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Tuesday Top Five: Back To School
Aug. 27th, 2024 06:05 pmSince a new academic year approaches (at least in the United States), I’m focusing this week on my favorite campus novels that we could, if we want, consider “dark academia.”
1. Victoria by Barbara Brooks Wallace (1972): Eccentric and prickly Victoria, her timid sidekick Dilys, and their two roommates form an occult-leaning secret society to ward off “evil forces” at their boarding school, guided by the instructions in the Black Book that Victoria carries everywhere.
I first picked up this book (which, to the best of my knowledge, is out of print now) from my older sister’s bookshelf when I was around the same age as the characters, and – based on the back-cover blurb and Dilys’s impressionable narration – wasn’t sure at first whether or not anything supernatural was actually happening. I think that this sort of genre ambiguity can be either a feature or a bug, but the complex, sometimes hostile, sometimes loyal relationships among the tween girls are what really make the story memorable, and speaking as a former Weird Little Girl who formed secret and vaguely occult-leaning alliances with friends and classmates, that aspect of the still book resonates with me.
2. Down A Dark Hall by Lois Duncan (1974): Fourteen-year-old Kit senses at a first glance that the Blackwood School is an “evil” place, and it’s certainly odd that only three other students are enrolled. Still, she and her new friend Sandy, along with the rigorously logical Ruth and the beautiful and dreamy Lynda, soon settle into their new routine, until strange incidents of sleepwalking and the emergence of inexplicable new artistic talents convince Kit that something is very wrong at Blackwood after all.
I could write so many words about Lois Duncan, one of the queens of young adult suspense, whose books I read and reread countless times in junior high and high school. I think Down A Dark Hall is definitely the strongest in terms of atmosphere; it blends one of her pet subjects – psychically gifted young people – with the Gothic trope of the forbidding, isolated house with a sordid history; and it evokes the psychological uneasiness and eventual terror that can arise when teenagers are at the mercy of adults who want to use them. (I wasn’t particularly impressed with the 2018 movie adaptation, which doesn’t spend nearly enough time with the students to make the audience care about them; it would probably have worked better as a miniseries.)
3. Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (1991): This is a retelling of the Scottish ballad of the same name, set at a Midwestern liberal arts college where the cultlike Classics department rides through the night on horseback, ghosts fling books out of dormitory windows, and our heroine must navigate classes, friendship, and romance amidst the scheming of otherworldly beings. This book doesn’t ultimately leave much doubt as to whether the supernatural elements are present, but they don’t become overt until close to the end. Meanwhile, readers spend most of their time exploring the beautifully described campus and intellectually rewarding classes with Janet and her brilliant, loyal (if sometimes bewildering) friends. In its depiction of the college experience, Dean’s novel is unquestionably aspirational, but as someone who first read it when I was looking forward to my college years, and have reread it several times since looking back, I’ve never found that aspect of it to be twee or grating. Also, as in the original ballad, the girl rescues the boy, and their slow-burn romance has some nicely swoony moments, but I appreciate the portrayal of the friend group, their interpersonal struggles, and their shared love of books, even more.
4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992): One of the foundational texts of dark academia is, in fact, another book about cultlike Classics scholars, though this one is very different in its intent and tone than Tam Lin. “Pretentious students murder a classmate and most of them get away with it” is not a spoiler (it’s revealed in the first few pages), and only partially conveys the experience of reading the book (which posts like this one also try to capture), but I certainly wouldn’t blame any reader for being unwilling or unable to buy into that premise. I bought into it to a degree that I can partially blame on circumstance, since I attended the college that was the basis for The Secret History’s setting, and read it on winter break while trying to decide whether I wanted to return. That said, I still find the story to be extremely re-readable even though I would probably not want to hang out with any of the characters at any point in my life.
5. All That Consumes Us by Erica Waters (2023): When Tara is unexpectedly invited to her college's exclusive academic society, she finds new friends and support for her dream of becoming a writer, but soon discovers what she was really signing up for when she took an oath to be a “vessel for genius.”
The only recently published entry on this list – which makes it the only one to be published after the Internet codified “dark academia” as an Aesthetic and a Brand – shares some noticeable thematic elements with the Duncan and Tartt novels mentioned above, and directly references the latter at least once or twice. If you prefer a more diverse cast and the emergence of a found family in your tales of ghosts, ominous scribblings in notebooks, and secret societies with their arcane rituals and sketchy academic mentors, then Waters’ book is a good choice.
