The hallowed halls of academia have long captured the imaginations of writers. With their exclusivity, insularity, and at times cultish devotion to knowledge, they lend themselves to richly drawn atmospheres of darkness and mystery and incisive explorations of access, adolescence, and power.
In Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, magically gifted students fight not to become prey to the monsters that lurk in the school’s shadows. In Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (tr. Sarah Booker), it is the students themselves who are the monsters, and a school for the daughters of Ecuador’s elite becomes a breeding ground for cultish violence. And in Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House, it just might be the prestigious institution itself that poses the biggest threat.
Join these authors in conversation with writer and editor Christina Orlando as they unpack what drew them, and what draws us, again and again, to the evergreen genre of dark academia.
