sent me on.

Before we jump in, I want to be clear for a second about what kind of resource I want this to be. I’ve used the word ‘booklist’ in the title but I don’t think anyone, including me, could reasonably be expected to read all of these. I don’t think it’s exhaustive and I don’t think I’m an authority on this. Including a book on this list doesn’t mean I think it’s good, or I recommend it, or I have unriddled all its relationships with the rest of the canon. Unless I spent five years on it and had access to considerable funding, this could never be complete. In particular, I might be wrong about where I place the line between YA and adult fiction. I haven’t read all that many of the YA books on this list so while I’m keen to be corrected, please be nice.

I’m going to organise this in four categories, matching the four sub-genres I pick out above. In each one I’ll give some ‘kinda’ dark academia books as well. I won’t write much about each one, and I won’t say anything at all about books I don’t know anything about, but I’ll pick a couple of features out if I think they need picking out.

Some of these books were written by authors who were aware of dark academia as a genre and who wanted or intended for their book to go in there. Some are books where the internet communally decided, ‘you don’t think you’re dark academia but we do and we’re claiming you’. Those authors might be offended by being brought into an internet subculture, but I have less than two thousand readers so I hope they won’t find out. And some are books where I might be the only person who made the connection with dark academia, but I’m very clever and always correct, so that’s good for everyone isn’t it.

So. Let’s get dark and arty.

Core dark academia

The Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992). Because obviously.

If We Were Villains, M.L. Rio (2017). The fun thing about this one is that it’s very ‘canonical’ dark academia to many but when I saw M.L. Rio speak in London last year she spoke in quite a lot of detail about how she had no idea what dark academia was, it hadn’t really happened yet as she was writing, and she thought she was writing a campus novel. The relationship between dark academia and the more old school campus novel is fascinating to me and you can read more about what she said live in my essay ‘the dream life and the dark academia life’ (read it, it’s good).

And also Graveyard Shift, M. L. Rio (2024). This novella got mixed reviews but I loved it and I think it works well in conversation with dark academia and with Villains. This is upfront about the least aesthetic, economic, timetabling parts of university life, accompanied by a proper old school gothic plot.

The Latinist, Mark Prins (2022). A very Oxfordy Oxfordy Oxford book with a lot of classics in there. I don’t see this one discussed much and I’m confused about why that is. It’s so very everything everyone seems to be after.

The Maidens, Alex Michaelides (2021). It’s interesting to me how dark academia loves murder but rarely takes the form of an actual murder mystery.

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, Ashley Winstead (2021). I’m not saying this is the only southern (as in southern USA) dark academia book but that side of it was fascinating to me. I found the differences in institution, aesthetic, campus relationships and sorority culture interesting.

The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt (2009). No one, including A.S. Byatt, thinks this is dark academia, but it absolutely is, and it’s brilliant to boot.

In These Hallowed Halls, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (2023). These short stories range across subgenres a lot but there’s some fantastic stuff in here and, additionally, reading so many short works all next to each other is really instrutive for how the genre works. I read this last month and I think I still think about ‘The Professor of Ontography’ every day.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl (2006). I think this is the masterwork example of the dark academia unreliable narrator. Perhaps the most re-readable but also one of the most difficult dark academia novels. I have no idea what happens in this book or what it all means. I’ll read it again and understand less.

The Cloisters, Katy Hays (2022). This one is set in an art gallery rather than a higher education institution, which I love and wish more people would do.

Mrs S, K. Patrick (2023). There are so many books set in the heady, isolated, gothic, creepy, nostalgic, romantic world of boarding schools (the kinds of schools called public schools in the UK, which are the opposite of American public schools, they are very much not available to all of the public). Mrs S did something really interesting with the setting by focusing on staff members rather than students. There isn’t much of that about and this made me wish there was more.

These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever (2020). This is probably the book on this list that I most want to read but alas, people keep insisting on charging money for books.

Dead Poets Society, N.H. Kleinbaum (1988). Sure, but I think a lot of people miss that this is a novelization of the film rather than a novel on which the film is based. I’ve no issue with anyone reading it but if it were up to me I think I’d just watch the movie.

The Drownings, Hazel Barkworth (2024). I haven’t read this one, but apparently.

Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth (2020). A friend recommended this to me when it was brand new out and I never read it, but I still aim to.

Kinda dark academia? The campus novel grey zone

The Idiot, Elif Batuman (2017). Perhaps it’s just because I’ve loved, stared at and reread this book many times, but I see links between this and the dark academia canon. It’s not gothic but it is a campus novel that goes deeply and darkly into academic content, class, exclusion, and feeling lost.

Disorientation, Elaine Hsieh Chou (2022). If there’s such a thing as dark academia comedy, this is that. A melodramatic genre about obsession and academic fraud certainly has the capacity to be silly and this book goes deep into how silly that is.

