‘It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.’ For me, (with apologies to Dickens!) those were the student years. I was blindsided by the Brideshead radiance of Oxford, a city so beautiful it never quite felt real. I couldn’t believe that I was really there, wearing my ridiculous academic gown and wandering through quadrangles that belonged in Inspector Morse. I tumbled into incredible friendships, some of which have lasted decades. I fell deeply, wildly in love. I was bombarded, intoxicatingly, by new ideas.
But there was also unremitting pressure: staying up all night not just to party but to meet weekly deadlines. There was the constant anxiety, social and academic. The hangovers. The lab-rat unavoidability of everyone and everything. When my ‘this is it’ love affair came crashing down in my final year, the bleakness and heartbreak were like nothing I had ever imagined – and there was nowhere to run.
Looking back, I was always going to write a dark academia story. Even now, in my forties, visiting Oxford still conjures up a gut-twisting medley of emotions. Hideous, self-doubting lows; superlative, intoxicating highs. It’s an easy enough step from that pivotal undergraduate intensity to the twisted stuff of which psychological thrillers are made. Besides, I’m a lecturer in Edinburgh now. I see university life from the other side. Who wouldn’t love an opportunity to subvert the world they work in? To play with ‘what if’ scenarios, protected by fiction? To upturn power dynamics and ask what happens when the unwritten rules are broken?
That’s what I do in my new thriller, The Weekend Guests.
As a reader, the genre already had me hooked. Dark academia treads an addictive line between brilliance and psychopathy, friendship and obsession, privilege and cruelty. It has all the deceptive glamour of the elite institution, from Oxford or Yale to Donna Tartt’s fictional New England college, bound up in east coast wealth. In Edinburgh, my own adopted city, I had an equally perfect location: a prestigious university in a town steeped in history and literature. The sinister and the beautiful lie side by side here, with ghosts on every corner. Wildness lurks at the very heart of the city. (Quite literally! My protagonists climb an extinct volcano by night, on Halloween.)
I love the alluring glimpses of arcane knowledge, to go with the settings. In Tartt’s The Secret History, things turn nasty when students take their Classical studies too literally. In Alex Michaelides’s The Maidens, Greek mythology twists into modern-day Cambridge when members of a clique of well-connected young women, named for Persephone, are murdered one by one. In M L Rio’s If We Were Villains, theatre students perform Shakespearean dramas against a backdrop of mounting personal disaster. The original dialogue is strewn across the pages, so character and actors intertwine, creating tragedies within tragedies. Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House is still more esoteric, combining Ivy League secret societies with dark magic.
Then there’s the claustrophobia of a tight-knit community, combined with the careless power of youth. Who can resist the heady, just-left-home propensity to drink too much, take drugs, and throw oneself into the hinterland between fantasy and reality, taken to its Bacchanal extreme in The Secret History? Not that destructive decision-making is limited to undergraduates (in fact or fiction!). In Dorothy L Sayer’s unforgettable Gaudy Night, a poison pen scandal lays bare the jealousies and insecurities of an Oxford College from dons to domestic staff. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse regularly uncovers the more sordid motives of senior academics.
Characters recur, redrawn for each context, but eternally compelling. The brilliant, beautiful girl, object of too-many fantasies (Meredith in If We Were Villains, Tabitha in The Things We Do To Our Friends, Heather Darwent’s twisted tale of imploding friendship). The quiet girl. The quirky boy, dabbling too deep into drink or drugs. The (would-be) alpha male. The outsider, often from a very different background, who is at once observer and participant. Then there’s the cult-like devotion to a brilliant but flawed professor. In The Secret History, that’s Julian Morrow. In The Maidens, it’s Edward Fosca.
My take on the genre, The Weekend Guests, is told on two timelines: dark academia in Edinburgh, 2001/2, and locked-room mystery on the Jurassic Coast in 2019. Like Sarah Vaughan in Anatomy of a Scandal, I wanted to show my protagonists as students, marring lives with a moment’s fallibility or wrongdoing, and as apparently successful adults, unable to escape the past. I also disrupted the all-important relationship between doctoral student and advisor. What happens, I wondered, when good intentions are horribly misunderstood?
In the Edinburgh strand, Darryl, a troubled and lonely PhD student, has two unexpected strokes of luck. He gets a new supervisor, Gemma, a young, kind, dedicated teacher who is all too easy to love. And a group of friendly undergraduates move in next door to him: charming Aline, sexy-geek Rob, and quiet Michael (later joined by hippy idealist Sienna). But the luck doesn’t hold. The relationships turn sour, as Darryl’s own secrets emerge, and he wants far more than Gemma – or his new friends – are prepared to give.
Years later, Aline, Rob, Sienna and Michael reunite in Aline’s glamorous, clifftop house in Dorset. It should be an idyllic weekend, complete with champagne and beach walks, and getting to know each other’s families. But Aline has her own agenda for bringing them together. And as the past resurfaces in a way that even she couldn’t predict, things take a dramatically dark turn.
My characters are real to me, as I hope they will be to you. In Aline, the centre of the group – beautiful, capable, and self-centred – I have combined golden girl with the ‘cult leader’ personality so beloved of dark academia writers. She draws people together, keeps them close even decades later. But it is Darryl, desperately vulnerable and intensely creepy, who should stay with you longest. With you – or in your nightmares…
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