Today we’re thrilled to welcome Dr Lorrain Wilson back to the Hive. She’s written us another excellent article, this time on the theme of Dark Academia, ahead of the release of her own DA novel THE SALT ORACLE, out today from Solaris. Before we hand you over to Lorraine, let’s find out more:

It’s been seventeen years since the internet crashed and left the world broken…

On the Bellwether, a huge floating college safe from the politics and war of the mainland, Auli is part of a research team studying the Oracle – a strange, uncanny girl who channels dangerous ghosts. The scientists notate everything she says, using her to piece together maps, weather forecasts, and anything else that might make the region’s hazardous waters a little safer for shipping cartels and local fishermen alike.

Auli is horrified when her beloved mentor, Boudain, reveals his scheme to create more human Oracles, seeking to leverage the power of this unique girl into security for the Bellwether and perhaps even a return to a new, warped digital age. The very next day, she finds him dead.

Reluctantly promoted to lead her team, Auli begins an investigation into Boudain’s death. Her scrutiny reveals the corrupt heart of the institute she has dedicated herself to, and as the ghosts and even the very seas around them start to mutate, she is forced to wrestle with a life-changing decision: save the Oracle or save the Bellwether – and all the lives that depend on it.

The Salt Oracle is out today – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

The lure and the flaws of Dark Academia – why this subgenre retains its appeal

by Dr Lorraine Wilson

‘the only people who get a significant vote are the people who’ve 

… cleverly arranged to be descended from a founding member.’ 

Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

Since its inception, Dark Academia has proven to be a perennially popular genre-space both within and outwith SFF. Whether you consider it as born out of Tumblr vibes or Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), the fascination with elite educational institutions as a setting for murder, romance and existential crises appears unflagging. Just as with any popular genre marker, the label ‘Dark Academia’ gets placed on books that span a wide gamut, from trope-forward dark romance to literary bildungsroman, but what is it about this genre that holds such strong appeal?

Since diving into writing my own rather tangential take on this genre, in my upcoming The Salt Oracle, this is a question that’s been occupying me. Because while I love DA, I also, sometimes, loathe it.

The Covid-19 lockdowns have been cited for M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains’ massive popularity spike years after its 2017 publication. This book, and others caught up in the wave, captured a romanticisation of – perhaps a mourning for – the unavailable college experience. That explains a moment in time, perhaps, but as an academia escapee I can’t personally use as an excuse, and it doesn’t capture the whole picture

So why then am I and many others so drawn to this genre, even when it often (for me) falls short of (my) expectations?

…

To start with some definitions, I believe we can distinguish two types of Dark Academia that are doing rather different things. 

If we accept that the label and thus the story-form arose from Tumblr posts first, then Dark Academia is essentially any story involving the following ingredients:

• An elite school/college, preferably isolated and/or very insular.
• Some focus on lessons & studying.
• Gothic architecture, libraries, fog.
• A small, probably deeply toxic main cast.
• Dark plottiness of some form*

*There’s not an awful lot of consensus over the default plot of DA when your focus is on the vibes, but it’s usually some form of Dark Things Happen, whether that’s murder, monsters, deadly secrets or just The Grown-ups Are Evil.

If you take The Secret History as your starting point (a divisive, but popular framing), then the ingredients look superficially similar:

• An elite school/college, preferably isolated and/or very insular.
• The study of something esoteric that mirrors the characters’ psychologies/the book’s themes.
• Libraries.
• A small, probably deeply toxic main cast.
• A plot that explores the faultlines at the heart of the institution, and possibly therefore at the heart of society, and cracks those faultlines wide open, usually cracking open a few characters in the process (literally or psychologically).

Both forms of DA involve a similar evocative, restricted setting, however one strand is much more focussed on the vibes and inter-personal plot, while the other centres the theme of unravelling the institution to find the rotten heart beneath.

‘Vibes’ DA therefore, such as Ava Reid’s A Study In Drowning (2024) or Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six (2021) may use the institution’s darknesses as a framework, but the main relationships in the story are between various hot and often problematic characters. By contrast, ‘Themes’ DA books like the aforementioned If We Were Villains or Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra (2018), may still have the hot and problematic romances, but the core relationship is that between the protagonist and the institution. The core choice is whether to become complicit in the institution’s corruption, to escape it, or to destroy it. 

Both types of DA can be wholeheartedly enjoyable, but they are different beasts, and the conflation of the two sets up sometimes-conflicting reader expectations. 

…

Did I mention the libraries though? 

Whether we’re talking Vibes or Themes, create a story that revolves around dusty tomes and wearing cozy jumpers, and you’ve basically tapped into most bookworms’ aspirational life. Add in danger, romance, fraught found-family bonds, perhaps some blood, and the lure of DA in any form is irresistible.

Personally, I’m a big yes please to all of the above. I love me some aesthetically delicious locations, collegiate worlds, layered relationships, darkness and drama. What I particularly love about Themes DA though, is that all this delicious surface feeds a story that ties the hunger for knowledge and belonging with the characters’ undoing. That peels back the allure of the institution, forcing the characters to face far more complicated and wide-reaching moral quagmires.

1. L. Wang does this beautifully in Blood Over Bright Haven (2025), driving her main character to immolation on the altar of an institution’s, and society’s, corrupted power. Naomi Novik’s fantastic The Scholomance series involves first rebellion against the institution, then escape, then a complete unravelling of the entire system and its secrets without once shying away from the costs of this dismantling.