The Virgins, Pamela Erens (2013). This is a strange and dark one, particularly to read as an adult but it’s got one of the most evocative portraits of boarding school I’ve read in a while.

Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld (2005). This one looks at class in wealthy boarding schools in detail. It veers around levels of darkness, and it’s probably more bildungsroman than dark academia.

And as an outside possibility wildcard, why not The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood (2021)? Yes it’s a romance and it has pink on the cover. Yes it’s not gothic at all. But my main standard for defining dark academia is having scholarly content be a meaningful driver of the plot and a key relationship, and there’s a non-zero amount of horror and the dark side of academic work in here. I genuinely think this book deserves mentioning in dark academia conversations. Yes I’ll defend that view. Please don’t hurt me.

Pre dark academia

Note - this section is hopelessly white and European and I didn’t like it as I was writing it out. I’m publishing this as it is because this is, as far as I can tell, a good statement of where the dark academia canon is at present. There are books I love here, and there are a good number of books that make me go ‘sure but why is it on this list’. A book becomes part of the ‘pre dark academia’ canon when people read it as part of a dark academia identity. I think we should do that more and wider, and I’ve included a few ideas here for places I think that could happen. I am a white medievalist of the British Isles, though, so additions from people who know other world literatures better than me are going to be better.

Possession, A.S. Byatt (1991). I know I said this post wasn’t written with the purpose of being full of recommendations but if I was recommending one book to the dark academia fans it would be this one. This is one of the best literary novels ever written, it’s so dark and twisty, so erudite and rich in allusion and myth, so medievalist and victorianist. A.S. Byatt’s mind is incredible and this speaks to The Secret History in amazing comparative ways. If you have any faith in me at all, read this book.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890). This is viewed by many as the ‘main’ ‘dark academia classic’. I don’t like the word classic so I’m using ‘pre dark academia’. I haven’t read this one in about fifteen years, so I’m cautious about passing judgement. It’s got the gothic, it’s got the horror, it’s got material on the dark twisting relationships between art and the worst/best parts of life. Is it academia? Idk.

Maurice, E.M. Forster (1971, but written much earlier). This only has a lushly academic setting for the first half of the book but the way it situates its queerness within classical reading, and how deeply it goes into ‘what we’re left with’ after attempting to live in a class-neutral melting pot at university makes it very academia to me, as well as very dark. Such a beautiful novel that I really think everyone should read.

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866). This is probably the main one I see invoked as ‘the kind of thing a dark academia hero would read’.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818). The really wonderful thing about reading this one as a dark academia novel is how the two educations we watch happen mirror and talk to each other. Victor and the Creature are both, in opposite and equal ways, ‘educated’.

Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897). Dark, sure.

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (1954). I’ve seen this called the defining English campus novel.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945). But those people are wrong because this is the defining English campus novel.

All Souls, Javier Marias (1989). This is very rarely mentioned in these conversations but I think it should be more. A very Oxford doomed romance.

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (1935). The defining dark academia murder mystery.

Stoner, John Williams (1965). The defining American campus novel? I might be the only person who didn’t like this one, but that was when I was about eighteen. I might have to read it again.

The Iliad, Homer (who knows). Thank you Henry Winter.

The Bacchae, Euripides (who knows). Thank you again Henry Winter.

On that Greek classics note, I think the important thing to remember about these texts is that they become ‘aesthetic’ because of a critical mass of people reading them and thinking ‘ooh aren’t I dark academia’. The Iliad counts because people read it and reckon it counts, in a certain higher education context, reading a certain edition. I would argue (and I have argued and will continue to argue) that it is more dark academia to refuse to be governed by what books an elderly English teacher told you were the cool good clever-people books. We could do it with,

Sunjata, Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, the founding legend of the Mali Empire.

Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin, one of China’s most highly respected novels.

The Analects, Confucius. If you read The Poppy War and felt breathlessly fascinated by the world R.F. Kuang conjured around a fantastical classical Chinese education, this is one of the texts that would have been being read, recited, commented upon and used there. Many generations of Chinese scholars had their lives governed by this text.

Ramayana. There are so many South Asian epics which contain enough depth, wonder and mystery to define a good portion of a vast subcontinent for two and a half thousand years. This text has been translated, varied, shifted and reinterpreted around since 500 B.C.E.(ish), across twelve(ish) languages.

Speculative dark academia

Fantasy

Babel, R.F. Kuang (2022). Not the original dark academia fantasy but probably the defining one.

But also The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang (2018). I see a lot of discussion about whether this is a romantasy book (it isn’t) but I don’t see it being considered for inclusion on dark academia. Is it a perfect fit? No, but it meets my main criteria of having its character’s most important relationship be the relationship with the scholarly content and where that drives her. Rin’s life is driven by study and the doors (wondrous and horrific) that that opens. I also think the dark academia fans would love the idea that a dark academia fantasy world doesn’t need to be constructed around the same four western European texts.

