5 Dark Academia Classics Every Fan Needs To Read

Having spent my 20s as a puzzle editor in London, I decided to do the obvious thing: write a novel. Because novels are often puzzles — they can be whodunits, whydunits, or stories that keep teasing the reader, enticing them with a sense of “You’ll never guess what happens next!”

My debut novel, Black Chalk (2013), was a case of all three — a mystery set in Oxford centered on one game (the puzzle), six players (whodunit?), and five survivors (whydunit?). But not long after it came out, around 2015, online fans of twisty mysteries at prestigious universities invented a new label for my novel: They called it dark academia.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is considered the foundational text of the genre, which also includes novels you’ve likely already read or heard of: If We Were Villains, Ninth House, The Maidens, Bunny, Babel, and so on.

This summer, I jumped into dark academia once more with a new novel, The Rabbit Club. Again, I’ve set it in Oxford with the action centering on a sadistic game, asking “How far would you go to gain membership to a secret society?” I can’t reveal how many of my characters make it out alive, but I can promise you there’s a plot twist at the end that will make you say “I didn’t see that coming.”

The book is also a love letter to literature and other classics set in dark academic halls redolent with mystery and malevolence. You can find hundreds of dark academia novel lists on the web, but unfortunately almost none of them look back beyond The Secret History. This is a great shame because you’ll find some absolute classics.

And so, with back-to-school energy on the horizon, here are my five favorite books set in dark, dusty campus corridors. They’re the original dark academia tales, published long before The Secret History was born in 1992.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

While studying at Oxford, Charles Ryder becomes friends with Lord Sebastian Flyte, a charming English aristocrat who carries around a teddy bear named Aloysius. The two of them drink, laugh, and picnic together; hang out in a stately home when they’re not in Oxford; and vacation in Venice, where Sebastian’s father owns a palazzo. But beneath all of the opulence and gaiety, Sebastian is a repressed Catholic with a brutally dark soul. The party can last only so long before the drinks turn sour. If I could name only one book on this list, this would be it, and it’s been a huge influence on my work. The novel is transcendent, but the 1981 BBC adaptation (available on BritBox) starring a youthful Jeremy Irons stays true to the book and is thoroughly watchable.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Jean Brodie, a charismatic but unorthodox teacher at an exclusive Edinburgh school for girls, selects “the crème de la crème” for her “Brodie set,” six pupils whose lives and passions she intends to shape. (Fans of The Secret History might already be getting goosebumps.) Brodie is also in the throes of a love triangle with two of the male school masters, the handsome-but-married painter Mr. Lloyd and the less-enticing singing teacher, Mr. Lowther, who is at least a bachelor. “I am in my prime,” Miss Brodie states, repeatedly and somewhat desperately. Meanwhile, the teenage girls of the Brodie set find their schoolmistress’s romantic life both fascinating and titillating, and as these girls grow up under Brodie’s eccentric tutelage, what unfolds is a tale of power, lost innocence, and betrayal. Spark’s beautifully written novel is witty, dark, and deliciously subversive.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

If I could convince just one reader to dive into this remarkable, mazelike novel, I would consider my time on Earth well spent. The story is structured around a poem, named Pale Fire, written by a professor at the fictional Wordsmith College. It contains 999 lines — its author, John Shade, was murdered before he could pen the final sentence. Shade’s neighbor, a fellow Wordsmith professor named Charles Kinbote, is our narrator, having taken it upon himself to interpret the poem on the reader’s behalf. Kinbote is the most fascinating unreliable narrator in the history of literature — a lunatic, a narcissist, and perhaps an exiled king from a land named Zembla. He is also absurdly funny as, page by page, he manages to make Shade’s last poem all about himself.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter Wimsey, a gentleman detective, is the star turn in a series of 11 books written by Sayers. And while this novel is included in the list, Harriet Vane, his long-pursued love interest, is the one who really shines. Vane returns to her Oxford University alma mater for a “gaudy” — the word used at Oxford for a reunion and celebratory feast. Soon she is enlisted to track down a writer of poison-pen letters and vicious graffiti. Addressing the new social landscape of the 1930s, women’s roles in academia, and Vane’s complicated feelings toward her suitor, Gaudy Night is arguably the first-ever feminist mystery novel.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“Hold on,” you might be saying. “How is this dark academia?” Hear me out. Lewis Carroll was a professor at Oxford, which means he spent most of his life in the city. His real-life inspiration for Alice was Alice Pleasance Liddle, a 10-year-old girl who was the daughter of the head of Christ Church college where Carroll taught. Wonderland is crammed full of the sort of eccentrics and oddballs Carroll encountered in his daily Oxford life, and this is why I made The Rabbit Club a retelling of Carroll’s work. My main character, Ali, is the male version of Alice, but he’s from Los Angeles in 1994 instead of England in 1865. He enrolls at Oxford where he falls down a rabbit hole, meeting a secret society of men who may or may not be trying to kill him. And as Alice herself says in Wonderland: “Who in the world am I? Ah, now that’s the puzzle.” Remember that line — because it’s a clue to cracking the code wide open.