1. Victoria by Barbara Brooks Wallace (1972): Eccentric and prickly Victoria, her timid sidekick Dilys, and their two roommates form an occult-leaning secret society to ward off “evil forces” at their boarding school, guided by the instructions in the Black Book that Victoria carries everywhere.
I first picked up this book (which, to the best of my knowledge, is out of print now) from my older sister’s bookshelf when I was around the same age as the characters, and – based on the back-cover blurb and Dilys’s impressionable narration – wasn’t sure at first whether or not anything supernatural was actually happening. I think that this sort of genre ambiguity can be either a feature or a bug, but the complex, sometimes hostile, sometimes loyal relationships among the tween girls are what really make the story memorable, and speaking as a former Weird Little Girl who formed secret and vaguely occult-leaning alliances with friends and classmates, that aspect of the still book resonates with me.
2. Down A Dark Hall by Lois Duncan (1974): Fourteen-year-old Kit senses at a first glance that the Blackwood School is an “evil” place, and it’s certainly odd that only three other students are enrolled. Still, she and her new friend Sandy, along with the rigorously logical Ruth and the beautiful and dreamy Lynda, soon settle into their new routine, until strange incidents of sleepwalking and the emergence of inexplicable new artistic talents convince Kit that something is very wrong at Blackwood after all.
I could write so many words about Lois Duncan, one of the queens of young adult suspense, whose books I read and reread countless times in junior high and high school. I think Down A Dark Hall is definitely the strongest in terms of atmosphere; it blends one of her pet subjects – psychically gifted young people – with the Gothic trope of the forbidding, isolated house with a sordid history; and it evokes the psychological uneasiness and eventual terror that can arise when teenagers are at the mercy of adults who want to use them. (I wasn’t particularly impressed with the 2018 movie adaptation, which doesn’t spend nearly enough time with the students to make the audience care about them; it would probably have worked better as a miniseries.)
3. Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (1991): This is a retelling of the Scottish ballad of the same name, set at a Midwestern liberal arts college where the cultlike Classics department rides through the night on horseback, ghosts fling books out of dormitory windows, and our heroine must navigate classes, friendship, and romance amidst the scheming of otherworldly beings. This book doesn’t ultimately leave much doubt as to whether the supernatural elements are present, but they don’t become overt until close to the end. Meanwhile, readers spend most of their time exploring the beautifully described campus and intellectually rewarding classes with Janet and her brilliant, loyal (if sometimes bewildering) friends. In its depiction of the college experience, Dean’s novel is unquestionably aspirational, but as someone who first read it when I was looking forward to my college years, and have reread it several times since looking back, I’ve never found that aspect of it to be twee or grating. Also, as in the original ballad, the girl rescues the boy, and their slow-burn romance has some nicely swoony moments, but I appreciate the portrayal of the friend group, their interpersonal struggles, and their shared love of books, even more.
4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992): One of the foundational texts of dark academia is, in fact, another book about cultlike Classics scholars, though this one is very different in its intent and tone than Tam Lin. “Pretentious students murder a classmate and most of them get away with it” is not a spoiler (it’s revealed in the first few pages), and only partially conveys the experience of reading the book (which posts like this one also try to capture), but I certainly wouldn’t blame any reader for being unwilling or unable to buy into that premise. I bought into it to a degree that I can partially blame on circumstance, since I attended the college that was the basis for The Secret History’s setting, and read it on winter break while trying to decide whether I wanted to return. That said, I still find the story to be extremely re-readable even though I would probably not want to hang out with any of the characters at any point in my life.
5. All That Consumes Us by Erica Waters (2023): When Tara is unexpectedly invited to her college's exclusive academic society, she finds new friends and support for her dream of becoming a writer, but soon discovers what she was really signing up for when she took an oath to be a “vessel for genius.”
The only recently published entry on this list – which makes it the only one to be published after the Internet codified “dark academia” as an Aesthetic and a Brand – shares some noticeable thematic elements with the Duncan and Tartt novels mentioned above, and directly references the latter at least once or twice. If you prefer a more diverse cast and the emergence of a found family in your tales of ghosts, ominous scribblings in notebooks, and secret societies with their arcane rituals and sketchy academic mentors, then Waters’ book is a good choice.
