Dark Academia Grows Up

Summary

In Katabasis, two graduate students at a magical version of Cambridge University go to Hell to rescue the soul of their adviser so he can give them a letter of recommendation. Anyone who has spent time in graduate school will understand the joke entailed in this premise, and also the extent to which it really isn’t a joke. Possibly most graduate students who have tried to go into the academy afterward—at least during the past few decades, when the perpetual scarcity of academic jobs has fallen to catastrophic lows—have understood themselves, in one way or another, to be going through Hell in order, as their prize, to get more of it. This is a novel that plays with two genres at once. On the one hand, it faithfully adheres to what readers expect of romantasy: a genre, hugely popular with the readers of BookTok who can make a book a bestseller, that combines romance plots with fantasy settings. On the other hand, it’s a satire of academia in the vein of David Lodge, Elif Batuman, or, especially, Susanna Clarke. Which places the novel in the interesting position of drawing from a specific experience but being marketed primarily to readers who haven’t had that experience. The aesthetic called dark academia—which, for reasons we’ll get into, is the frame through which readers on social media will likely encounter the book—is one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing. The term only started appearing in deal announcements on Publishers Marketplace in 2022, but it has already accrued a long shelf of titles, including Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (retroactively), Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, and Kuang’s own Babel. It also pervades TikTok, Tumblr, and Instagram hashtags. Think Gothic corridors, gloomy libraries, deadly secret societies, marble busts of authors watching you with knowing eyes. Generally, the dark in dark academia refers to safely improbable things, like murder. Some people theorize that the appetite for dark academ...