Bunny, Mona Awad (2019). I would say Mona Awad is the master of dark academia horror.

But also, All’s Well, Mona Awad (2021), which I find more ‘dark academic’ because of the deep link between the play All’s Well That Ends Well and everything that happens to individuals, relationships, and the academic institution itself. It’s also the only dark academia book I or my readers (it was a reader who suggested this but I think I’d have got there eventually) could think of that considered disability in detail.

Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (2007). This is a breathtaking fantasy and I’m open-mouthed at why it isn’t more popular. This Ukrainian novel has one of the oddest and most original fantasy concepts I’ve ever read and the college at which it’s set is like nothing else on this list. Seriously, seriously, seriously read it. I think there are only two slavic-inflected books in this list, but they’re both wildly surreally amazing. I feel like eastern Europe lends itself well to dark winter dark academia.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004). As well as being a fantastic book, I think this one is worth mentioning for being the only dark academia (or kinda dark academia) novel I can think of set outside a literal education institution. I think we need more of those and I want, in particular, one set in a botanical garden.

And also Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (2020). This might be the closest to a ‘high fantasy’ dark academia book I’ve got here, though it’s still not really high fantasy

Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo (2019). For a genre that’s so dark and concerned with darkness, it’s interesting how rare it is for dark academia to commit to all-out horror.

The Atlas Six, Olivie Blake (2020). My hot take is that I’m not sure how far this one counts, because it has a very 'dark academia moodboard’ setting but the scholarly content of their studies never comes up much. Hmm.

An Academy for Liars, Alexis Henderson (2024). Another good horror example.

Juniper and Thorn, Ava Reid (2022). Seeing slavic folklore get to shine here is pretty cool. I’m keen and excited by any departure from the same western european/classical paradism. Like, I’m a medievalist of the British Isles, I love and get the appeal of that material, but I love seeing the net cast wider.

Vicious, V.E. Schwab (2013). I’ve not read this one but it gets mentioned a lot, a lot, a lot. It’s probably the most prominent dark academia book I haven’t read.

A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness (2011). I have a lot of grievances with this book but sure, it counts.

An Education in Malice, S.T. Gibson (2024). There should be more dark academia vampires.

The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern (2019). This is a more wild and surreal type of fantasy than many of the other dark academia fantasies, which tend to have quite a close focus on a small number of thematically relevant magics. This one is far dreamier and while it’s far from my favourite book on this list, many of the images have echoed round my brain for half a decade now.

Sci fi?

I go on a long digression in my original essay about the fact there is essentially zero dark academia sci fi. I’m fascinated by why this is and I had a lot of comments from people who found that question interesting. I’d quite like to write a whole essay on the dark academia sci fi question, which is a question I asked and the primary audience for that is me.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishigiro (2005). While this is from 2005, so comfortably within the time period I have said ‘core dark academia’ is allowed to exist, it has much more of a ‘pre dark academia’ feel to it. I don’t think Kazuo Ishiguro has ever consumed or created a moodboard. But this is a true sci fi book at the same time as going deep into what schooling does to people, how it gets inside us and how we get away from it or don’t.

Catherine House, Elisabeth Thomas (2020). This was the best I could come up with for a classically, very, moodboard-appropriate dark academic sci fi book. It’s weird, and a pretty good book, and fascinating to read as a book that goes down a sort of genre blind alley and ends up in a place no one else did.

Neverworld Wake, Marisha Pessl (2018). This was the only other dark academia sci fi. It wavers right close on the line between fantasy and sci fi, but maybe, kinda.

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (2006). A commenter on my previous essay raised this one as a possibility for a dark academia sci fi. It’s certainly true that the dark and strange possibilities of the academia drive the plot and create the darkness. It lacks the gothic setting but, like, perhaps.

Young adult dark academia

A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid (2023). A fantastical younger sister to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, I love how this one brings celtic and celtic languages into the mix.

Gallant, V.E. Schwab (2022). Another one I haven’t read but I’m really intrigued by the idea of illustrations talking to the main plot. There aren’t many illustrated dark academia books.

A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik (2020). Interesting how much more highly fantastical the YA ones are.

Ace of Spades, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (2021). I’m not doing very well at having read books from the YA section of this list (and I didn’t realise A Study in Drowning was YA when I bought it) but if I were going to read a YA dark academia book on purpose, I think it would be this one. There are books in the dark academia space that think about race but there aren’t many (aside Babel) that put how race operates in higher education so front and centre.

A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee (2021). Again, haven’t read it, reckon I’d like to. Gay. Witchy.

So that’s I think around sixty dark academia books I’ve mostly read or maybe just looked at and thought about in the course of writing my previous piece. I don’t really have a conclusion to this one because how could a post in this format ever aspire towards a conclusion? I’m excited to hear about everything I missed out.