Dark Academia

These twisty novels delve into the dangers of intellectual curiosity, whether from competition, conspiracy, or something else unexpected.

Showing 1 - 20 of 131  There are a total of 131 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Chilling adventures of Sabrina"
Star rating for Chilling adventures of Sabrina
Description:
"On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, the young sorceress Sabrina Spellman finds herself at a crossroads, having to choose between an unearthly destiny and her mortal boyfriend Harvey. But a foe from her family's past has arrived in Greendale--Madame Satan--and she has her own deadly agenda"--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "Big bad"
Star rating for Big bad
Description:
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Suicide Squad in this dark, rompy novel in which the show's most beloved villains must team together to stop the Slayer from ending their world."--
Book cover for "Dark rooms"
Star rating for Dark rooms
Author:
Description:
"Death sets the plot in motion: the murder of Nica Baker, beautiful, wild, enigmatic, and only sixteen. The crime is solved, and quickly--a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide note confession--but memory and instinct won't allow Nica's older sister, Grace, to accept the case as closed. Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from which she recently graduated,...
Book cover for "All's well"
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Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"Miranda Fitch['s] ... life is a waking nightmare after an accident ruins her acting career, and leaves her with chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers and alcohol. On the verge of losing her job as a college theater director, Miranda lives out her broken dreams through an upcoming production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, when the unimaginable happens. She suddenly recovers, but at what cost?"--...

5. Bunny

Book cover for "Bunny"
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Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...
Book cover for "Ninth house"
Star rating for Ninth house
Series:
Alex Stern volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Galaxy "Alex" Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale's freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she's thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend...
Book cover for "Book of night"
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Average Rating:
2.9 stars
Description:
"#1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black makes her stunning adult debut with Book of Night, a modern dark fantasy of shadowy thieves and secret societies in the vein of Ninth House and The Night Circus. One of Publishers Weekly's top ten most anticipated books of 2022! Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn't pick, a book she couldn't steal, or a bad decision she wouldn't make. She's spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians...
Book cover for "The atlas six"
Star rating for The atlas six
Series:
Atlas volume 1.
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation. Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and...
Book cover for "Long black veil"
Star rating for Long black veil
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"On a warm August night in 1980, six college students sneak into the dilapidated ruins of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, looking for a thrill. With a pianist, a painter, and a teacher among them, the friends are full of potential. But it's not long before they realize they are locked in--and not alone. When the friends get lost and separated, the terrifying night ends in tragedy, and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences reverberate...
Book cover for "Tell me everything"
Star rating for Tell me everything
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
In her first weeks at Hawthorne College, Malin is swept up into a tight-knit circle that will stick together through all four years. There's Gemma, an insecure theater major from London; John, a tall, handsome, wealthy New Englander; Max, John's cousin, a shy pre-med major; Khaled, a wisecracking prince from Abu Dhabi; and Ruby, a beautiful art history major. But Malin isn't like the rest of her friends. She's an expert at hiding her troubled past....
Book cover for "The world cannot give"
Star rating for The world cannot give
Description:
"When the shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic "prep school prophet" (and St. Dunstan's alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at 19, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school's cultic chapel choir:...
Book cover for "The rule of four"
Star rating for The rule of four
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
Princeton. Good Friday, 1999. On the eve of graduation, two friends are a hairsbreadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance text that has baffled scholars for centuries. Famous for its hypnotic power over those who study it, the five-hundred-year-old Hypnerotomachia may finally reveal its secrets--to Tom Sullivan, whose father was obsessed with the book, and Paul Harris, whose future depends on it. As the deadline...
Book cover for "The searching dead"
Star rating for The searching dead
Series:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Dominic Sheldrake has never forgotten his childhood in fifties Liverpool or the talk an old boy of his grammar school gave about the First World War. When his history teacher took the class on a field trip to France it promised to be an adventure, not the first of a series of glimpses of what lay in wait for the world. Soon Dominic would learn that a neighbor was involved in practices far older and darker than spiritualism, and stumble on a secret...
Book cover for "The emperor of Ocean Park"
Star rating for The emperor of Ocean Park
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
After the death of his father, the flamboyant and controversial Judge Oliver Garland, his son Talcott must unravel the truth about his father's life, a quest that brings him face to face with old scandals and family secrets.
Book cover for "The manor house governess"
Star rating for The manor house governess
Description:
Orphaned young and raised with chilly indifference at an all-boys boarding school, Brontë Ellis has grown up stifled by rigid rules and social "norms," forbidden from expressing his gender identity. His beloved novels and period films lend an escape, until a position as a live-in tutor provides him with a chance to leave St. Mary's behind. Greenwood Manor is the kind of elegant country house Bron has only read about, and amid lavish parties and...
Book cover for "The city of brass"
Star rating for The city of brass
Series:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
A "historical fantasy in which a young con artist in eighteenth century Cairo discovers she's the last descendant of a powerful family of djinn healers. With the help of an outcast immortal warrior and a rebellious prince, she must claim her magical birthright in order to prevent a war that threatens to destroy the entire djinn kingdom"--
Book cover for "Whisper down the lane"
Star rating for Whisper down the lane
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Two narratives--Richard in present day, settingling into a quiet but pleasant life as a newly married art teacher; Sean in 1980s Virginia, when cult leaders, serial killers, and stranger danger are on the rise--converge around a few small lies that spiraled into a terrible tragedy. Thirty years later, it seems someone is out for revenge."--
Book cover for "Trust exercise"
Star rating for Trust exercise
Average Rating:
2.2 stars
Description:
"In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving 'Brotherhood of the Arts,' two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed--or untoyed with--by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting...
Book cover for "Piranesi"
Star rating for Piranesi
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"From the ... author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi...
Book cover for "Gotham Academy"
Star rating for Gotham Academy
Series:
Gotham Academy volume 1.
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Gotham City's most prestigious prep school is a very weird place. It's got a spooky campus, oddball teachers, and rich benefactors always dropping by...like that weirdo Bruce Wayne. But nothing is as strange as the students! Like, what's up with Olive Silverlock? Is she crazy or what? Where did she go last summer? And what's the deal with her creepy mom? And how come that Freshman Maps is always following her around? And is she still going out with...