Dark academia is en vogue at the moment, spawning its own sub-sub-genres all over the place. Our unnamed narrator arrives at Corpus Christi an unnamed Cambridge college in the early 00s I feel like I can date it precisely to somewhere between about and , as Facebook and I arrived at Cambridge in , and the narrator tells us this was pre-Facebook.
Otherwise, van der Borgh evokes a Cambridge that is exactly, painfully how I remember it, with an attention to detail that is, annoyingly, rare in Oxbridge novels. She hits all the beats of dark academia, but so perfectly that it feels like she is reinventing the genre. Have we ever really had a properly good dark academia novel set in the real world? Van der Borgh writes so well that And He Shall Appear becomes genuinely creepy and unsettling as our narrator becomes obsessed with fellow student Bryn, whom he suspects may be dabbling in dark magic.
His obsession with Bryn also feels so much more real than this trope usually does, with a series of beautifully vivid set-pieces: magic card tricks at a room party, a dive from a roof into a swimming pool, occult costumes at formal hall. Why should we accept an ordinary life when we can dream of more? Better to believe that our lives are cursed or fated than that we have no meaningful story at all.
Source: NetGalley. Lucy Rose, The Lamb. Mama and Margot live in rural Cumbria, waiting for strays to happen by their cottage so Mama can seduce and devour them. But when a woman called Eden turns up, Margot starts to question the foundations of her upbringing.
I was attracted by the idea of a dark folktale that centred on a mother-daughter relationship plus that gorgeous cover, but The Lamb was definitely not for me.
