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Talking Out of School About Dark Academia: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad

Talking Out of School About Dark Academia: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad

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Katabasis by R. F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, August 26, 2025) and We Love You, Bunny by
Mona Awad (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, September 23, 2025). Covers: Patrick Arrasmith, uncredited

The New York Times traces the inception of the “dark academia” genre to Donna Tart’s The Secret History, a Gothic murder mystery involving Classics students at a liberal arts college. The novel was published in the early 1990s, at about the time an entire generation was getting weaned on Harry Potter and Hogwarts, leading perhaps to an audience primed for settings of shadowy collegiate intrigue.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many dark academia authors hold graduate degrees and professorships at the very elite institutions whose campus culture and academic politics they mock. Which might seem like biting the hand that feeds you. Case in point are two recent novels, Katabasis by R.F. Kuang and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad.

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Alt History on Acid: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

Alt History on Acid: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

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Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press, October 7, 2025)

I never really fully understood what Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow was about. Much like everyone else. As one critic put it,

I doubt that anyone could account for everything going on in Gravity’s Rainbow, even Pynchon himself, although I suppose he has an edge on the rest of us.

I sort of knew it had something to do with V-2 rocketry and associated penis imagery, fascism and political satire, conspiracies and paranoia, alt-history, combined in a hodgepodge of puns, jokes, silly song lyrics, and linguistic puzzles spread amongst loosely connected absurdist plot lines. And that is sometimes characterized as the

Great American Novel, like Moby-Dick. Unlike Melville’s readers, though, Pynchon’s readers can go for pages at a time without one clue as to what is going on with the plot, setting, or characters.

Which I think is the point. To not know what is going on. Because that’s the way life is; no controlling narrative, but rather a series of random occurrences that nonetheless shape the impenetrable human condition.

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Not Your Average Standard: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Not Your Average Standard: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

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Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber, April 4, 2024)

This is a strange (in a good way) hybrid of alternate history (a 2023 Sidewise Award winner, in fact), syncretism, crime noir, and Christological sacrifice. Oh, and it has a little something to do with jazz, specifically that of the 1920s hot jazz era played in bars and brothels.

Let’s take these in order.  The alternate history is the invention of Cahokia, in reality a prehistoric Native American settlement around some 80 surviving earthworks today preserved as the Cahokia Mounds archeological park located directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis Missouri, as a Prohibition-era multi-ethnic capital city in a U.S. state formed by an alliance of Native American tribes. Cahokia has its own language, and although Catholic-converted Native Americans comprise the majority, there are various ethnic communities (that’s the syncretism part), including a large African American presence, and, as you might expect, tension among them.

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Red Shoes Go Rogue! Read All About It in Rouge by Mona Awad

Red Shoes Go Rogue! Read All About It in Rouge by Mona Awad

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Rouge by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, August 1, 2024). Cover uncredited

Red footwear is a powerful metaphor in folklore and fantasy. Dorothy clicked her red slippers to go home. (Yeah, I know, the slippers were silver in the Baum book, and only became red as a better fit with new Technicolor filming, but stay with me here.)

Let’s go back to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Red Shoes in which Karen is given a pair of red shoes as (it turns out) an inappropriate confirmation present; the shoes stay stuck to her feet and force her to dance incessantly to the point where the only remedy is to cut off her feet.  The story forms the basis of the British film, also called The Red Shoes, in which a ballerina dancing in red shoes commits suicide. The film inspired the Kate Bush song (you guessed it) The Red Shoes.

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Ahoy, Matey! Plunge the Depths of The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman

Ahoy, Matey! Plunge the Depths of The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman

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The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman (Melville House, June 4, 2019). Cover artist unknown

Pop quiz. What do Captain Ahab, Captain Nemo, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel share in common? Okay, if you don’t know the first two, you have no business reading anything here at Black Gate. But you are forgiven if you haven’t a clue as to Brunel. I know I didn’t until I read Howard A. Rodman’s wonderfully inventive novel,  The Great Eastern.

Let’s look first at the main difference. Captain Ahab and Nemo are fictional. Brunel was a real person, and not just any person, but a renowned 19th century engineer who not only worked on Britain’s the Great Western Railway and Clifton Suspension Bridge, but also designed a series of of steamships called the Great Britain, the Great Western, and the Great Eastern.

So you can start to see where this is going.

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Houses of Ill Repute: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix and Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Houses of Ill Repute: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix and Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

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Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix (Berkley, January 14, 2025) and
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow (Tor Books, October 3, 2023). Covers: uncredited, Micaela Alcaino

No, not that kind of house of ill repute (though I confess I thought the semi-salacious implication of the headline might get some of you to read a bit further, though of course not you who are reading this now, just all those others). Rather the gothic trope of the creepy house, the mansion where ancestral secrets lie, where bad things happen. From The House of Seven Gables to The Fall of the House of Usher to Wuthering Heights to more contemporary (all the more so because they actually existed) houses of horror such as Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Academy and Tananarive Due’s Dozier School of Boys,  these are places that present a facade of safety, but are far from it.

That’s the kind of  house found in Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Don’t be put off by the middle school YA sounding title. Homes for “wayward girls” actually existed in mid-20th century Florida. It was where unmarried pregnant teenagers were sent to have their babies, give them up for adoption, and then return to “normal” life with their and their family’s “reputations” intact.  

