phantomtomato

After reading The Secret History in May, and surprising myself with my enjoyment of it, I did the natural thing and immediately read four more Dark Academia(ish) books to explore the genre. I ended up with a pretty broad mix: scifi and fantasy and horror, a range of school types (primary, undergraduate, graduate), and both British and American offerings. Still, looked at as a whole, there were a lot of similarities which I think defined the books as (mostly) fitting the image of the aesthetic, for better and for worse.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

To start, the least-fitting of the bunch. This book came as a recommendation by way of a colleague who teaches a course called “Dark Academia.” They said that this book always ended up being the showpiece of the class.

To head things off, I don’t think this would be a common or expected rec for the DA genre. It is a speculative fiction novel set in 1980s-1990s Britain (Wales is mentioned!) in which our first-person narrator Kathy H. gives us a retrospective of her life. Her narrative is ostensibly a recollection of childhood friendships with Ruth and Tommy, met at a boarding school called Hailsham, but oddities in her story soon make clear that her childhood was not normal and that her world has very dark undertones. The prose is chatty and easy to read, so the effect is a discomfiting, tense sense of dread which does not match the lighthearted childhood stories.

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Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Katabasis is the sixth novel by R. F. Kuang and the first of hers that I’ve read (thanks to a friend of a friend who had early access). It is a fantasy in which two rival graduate students of the same deceased PhD advisor journey into hell in order to retrieve their advisor’s soul. It takes place in a slightly alt-history version of 1980s Cambridge, and it is a critique of the abuses endemic to graduate school. As a fan of portal fantasies and a lover of navel-gazing books about academics, I am its core audience. Unfortunately, I think it was bad.

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Overall, I don’t recommend this. The lead is difficult to deal with beyond what I write here, the prose is bland, the magic and the settings are uninspired. It does stand out for being a Dark Academia book about graduate school, but really, just go (re)read one of the comp titles.

And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh

This was a true and clear Dark Academia novel, playing the concept straight. An unnamed protagonist narrates from twenty years in the future, describing his time as a Cambridge music student (two Cambridge books in a row!). The odd Northern duck out, he quickly sets his sights on joining the friend circle of wealthy, attractive Bryn Cavendish. Both men share fraught relationships with their fathers (the narrator’s father was an alcoholic who passed away; Bryn’s father is a famous stage magician who is separated from the family), but Bryn’s glamour and flair for the sinister captivate half of campus. In the present, our narrator hints at the knowledge he has about Bryn’s mysterious death.

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One of my biggest critiques is that And He Shall Appear does not follow through on its drama. I like a low-stakes story. This isn’t that. This is a high-stakes story which does not deliver. We are promised black magic, a death, addiction, and class commentary. And yet the answer to those is passivity. The result of all the build-up is nothing: no magic, no murder, just a lonely adult drunk twenty years on. All of this for a guy that the narrative only ever manages to tell us is worth this obsession. And then there’s not even any school in it.

If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

I’m glad that I ended with this novel. It helped me understand why there is so much hope for Dark Academia as a contemporary genre.

If We Were Villains is the story of seven Shakespearean Theatre students, currently in their four year at the fictional Dellecher Classical Conservatory. Dellecher is an arts school in rural Illinois with a prestigious, harsh reputation—each year, half of the students are not invited back, leading to things like a seven-person senior class in a major. The Dellecher drama program only studies and performs Shakespeare, making for a heavily-referential novel. It is a frame story, narrated in both the present (10 years on from school) and the past by one of the thespians, Oliver Marks, who explains the death of one of his friends during that final year at Dellecher.

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I recommend this book to anyone looking for a recent take on Dark Academia, especially if you’re otherwise leery of cynicism. I came into this without any sense of the plot or relationships, and I really enjoyed encountering them without spoilers. It was a rewarding book for letting the mystery unfold at its own pace.

This post is very late for a monthly roundup, but you’ll forgive me as I’ve just spent two weeks in Japan! It took me a few days after returning home to get my bearings and type these up. Next month: Stephen Spender, Donna Tartt, and perhaps a third book.

Nottingham Lace, E. M. Forster
I read the unfinished manuscript which would have been one of E. M. Forster’s first novels, now included in the Forster Abinger edition volume entitled “Arctic Summer & Other Stories.”

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Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, J. E. C. Welldon
This book imagines itself to be a school novel of the late Victorian tradition, with an odd-couple romantic friendship amidst a background of Muscular Christianity. It also imagines itself to be an Austenian romance crossing class lines. It also imagines itself as a tragedy of youth in the vein of Goethe. Don’t you like all of that in the same novel?

