The Dark Academicals Sarah Purnell & Sophie Waters

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!

Welcome to The Dark Academicals, the podcast where we delve into the mythos of dark academia one book at a time.

Have you ever come across lunar magic before? We haven’t!

With this beautiful cover and the promise of dark academia meeting lunar magic, ‘Curious Tides’ had to have a starring role in season seven. This was one of our most anticipated reads of the end of 2023 so we’re incredibly excited to get to discover it for the podcast.

Can this possibly deliver everything it’s promising and hit the right dark academia notes?