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A Lot of Camelot: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

A Lot of Camelot: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

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The Bright Sword (Viking, July 16, 2024)

With no disrespect to J.R.R Tolkien, the King Arthur legend is arguably the  inspiration of much post World War II medieval-based fantasy. You’ve got your out-of-nowhere claimant to the throne, a magic sword, court intrigue, some side stories, romance, sorcery, betrayal but yet a kind of redemption. All the key ingredients.

Sure, Game of Thrones was based on the very real English Wars of the Roses, particularly the also very real violence and death of key personages. But let’s look at the long literary tradition of Arthurian stories: sourced from Welsh mythology and grafted into 12th century British histories more based on fancy than fact, eventually becoming the  Chrétien de Troyes romances and subsequently Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. From multiple sources and variations we wind our way through Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot which in turn inspires various associated fictions, not the least of which includes Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 

Fast forward to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and its adaption by Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (“If ever I would leave you, it wouldn’t be in summer…”).  With the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Camelot became a metaphor for “a shining moment” intervened by fate to extinguish, that nonetheless, like the Christ-like resurrection grafted on to the Arthurian mythos, may inspire future generations. (Only a cynic would make comparisons between Guenevere’s infidelity and Kennedy’s.)

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We No Longer Need Aliens to Feel Alienated: State of Paradise by Laura Van Den Berg

We No Longer Need Aliens to Feel Alienated: State of Paradise by Laura Van Den Berg

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State of Paradise (Picador paperback reprint, July 8, 2025). Cover art:
detail from Tiger in a Tropical Storm by Henri Rousseau, 1891

When I was a kid there was a public service announcement on TV that went something like “Attention: Aliens. You are required by law to report by January 31st.” This was because of the Alien Act of 1940, otherwise known as the Smith Act. Basically, the legislation made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and provided for a tracking system of non-citizens who, in the context of Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe and its then alliance with the Soviet Union, were potential suspects of espionage and sabotage. (Fun fact: prosecutions for advocating overthrow of the government have been ruled as unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment, in case you were wondering how any nitwit on social media can mouth off about doing just that.)

But as I didn’t know anything about this, the announcement always conjured an image of big headed, bug-eyed tentacled Martians registering at the local post office. Which I thought pretty funny. One thing I’ve learned over the years, and particularly these days,  is that much of what adults say in all seriousness is often funny, but not in a “ha ha” way. More in a Jean Paul Sartre absurdist kind of way.

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Spies, Cowboys, Anarchists, O My: Polostan by Neal Stephenson

Spies, Cowboys, Anarchists, O My: Polostan by Neal Stephenson

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  Polostan (William Morrow, October 15, 2024). Cover art uncredited

If, like me, you are a Neal Stephenson fan, you know he has a tendency to get deep into the descriptive weeds. I sometimes imagine his editor suggesting, “Neal, do we really need all this detail?” And then Neal grouchily responds, “If I didn’t think the story needed it, I wouldn’t have written it.”

Case in point from his latest novel, Polostan, a depiction of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair Century of Progress exhibition where the protagonist, Dawn Rae Bjornberg, also known as Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, works shilling for a shoe salesman:

She went to the fair early and stayed late, for the work was easy and there were plenty of diversions — that being the point of a fair.  Her perambulations soon made her as conversant with the place as if it were an old city…As they were meant to, [the exhibits] drew visitors: 600 Norge salesmen on the B&O from Philly; 176 newsboys on the New York Central from Buffalo; 60 Episcopal bishops; 180 Civilian Conservation Corps workers en route to turpentine camps in the southeast; 100 Minnesota National Guard troops. Paramount Studios executives from Hollywood, Lions from St. Louis, Shriners from Fort Smith…

It goes on like this for quite a while.  Do we really need to know that “Five hundred employees of the National Carbon Coated Paper Company of Sturgis, Michigan, arrived on the same train as 270 members of the Jewish Socialist Verband from New York City.” Probably not; it doesn’t further the plot, though it does provide a sort of Proustian vibe.

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Play’s the Thing: Playground by Richard Powers

Play’s the Thing: Playground by Richard Powers

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Playground (W. W. Norton & Company, September 24, 2024)

The ocean covers approximately 70% of Earth’s surface. It’s the largest livable space on our planet, and there’s more life there than anywhere else on Earth…Despite its importance, the majority of our ocean is largely unknown…Scientists estimate there may be between 700,000 and 1 million species in the ocean (mostly animals and excluding most microorganisms, of which there are millions). Roughly two-thirds of these species, possibly more, have yet to be discovered or officially described.

— NOAA Ocean Exploration

The capacity to play began evolving millions of years ago; it appears to exist in animals dating back 500 million years.  As evolution created ever more complex animals, play capabilities expanded too; humans are the most complex and the most playful of all species.

— The National Institute for Play

In The Overstory, Richard Powers depicted the concentric connections of the world’s forests and the human tampering with, if you’ll pardon the pun, “roots” of the natural world.  In his latest novel, Playground, Powers explores the interrelations among life below and above the sea,  as well as the effects of AI on both. But the overstory, if you will, is about the importance and effects of play.

The titular playground is actually several playgrounds and types of play. Rafi Young, a Black scholarship kid, and Todd Keane, a white nepo baby, first meet at a prestigious Chicago high school, bonding first over chess and then over Go, an ancient Chinese board game of strategy played with stones.

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