The fascination with a glamorous ‘other’ is a near-universal human experience, whether it’s the ‘in’ crowd at school, celebrity culture, or an elite college. We aspire to belong to these clubs, because belonging equals power, and power equals safety. We probably loathe them for the same reasons. DA seduces us; sets its shimmering, mysterious institutions on a pedestal, because the pedestal is necessary to the glamour. But we want the bite too. So the best DAs plot a descent from those glittering spires into the darkness, and do not emerge unchanged.

…

So the appeal is obvious, perhaps. Allure, books, atmosphere; not necessarily in that order.

But aside from diverging reader expectations across Vibes and Themes DA, there are a few aspects of the genre that fall short. Perhaps this doesn’t matter – no book or genre is for all readers. But these sticking points are of interest to me because they reflect sociopolitical issues DA is well placed to explore, issues that resonate with my personal experiences of academia. 

Let’s talk about classism then.

Books such as R. F. Kuang’s popular Babel (2023) and the aforementioned A Secret History, are rooted in, and in love with, the Oxbridge (or Ivy League) college worlds. Institutions financed by inherited wealth and populated by the privileged. Although we’re pretty much guaranteed an Outsider archetype – with neither connections, wealth, nor adequate training – the Institution and most of the people in a DA are straight from the (real or fantastical) societal 1%. Which is, particularly in the current political landscape, a turn off for a lot of readers. Are we really meant to empathise with the existential crises of the super-rich right now?

If a DA book contains no real reckoning of the structural cruelties and lies that an elite college and its members stand upon, what is it saying? Is it romanticising the closed doors of inherited power? Is it carefully leaving foundational inequity undisturbed for the sake of a HEA? No amount of libraries and cozy jumpers can make unchallenged institutional privilege a comfortable read for those of us who are uncomfortable with those kinds of settings.

What about the deification of cleverness? 

Books that demonstrate the author’s deep love and understanding of A Thing, whether that’s Shakespeare or philosophy, maths or contract law, will always be beloved. Because what is more captivating than passion and deep understanding, embedded in a story world? But, and I say this with love for my fellow nerdy authors, it’s quite easy to swing too far towards:

• Arm-waving, as my old PhD advisor used to call it – lots of talk that doesn’t actually stand up to scrutiny.
• Or Showboating – going into long expositionary detail to impress us the readers with your, the author’s, amazing cleverness.

Both of these can work in small doses, of course they can. But if they are stand in’s for the entire ‘academia’ credentials of a book, then they can quickly get rather creaky. Cleverness on its own is not storytelling. In fact, intellectualism when wielded to impress, can start to look a lot like reinforcing those closed institutional doors. Readers do not come to DA to be impressed by the author’s knowledge but to be, as I said before, seduced by what it does. 

Lastly, and this is perhaps a little niche, but if you’ve spent any time in academia, you might read some DA books and slightly despair. 

I very much appreciated Emily Tesh’s recent The Incandescent (2025) for giving us DA from the perspective of an exhausted lecturer! But for most DAs, I am left asking – where are the endless faculty meetings and grant deadlines and HR emails asking for updated budgets? Where is the goddamn bureaucracy and overworked post-docs who just want half a day to themselves to get their paper written? That’s the real Dark missing from the DA!

…

Of course, many books labelled as DA are not seeking to centre academia or ideas of institutions at all, the story just happens to be set at educational institution. They used to be called ‘campus novels’ or even (whisper it) ‘new adult’. Likewise for college-set ‘dark romance’ or murder mysteries – being in an academic setting does not necessarily a DA make. 

The Salt Oracle is intending to centre ideas of institution though, and is being labelled as DA (partly, because why do one genre when you can collect them like cats). It is by my definitions though, not a Vibes DA at all. 

Set on a college fortress afloat in the Baltic Sea, and established only twelve years ago (after the collapse of the internet), there is not a gothic spire to be found, or even a cardigan. Instead this college is a rusting thing of steel and salt-stained wood, and its researchers are only privileged insofar as their (frequently deadly) job comes with the rare luxury of coffee. 

The academia is also not esoteric enough, compared to all the books I’ve mentioned. Instead of philosophy, literature or language, it is machine parts and old radio bulletins, maps and songs and doing hard maths by hand because the computers are gone. 

Despite this, it does fit the Themes DA requirements in that it centres an exploration of the college’s rotten heart – in the shape of the eponymous Oracle. My characters must each in their own way confront their complicity in this rottenness, and in the cruel moral equations that hold the college together and underpin its promise to keep the seas safe. It also has a very nice library. And to appease my own inner academic, its protagonist is a very tired researcher, failing to get her paper written and drinking too much coffee while juggling student projects and funding applications.

I hope I am doing something interesting with the Dark Academia themes. I also hope we see more books, like Blood Over Bright Haven and The Scholomance, sink their teeth into the complicated meat of this subgenre to ask questions not just about power, and the lure of power, but about the means of dismantling it. In this brooding and amorphous subgenre though, its very amorphousness is likely to mean it can continue to tap into changing appetites and dodge its own flaws for some time yet. 

A conservation scientist and third culture Scot, Lorraine lives by the sea writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has a PhD from the University of St. Andrews but left academia and turned to writing due to disabling illness. Her debut novel, the dystopian thriller This Is Our Undoing, was a multi-award finalist. The follow up, a dark folkloric mystery The Way The Light Bends, was longlisted for the BSFA Best Novel award; her third book, Mother Sea is an exploration of motherhood, climate change and belonging, and was called ‘complex, rich and beautifully crafted’ by Claire North, author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Lorraine has been stalked by wolves and befriended pythons, she also runs the Rewriting The Margins mentorship scheme for marginalised writers.