The Dark Academicals

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 gra...

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’. Is it… dark academia though? Well… In this episode we discuss: Body horror and the effects of being a horror-first narrative The technical delivery of the story and what we enjoyed (and how we wished it was longer!)...

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 se...

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, y...

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 l...

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...

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 wel...

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...

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 usua...

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 ex...

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 Au...

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...

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...

‘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 Seaso...

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’...

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 ancien...

This historical fantasy is from the realms of classic YA and we’re both super excited to revisit this novel that we both read around 10 years ago for the podcast as from what we remember, it has definite dark academia fantasy vibes. While this series is now out of print, ‘The Great and Terrible Beauty’ is still available in ebook, and it stands as a touchstone of YA. It's 1895, and after the death...

This debut novel has been everywhere all year and it’s about time we got around to reading it. ‘The Four’ by Ellie Keel sounds super dark and it gives real dark academia vibes already: scholarship students in an elite institution, a dead friend, and the mystery of what happened. We were always The Four. From our very first day at High Realms. The four scholarship pupils. Outsiders in a world of po...

We read the first book in this series, ‘Belladonna’, back in season seven and we’re so excited to revisit Signa at Thorn Grove following the cliffhanger at the end of the first novel. ‘Belladonna’ is one of the most fun books we’ve read for the podcast and I think this is just going to be just enjoyable. The dangerous, seductive and suspenseful New York Times bestselling sequel to the Gothic fanta...

Our dark academia adjacent title for this season is one of Sophie’s favourite books. ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier is a masterclass in Gothic suspense and it’s something that we’ve needed to tackle on the podcast for a very long time. On a trip to the South of France, the shy heroine of Rebecca falls in love with Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower. Although his proposal comes as a surprise, she...