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Stoner, John Williams
In Stoner, we follow William Stoner from his late adolescence through his fateful exposure to the academic field of English literature, in college, and subsequent career as a professor. As the son of poor farmers in a still-young (early 1900s) Midwestern USA, he was fated to experience some hardship—but the slow-burning tragedies of his full life are thoroughly the product of his own choices. This is an engagingly well-written story which sometimes allows you to forget its heaviness as you fly through the pages, but death and defeat haunt William Stoner, and the end of the novel will not allow you to forget that.

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This is a simple book. The story is briefly described: an aging, widowed British author becomes obsessed with a young American movie star and contrives to meet him. It is short: the copy that I read is fewer than 140 pages. It has no elaborate structure, Adair having even foregone the use of numbered chapters.

I’ve been mostly offline lately—since about December of last year. It’s been one of those periods wherein I think that after this current hurdle, I’ll surely get back to Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and fandom… but that event passes onto the next and the next and the end result is that I need to reckon with having lost the habit. Reading for pleasure has seen a shade of that, too. I’ve finished a couple of books (The Book of Life, Kitchin; Autobiography of Red, Carson) and parts of two others (The Farewell Symphony, White; The Woman in White, Collins), but I’m definitely reading less and I’m less excited to spend time on it. When I’m home after work and dinner, I want to sit on the couch with my spouse, YouTube, and a knitting project. My mind can’t seem to handle the demands of reading or writing, and all I can summon energy for is keeping my hands busy.

This is a long way around say thing, with my spouse traveling this weekend, I wanted to read a simple book and finish it. That was neither of my reads-in-progress. I heard about Adair because he wrote the introduction to the reissue of a Forster novel—I must find a copy of that essay—and I picked this novel of his on a whim.

It is simple reading, but clever, and with attention to its primary character so as to make the reading rewarding. Adair draws a priggish, unselfaware man for his narrator. This makes his inner monologue at times a chore to read (his vocabulary is intentional obtuse), but watching him unravel in his obsession is at turns amusing and horrifying. It’s a sketch of a bad ending resulting from extreme repression—not only of the sexual kind, but social and emotional as well. Our narrator (mostly nameless, as the book is written in the first person) has few friends. They all date from his days as a promising undergraduate at Cambridge. His stable writing career and family wealth could be the basis of a comfortable life, but in his unwillingness to connect with other people, he’s made a tomb of them. When a series of circumstances lead to him accidentally watching a teen flick at the cinema, thus introducing his fascination with the actor Ronnie Bostock, we see at first not the way that the obsession will consume him but rather we see the neglectful way he has treated the world for some three decades. He has a naïve, juvenile understanding of his own culture, stuck somewhere before his adulthood, perhaps in the Edwardian times of his revered Forster.

The unfolding obsession with Bostock somewhat modernizes him, but more devastatingly, it forces him to leave his tomb. He confronts his sexual attraction to men by recalling how he’d never engaged in even the slightest fumbling during his “undersexed” school years. He’d thought of himself as boringly heterosexual, though one wonders whether he ever achieved any degree of passion for his wife. He’s a man who cannot masturbate to completion, and the impact of all this pent-up inability to self-examine is the finale of the book in which the narrator travels to America and engineers a confrontation between himself and the subject of his obsession.

Throughout, Adair shows the depth of his narrator’s self-delusion in a really compelling way. The narrator is a British writer of a certain age—it would be unbelievable to not show him as introspective. But his introspection never solves anything. It’s very effective writing of a deeply troubled, intelligent man, and it’s very sad.

[I]magine the hubbub I would cause were I to drop in on my Cambridge acquaintances and recite to them everything I know of an obscure American actor of whom they would never have heard and to whose one feature of interest they would be totally insensitive. Only I, I exulted, only I and that legion of fans who do not count, have recognised this rare flowering among weeds…

I’m not sure if I want to read any more from Adair soon—this was very anxiety-provoking by the end—but I’m glad to have read this one. I recommend it to fans of character studies.

Happy New Year!

Unusually for me, I’m traveling over the holidays this year. I’m still gone (and mostly enjoying the slight break from being online) but I look forward to connecting again with this community’s resolution posts and roundups a little later in the month. Until then, I hope you have a wonderful start to 2025!

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Werther is this term’s reading group book—sort of. We finished the (quite short) book by early October, and are now discussing the opera adaptation. It’s very fun! I appreciate getting to see both a text and its adaptation in close proximity, especially a text and an adaptational medium that I would never have chosen to approach on my own.

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A Glass of Blessings - Barbara Pym

Our delightful first-person narrator is Wilmet Forsyth, a 1950s middle-class London housewife in her thirties. Pym takes the basic premise of boredom with one’s marriage amidst a backdrop of neighborhood gossip and makes it a compelling piece of character work as we’re exposed to each player and their dramas through Wilmet’s judgmental eyes.

