Whispers of the the occult, class rivalry and Elizabethan alchemy fuel a glamorous debut set in a Cambridge college

Will we ever wander an ancient quadrangle, enter an ivy-clad postern, or tiptoe into a panelled library again without feeling a tremor of disquiet? Dark academia is a booming genre, with only the cloven hooves of romantasy putting so much as a dent in its commercial dominance. But unlike its elven rival, dark academia has literary kudos, dating back to the hardcore classics background of its Dionysiac origin tome, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

An unspecified college in Cambridge is the setting for Kate van der Borgh’s darkly glamorous debut, its narrator, a music student, so undistinguished that we never learn his name. It’s not that he’s not given one: his nemesis, fellow first year Bryn Cavendish, cavalierly dubs him first Tom and then John, as if to underline his sheer anonymity. Studying maths officially, and the occult unofficially, Bryn dominates the college’s wealthy, public school-educated set, one that outsiders with northern accents can’t hope to infiltrate. The music student gains a tenuous hold by dating Bryn’s cousin, Berenice. She for one is unsurprised when bad things start to happen to those closest to Bryn, an amateur magician whose brilliant tricks conceal a darker edge.