It’s no secret that we love Kat Dunn and ‘Hungerstone’ - have you listened to our interview with Kat? - so it was inevitable that we’d have to read and discuss ‘Rottenheart’. Revenge me. For I am murdered . . . Odette and Cecilia are young women, living between their grand homes in Hampstead and the imposing, ancient Herne House in Suffolk. Though Odette's artist mother Lydia keeps a tight grasp on her, she and her beloved Cecilia are mostly left free to roam, to learn and to love. But when Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. As the funeral rites are performed, Odette's aun
If you’ve been with us since Season 8, you may recognise the name of this week’s author as we read his novel ‘Black Chalk’ back in 2024. Now Yates is back with another dark academia novel that has had it’s praises shouted from the rooftops. When Ali McCain, an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles, is accepted at Oxford, it’s a chance to fulfil his dreams. To study English literature in England; to meet true intellectuals; and to glimpse the life he might have lived had his father—British rock star Gel McCain, legendary frontman of the Pale Fires—not abandoned him and his mother when he was a tod
‘The Dark Academia Journal’ will be published on 10 September 2026 by Wildfire and you can pre-order it right now!
Jennifer Niven is a huge name in YA, most known for ‘All the Bright Places’ which was released in 2015 and neither of us had read her since then. As soon as we saw a 2025 dark academia release from her that was compared itself to ‘The Secret History’ we had to revisit this author of the golden age of YA.
Welcome to Season 13! We’re kicking off with an audio-only novella from one of our very favourite authors, Ali Hazelwood, as she tackles dark academia and paranormal romance in ‘Bound’. A reluctant con artist and a professor with too many secrets are bound by an arcane text-in more ways than one. Veronica "Vero" Mercer grew up with grifters for parents, and she knows her way around a con. When grad school bills pile up and her friends are in trouble, she turns her art history skills into a forgery side hustle. It's supposed to be a short-term deal, but her work draws the attention of Dr. Vikto
This is it! The last episode in for this season! Can you believe we’ve done 12 of these now? So we’re going out with a bang with some horror in the form of ‘The Library at Hellebore’.
It’s time for one of our most anticipated books of the season: Emily Tesh’s ‘The Incandescent’. A magic school? Check. Demons? Check. An entirely different perspective? Check. Dr Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions. Walden is good at her job - no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It's her responsibility to keep her school w
We’re heading to Huntsworth Academy for this episode of the podcast, and returning to YA, with Jenni Howell’s Boys With Sharp Teeth. Seventeen-year-old Marin James has spent her entire life living in the shadow of the exclusive Huntsworth Academy. So when her cousin’s dead body is found in a creek on school property, Marin knows exactly who’s to blame: Adrian Graves and Henry Wu, the enigmatic, yet dangerous leaders of the school's ecosystem. Swapping her ragged T-shirts for a crisp prep school uniform, Marin infiltrates Huntsworth to exact her revenge. But her quest for vengeance is quickly m
It’s time for our Dark Academia adjacent title of the season! And we’re doing it in Gothic style. ‘The Monk’ is one of those books that both of us have wanted to read for a long time.
Back in season three we dove in Mona Awad’s ‘Bunny’ with no idea what we were getting into, and even less idea how foundational a text it would be for this podcast and our discussions around dark academia and genre. We were both fascinated with how Awad would revisit Sam and the Bunnies, even though it’s not dark academia as we know it. In the cult classic novel Bunny, Samantha Heather Mackey, a lonely outsider student at a highly selective MFA program in New England, was first ostracised and then seduced by a clique of her saccharine sweet, rich girl cohort (who call one another ‘Bunny’). An
Season twelve is here and we’re kicking off the season with one of the biggest releases of the latter half of 2025: RF Kuang’s dark academia fantasy, ‘Katabasis’. We had a rocky time wth ‘Babel’, but we’re taking another chance on Kuang for her latest novel about a pair of academics taking a journey into Hell to rescue their professor. Everything about the synopsis ticks our boxes, and even though the reviews have been a bit more mixed than with ‘Babel’, we’re optimistic about this one.
It’s already time for the finale of season eleven! This season has truly flown by and we’re hoping to send it off with another brilliant 2025 release. Kate van der Borgh’s debut novel, ‘And He Shall Appear’, has been recommended for fans of ‘The Secret History’ and ‘Saltburn’ so hello, that’s us! It sounds like a deliciously dark and addictive read and in this episode we have a look to see how well it matches up to our Dark Academia framework.