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I read a lot this month! And most of it after I finished my vacation. I can’t explain this, even given how short most of these are. I guess I was just in a reading mood.

A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
I knew this book would feel different from Forster’s other novels—it was written a decade after Maurice, the last of them, and after so many changes in Forster’s personal circumstances. I suppose that’s why I gravitated towards it last.

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I find this book challenging to recommend. So much of its context is foreign to me, and I’m guessing a reader more informed about this era of British and Indian history would pick up many things I did not. However, I do not want to under-appreciate its reflection of Forster’s values, and I would certainly want to rank it higher than A Room With a View in consideration of that. I can’t say it’s anywhere near my favorite—perhaps that makes my prior comment hypocritical. I am glad to have read it. I may need to separately reflect on the Forster Novel Reading Experience and my journey through it. I can’t believe that I’ve finished them!


A Separate Peace, John Knowles
I’ve heard that this book is commonly assigned reading for high school students in the US. It was not for me, but I can see why it would be—the omnipresence of WWII and all of the ways it shows up in the narrative would be great for teaching literary devices—but I can also see why it is no longer as favored. The other omnipresent theme is homoeroticism, and I’m not sure that the context of a modern high school is equipped to handle the discomfort of reading portrayals of romantic friendship. Perversely, it would be easier to engage with that at a time when you could issue a flat denial—they’re not gay—than at a time when you must discuss the possibility that they are.

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Overall this was a gorgeous novel and a fast read. It gets added to my pile of midcentury novels about boys in adolescence as a tapestry for examining greater social/political shifts. It is an extremely worthy addition.

I also wrote a fic for this after finishing:
A Good Sport, ~3k. Sports Men by Haruomi Hosono was the soundtrack.

Mike and Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse
I put this one off for a good long while. Do you ever encounter that sort of mental resistance, of knowing that a piece of beloved media will not land for you and so you don’t want to consume it and confirm that knowledge? I’m not letting anyone down by not connecting with a book, but as tied to broader English boarding school fandom as this one is, I still felt that unreasonable disappointment.

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Owen Wingrave, Henry James
I spied this in the ficinabox tagset and was intrigued.

Have you ever put yourself through James’ prose? I can now say that I have. This short story was a ghost story, which I didn’t know from the outset. James’ prose, combined with the slow build towards the ghostly elements, left me wondering what exactly I was reading for a good 75% of the piece. I should have guessed it would be a ghost story, all of these Victwardian short stories seem to be, and so that one’s on me.

Anyway, a character dies in that classically abrupt “a ghost did it” way that all these stories go, and that’s the end. My conclusion is that Henry James should not have written, and least of all ghost stories.

The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story, Isabel Quigly
This was mentioned in a Tumblr post and, as it was available for two-week lending on the Internet Archive, of course I snapped it up. Quigly covers the progression of the genre through specific exemplar authors, and so I skipped and skimmed as needed. She is also extremely opinionated in her evaluation of the literary merits of these books, and sometimes I had to skim out of sheer disagreement.

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The Beautiful Room is Empty - Edmund White

I like how Edmund White writes. His prose is filled with details that convey immediacy—it must be this time and this place and none other. Usually the type of prose I see praised is about description so fnature, or metaphors using it—your Austens and the like. White doesn’t have much of that. The closest that he gets are the times he describes bodies, especially of men he’s sleeping with. It’s more culture that earns his attention, the milieu of life in that city or town during those years. As an American whose life has touched many of those same places, albeit during different decades, I really love reading it. He is unsparing but somehow not unromantic.

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Oh, and a final note—the entire novel is written in first person POV (love this), and White avoids anyone ever addressing the narrator by name. It’s incredible, actually. The effect is so convincing. We know the character so well that we forget we have nothing to call him.

Run Away With Me, Girl - Battan

This manga has really gorgeous art. There is so much movement—the artist draws hair with particular personality—but also volume. The characters are sort of weightless, allowing them to flow across the panels, but their bodies curve and take up space on each page in a way that I don’t often see in manga. It’s very compelling, as so much of the story depends on our ability to empathize with them, so letting their physical forms be the tableau through which the story is told (as opposed to more typical backgrounds or objects or action+SFX-type movement) is effective at creating that empathy.

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Overall, a great read, not too long, and I recommend it to anyone who is intrigued by lesbian identity drama with a hard-earned romance and great art.

