The Secret History by Donna Tartt is an international bestseller, a critically acclaimed chonk of a book, and the basis of Dark Academia as we know it today. It was about time that I read it, but I think you’ll be surprised at what I have to say about it.

First published in 1992, the story follows a group of classics students in far-from-everywhere Vermont and the descent into chaos as an accidental death suddenly sets them all down a dangerous path of vices and loss of control. It has the essentials of dark academia we know today – isolated location, small cohort studying something niche, threads of elitism/racism/sexism as well as and the critique of these (and more), themes of obsession and power, and death. Dark academia novels released in recent years don’t always have all of these, and it’s a good thing they don’t in my opinion.

While reading this was certainly an eye-opening experience as a writer, seeing her strong writing style and the description, dialogue and way in which the narrator would work through memory and action in their monologue. As a reader, though, it left me disappointed. This is on me in part, I know, for not being a fan of several of the themes and general elements of the content (rich kids spending frivolously, copious amounts of drinking, sexual content, etc.) but I felt that the story was empty once the gleam of dark academia was removed.

I DNFed at around page 315, just a few pages into Book Two. I found that objectively the chapters were too long and it broke the flow and pacing of the story. A reader needs to have the time to digest information, to come down from moments of high tension and to have breaks from huge paragraphs of text. If the shortest chapter is 36 pages (from what I read) and the others range from 60 to 115 then there is very little page breaks can do to prevent the story from falling flat, especially when its a book sitting at around 600 pages. For me, the chapter length contributed to the lack of tension I got from the interactions but it wasn’t the sole reason for DNFing.

In the 315 pages I read, there were bits that I genuinely liked to read as a writer; the character layers and elements to their being that made them likeable or dislikeable (or straight up abhorrent in Bunny’s case), the way in which mundane activity could be given an aesthetically pleasing aura, and the different view on “old money” and “new money”. Unfortunately, there was a lot that left much to be desired. It seemed to me that the true action wasn’t snowballing soon enough and that it was very low-stakes low-tension for the first book. Nothing really happens besides a handful of key events and the academia aspect of this story seems to be put to the backburner more often than not. I reached book two and genuinely had to ask myself if I cared to read the rest because I wasn’t interested in the book at that point, let alone invested in the story. I read a little more to see if there was going to be much detail of the event at the end of the previous book but it was washed over. I’m glad I didn’t continue if the summary I read is anything to go by because yikes that is not what I want to read.

The original of something won’t be the best and I think The Secret History fits that statement when it comes to dark academia books. I can safely say that my top three are Babel, Dead Poets Society and If We Were Villains, all of which deal with some of the themes I mentioned above but not all of them, mind you Dead Poets Society is more true academia or light academia than dark. If you’re looking for some dark academia reads, I would recommend those to you before you pick up The Secret History.