Carmilla and I grew even more entangled, like flowers who, denied sufficient sunlight, entwine their leaves around each other and grow up strangled with love.

An Education in Malice is the latest dark academia novel from A Dowry of Blood author S. T. Gibson. Dark academia is a genre I always thought I’d love, but the only other one I’d read I didn’t get on with and had to DNF, so I wasn’t sure how this was going to go…

It took a hold of me and I consumed it in three days.

It’s the story of Laura and Carmilla, students in all-girls university in New England during the 1960’s. Carmilla is the pet of the poetry class, but when freshman Laura is unorthodoxically allowed to join their senior class, she has a new rival for the attention of their charismatic yet aloof professor. As for Laura, a southern belle fish out of water, she’s desperate to prove herself to these worldly women. Academic rivalry very quickly becomes intoxicating infatuation.

As always, I try to leave my reviews as spoiler-free as possible so I won’t be going into certain details, but there’s a comprehensive and really quite conscientiously-worded content warning at the start of the book, and I would urge you check this out first before reading.

But this girl, this Carmilla… she undid all my domestication

The first thing that struck me was Gibson’s writing; hers is a style that is so easy to read. It sweeps you along, painting the scene vividly yet with such subtlety. I was only four pages in and could envisage the setting perfectly and really felt like I was getting to know Laura intimately. It’s a sumptuous feast for the senses, paying attention to the details of scents and flavours throughout. The writing is rich with poetic metaphor, and of course being poetry students, there’s a great deal of poetry at the start. References to poets are both overt and subtle, making it accessible for those unfamiliar and at the same time including enjoyable easter eggs, or cucumber sandwiches, for those who are.

There is a move away from this as secrets start to unfurl, there’s a decided shift in tone when things are revealed. I found myself loving the rivals to lovers storyline. I’ve tagged this as a romance, but there’s nothing romantic about the relationships in this book. They are dark and toxic creatures, strangled by jealousies. And when I say lovers, rest assured there’s no polite drawing of the veil across what transpires, this is a very carnal book (mostly sapphic, there are very few male characters at all in the book as a whole).

There’s a great deal I’m not saying, a key aspect I’m not alluding to, because I wasn’t aware of it going into the book, and I enjoyed figuring out the clues at the start, the satisfaction of being right, so I wouldn’t want to take that away from anyone. There is so much more I could talk about though, as Gibson covers the subject so very well, and as with the poetry, there were plenty of references and influences I appreciated.

S. T. Gibson has become a new favourite of mine. I wasn’t expecting to be swept along so profoundly. You will find yourself enmeshed in the obsession that pounds these pages as Gibson grasps you by the hand and leads you into the dark.

P.S take caution reading this in public spaces/the staff room where your manager can walk in just as you get to an especially, um, juicy part.

“It must be so terrible… to have to kill the thing you love most.”

An Education in Malice is available now. You can pick up your copy from Bookshop.org