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

I did not finish this around the halfway mark. I want to be upfront that this was not about a dislike of Fanny, though she does not generally appeal to me. The book was too slow-paced for me overall, and though I suspect that the drama at its climax would be interesting (Henry being dastardly, Tom being ill), I was still so far off from it that the slog did not seem worthwhile.

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Anyway, a break from Austen for me. Back onto Forster, my last of his novels, and either more Edmund White or some Alan Hollinghurst to follow.

So many things to link today! First, two fics that I posted this week:

To the Cuckoo, a crossover between Howards End and A Room With a View

Would that I lay there, for The Poe Clan

It feels good to post those! I am so out of practice. I remember that posting got easier the more that I was doing it—less anxiety about the summary or title or tags, more confidence in judging when a project is good enough to ship. I am going to keep working on rebuilding the habit.

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I am a fan of a handful of YouTube video essayists. It’s not a big part of my entertainment—the publication rate for the people I watch has dropped to about one video per year, which is honestly more than reasonable when considering the amount of work that goes into producing these hour-plus videos. I watch about four long video essays a year.

I Don’t Know James Rolfe - Dan Olson

Reflecting on creative success and self-mythologies

Olson breaks down the career of one of YouTube’s biggest earlier stars, James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd), mostly through the lens of Rolfe’s self-published autobiography and a behind-the-scenes video tour of Rolfe’s recording space. This is an interestingly lo-fi premise for a YouTube takedown video. Rolfe has already had those made about him, eviscerating his business decisions and in particular focusing on a plagiarism scandal (that he has acknowledged and apologized for). Or I’ve seen people focus on Rolfe’s brand of gross-out juvenile humor, which might have been crassly funny in 2006 with his audience of mostly 13-24 year old men, but is now just kind of sad. These are both valid avenues of critique, and there are others as well, but they’ve been done before. Olson would be retreading old territory to focus on them.

The angle that he chose is so much more compelling to me because what he chooses to interrogate is not whether Rolfe’s videos are Good (he pretty easily dismisses them as bad), but what we can learn by thinking about their production. Olson is a self-identified gearhead when it comes to film equipment. He sticks on the bizarre choices that Rolfe has made in constructing the set where he records his videos: the cramped layout, the amateur camera mounts, etc. He contrasts that with standard professional practice. But as he goes along, he starts to bring in elements from the Rolfe autobiography, and you learn how Rolfe positions himself as very specifically a filmmaker, not a YouTuber. Olson’s dissection of this identity is worth watching if it sounds interesting—there’s a lot of work going into the visual representation of this argument through his shot composition.

The end result feels extremely personal. Olson doesn’t interrogate one of his YouTube peers without recognizing that the same critical lens must be applied to himself. He ends on that note in a gag sign-off, but to me, the theme was overwhelming throughout. What does it mean to have gone to film school and dreamed of your career in traditional filmmaking terms and reached success (financial stability, large audience, etc.), but on YouTube instead of in the movie industry? Olson and Rolfe are both old enough that YouTube didn’t exist when they were 18 and picking out college majors. They are not the current youngest generation of internet celebrities, who could have envisioned their career goals in terms of follower counts and specific platforms. They were inspired by examples from a fundamentally different format.

Rolfe seemingly continues to define himself against the old ways. He makes films, never mind that his features are posted directly to YouTube and are not the main attraction of his channel. Olson… it’s not as clear, except that he’s aware of this tension and recognizes himself as a YouTuber. But is that in addition to being a filmmaker? If he allows it for himself and not Rolfe, what does he see as the distinguishing factors? I don’t think he should have presented an answer to those questions, so I’m glad that he didn’t—it would invite unnecessary drama into what is much more interesting as an open question about the myths we construct around ourselves.

Happy Friday!

Writing this week went well. Partly, I must be conscious in telling myself that—the longer I have this hobby, the more I come to recognize the continual adjustment of expectations inherent in it. This week I wrote around two thousand words of fic, and in my journal, a few thousand more words of planning notes for various fics. This is not what my writing used to look like. It used to be more straightforwardly words on the page, which would all eventually get published ±revisions.

But I have tentatively finished the Tibby/Cecil fic. I’ve only just written the ending, and I need to reread and edit that, and also reread and edit the whole thing. Writing for Good Literature has that effect on me. I mean, I’d reread anything before posting at least once, to catch typos at a minimum, but I put more pressure on myself to pick through my phrasing and themes when the original novel was thoughtful in that way. Perhaps I need to write some PWP to loosen back up a bit!

I put in my RMSE slate, though I need to write prompts for the new fandoms and consider whether to add one or two more requests. This is a tagset where I could easily max out both my offer and request slots! Truly amazing selection of ships, and I’m not even the nominator for all of them. :D I can tell I will have a fun time revisiting the signups page over the coming week.