This episode of the podcast has been an evolution. If you’re a reader of our Substack (if not, um why?) then you’ll probably be confused that ‘Spoilt Creatures’ is making an unexpected appearance on season 11. Let me tell you, it was a journey to get here. The previous title we picked wasn’t right for the podcast and then option two was putting me (hi, it’s me Sophie) into a reading slump and I’d only just escaped one, so we changed tacks one more time. Thankfully it stuck and we both raced through 'Spoilt Creatures’. THEY THOUGHT THEY KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT US. THE KIND OF WOMEN WE WERE.Iris s
It was the cover of ‘Voice Like a Hyacinth’ that initially caught our attention, but as soon as we realised it was a tricksy novel about female friendship featuring obsessions, a ritual and a creepy professor? We needed to get that on The Dark Academicals ASAP. The intersection of art and dark academia is always one that’s interesting and provides a different view of academic focus to what we usually see and explore on the podcast. Five young women eager for success rely on the unspeakable to make their dreams come true in a chilling novel about martyrdom, ritual, and obsession by the author o
We’re both suckers for fantasy romance so when that intersects with dark academia? Just give it to us. This season is really delivering on making us read authors we’ve wanted to try for ages and never gotten to as we’re reading Elise Kova’s very much anticipated new releases, ‘Arcana Academy’. This launches a new series about illegal magics, tarot, royalty and a deal gone awry. We’re very, very excited for this one. A woman who wields magical tarot cards lands herself in a false engagement with the headmaster of a mysterious academy in this first instalment of an enthralling fantasy romance se
It’s that time of the season - dark academia adjacent time! Our adjacent title for this season is a book from one of my literary heroes and one of my most beloved writers, Jane Austen. It’s the first time we’re tackling Austen on the podcast and we’re going to be delving into the world of the Gothic satire or parody with ‘Northanger Abbey’. Though ‘Northanger Abbey’ is one of the last published Austen novels as it was published posthumously, she wrote it towards the late 18th Century when she was in her very early 20s, following her first visit to the city of Bath.
Welcome to Season 11 of The Dark Academicals! We’ve got a heck of a season coming up for you this summer and our first title of the season is a book that has received a whole lot of love since it was traditionally published earlier this year, and the author is already beloved after only two releases. We’ll be tackling ‘Blood Over Bright Haven’ by ML Wang.
Wildly, it’s becoming a bit of tradition to see out the end of the season with a podcast episode dedicated to speaking to an author and Season 10 saw us speak to the wonderfully lovely and very smart Kat Dunn, the author of ‘Hungerstone’, ‘Bitterthorn’ and the ‘Battalion of the Dead’ trilogy. It was ‘Hungerstone’ that captured us and we had so many things to discuss about the Gothic, dark academia, women and the wonderful ‘Hungerstone’ which you can learn about right here: FOR WHAT DO YOU HUNGER . . . ?Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationshi
A book pitched as ‘dark academia romantasy’? Say less. This promises some potential for morally grey taboo romance, a real villain and a fun time, but the ever present conflict between romantasy, spicy romance and dark academia will test what we know and see as dark academia as it always does when we read these types of novels for the podcast. “Your destiny is not to do what is right. Your destiny is to destroy us all.”Willow Madizza never thought she’d accept a place at Hollow’s Grove University, the secret and prestigious institution where the best and brightest of her fellow witches learn t
‘Vita Nostra’ has lingered on our masterlist of dark academia titles since the conception of The Dark Academicals and after we tackled a novel about translation in season nine, it felt only right to tackle a novel that has been translated, and the beloved ‘Vita Nostra’ was the answer.
While I feel like I’ve known about the existence of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by Joan Lindsay for so very long, it even has a film adaptation, but the mysterious synopsis and the question it asks about fact vs fiction really speak to our dark academia adjacent desires. This is the first time either of us has read this modern classic! Let’s dive in!
Both Sarah and I have big buzzwords outside of dark academia, and several of them are vampires and ‘Carmilla’ retelling and we added ‘Hungerstone’ to our line up so fast when we learned that this novel is inspired by ‘Carmilla’ b Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a sapphic vampire novella that predated ‘Dracula’. Even with my slight aversion to historical fiction, reading this and talking about it on Season 10 was a no-brainer. FOR WHAT DO YOU HUNGER . . . ?Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationship has soured, and no child has arrived to fill the dist
We explore 'An Academy for Liars'; twisty, dark and academic... But is it Dark Academia? We go through our defined tropes and hold it up against the framework and ask ourselves just that!
With ‘Special Topics and Calamity Physics’ and ‘Night Film’ both catapulting Marisha Pessl into the realms of early BookTube and book internet fanfare in the early 2010s, with whispers of dark academia and academia-related stories that blend with thrillers and literary fiction. We’ve both been long-interested in Marisha Pessl as an author and the fascinating premise and stunning cover of ‘Darkly’ meant it was sent straight to the top of our dark academia wishlist… A seemingly ordinary high school student. A mysterious summer internship. And a legendary games designer, now dead.When an ad for a
This will forever go down as a Podcast highlight for us. Being given the opportunity to talk with the one and only M L Rio about Dark Academia, her new book ‘Graveyard Shift’, while also waxing lyrical about ‘If We Were Villains’ was something me and Sophie could have only dreamed of when we started The Dark Academicals. M L Rio's novella is summarised thusly: “Every night, in the college's ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief
