The Dark Academicals Sarah Purnell & Sophie Waters

Welcome to season 8 of The Dark Academicals!

We’re kicking off with ‘Black Chalk’ by Christopher J Yates, a psychological thriller campus novel from 2013, that features on nearly every dark academia reading list out there. It’s much more similar to the earlier dark academia than our explorations of modern dark academia so we were eager to really give it a go.

One game. Six students. Five survivors. It was only ever meant to be a game played by six best friends in their first year at Oxford University; a game of consequences, silly forfeits, and childish dares. But then the game changed: the stakes grew higher and the dares more personal and more humiliating, finally evolving into a vicious struggle with unpredictable and tragic results. Now, 14 years later, the remaining players must meet again for the final round. Who knows better than your best friends what would break you? A gripping psychological thriller partly inspired by the author's own time at Oxford University, this is perfect for fans of The Secret History and The Bellwether Revivals. The author's background in puzzle writing and setting can clearly be seen in the plotting of this clever, tricky book that will keep readers guessing to the very end.

With an Oxford setting, a dangerous game, and fracturing friendship, this has the makings of everything we look for for the podcast. Will it make the cut?

In this extra special episode of The Dark Academicals, we have Katy Hays, author of 'The Cloisters' discussing fate, destiny, dark academia and more.
The conversation flows from Dark Academia tropes, to the pivotal action in 'The Cloisters', as well as finding both Sophie and I shooketh at Katy's writing process. and excitement regarding future projects.

Can you believe it’s already the season seven finale of ‘The Dark Academicals’? We can’t!

For this final episode we’ve got a dark academia thriller set between the 1990s and current day that we think is going to be a surefire hit, and possibly pose some real connections to ‘The Secret History’.

We take on this sapphic gothic tale which stops just shy of the word "romp", in our opinion. Is it Dark Academia? The amount of lists this 2024 release can be found on would leave you to believe so.
Let's find out!

As per, we hold each title up against our Dark Academia framework and really get down into the bones of the story, and ask if it can truly be placed under the DA umbrella.

It’s time for our dark academia adjacent title for season seven and we’re tackling Curtis Sittenfeld’s classic campus novel, ‘Prep’.

Sophie read this about a decade ago and has had a lingering love for it ever since, so it has some big shoes to fill on this reread and for Sarah’s first read.

'Prep’ is a modern classic generally in fiction, but also in the realm of campus novels. We can’t wait to see how this informs what we know as dark academia.

Welcome to The Dark Academicals, the podcast where we delve into the mythos of dark academia one book at a time.
Especially when that one book has a cover like this one... Whoever said you can't judge a book by its cover was wrong. But then again, as we dig down into 'Belladonna' we start to discover that maybe it's not everything we were promised it would be?

There were definitely some polarising opinions on the reading experience. Was it dark academia though? We did find some common ground there at least!