cptn_dr posted:

I found it kind of grating, but I don't know if I've ever read anything described as "Dark Academia" without finding it grating, so I'm willing to admit that's possibly just a Me Problem.

Remulak posted:

I was Not Into the new one, System Collapse at all, it felt like a rewritten chapter cut from something larger and the whole thing just wasn’t working for me. Finished it though since I already preordered and paid for it and had enjoyed the previous ones.

To double-check if it was a Me Thing I went back and started Network Effect, then finished the whole thing overnight because I couldn’t put it down. It also put a lot of System Collapse into context and probably would have made it better had I reread it first,but IMO means System Collapse didn’t work as a stand-alone novel.

zoux posted:

This is where I point out that the only book I've ever found that are remotely like this is Son of the Morning by Mark Alder.

Gaius Marius posted:

It's just The Secret History as aesthetic

cptn_dr posted:

I found it kind of grating, but I don't know if I've ever read anything described as "Dark Academia" without finding it grating, so I'm willing to admit that's possibly just a Me Problem.

cptn_dr posted:

The Secret History But With Wizards is something that feels like it should be a goddamn slam dunk, but I feel like the problem is that nobody who's turned tried to write it has been anywhere close to as good a prose stylist as Donna Tartt, so it all just turns out insufferably YA-like.

zoux posted:

The Historian is good, if a bit long.

Ccs posted:

The Magicians is pretty similar to that and I think Lev Grossman is a good writer. Vita Nosta might also count?

cptn_dr posted:

Dark Academia just kind of feels more like a Pinterest vibe board than an actual genre, though I'd really like to be proved wrong one day, so if anyone has any good examples I'd love to hear them.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Can you tell me who published the French original? If I can look it up and order, it would make a great Christmas present for my husband.

Chairman Capone posted:

As a college professor it is really funny to see what the general public thinks of academic life when the reality is anything but. I have a friend who is a VAP at Yale and even that is not anything like the dark brooding Gothic experience that I'm guessing most people just assume it is because of Hogwarts.

Obviously no one would be interested in a real take on academia (with a chapter on the two-hour faculty senate meeting where the heroes spend half their time debating how to respond to the vice president for advancement's new proposal for a three-year plan on high-impact practice adoption) but I do wonder how university life in general developed such a widespread perception that's so off base. I guess it's a liberal inversion of the conservative view of academia as basically being a Maoist struggle session with blue-haired gender-neutral commissars.

Chairman Capone posted:

As a college professor it is really funny to see what the general public thinks of academic life when the reality is anything but. I have a friend who is a VAP at Yale and even that is not anything like the dark brooding Gothic experience that I'm guessing most people just assume it is because of Hogwarts.

Obviously no one would be interested in a real take on academia (with a chapter on the two-hour faculty senate meeting where the heroes spend half their time debating how to respond to the vice president for advancement's new proposal for a three-year plan on high-impact practice adoption) but I do wonder how university life in general developed such a widespread perception that's so off base. I guess it's a liberal inversion of the conservative view of academia as basically being a Maoist struggle session with blue-haired gender-neutral commissars.

Leng posted:

I have Blood Over Bright Haven which is supposed to be dark academia too and has been well received as far as I know. I'll report back once I've read it.

Just finished The Art of Destiny. It felt rougher compared to The Art of Prophecy and more meandering. There's a three year time skip between the books and it honestly felt a little directionless. Okay, maybe that's not fair; there's a clear Event that two of the storylines are building to and intersect at, and then the third storyline is kinda off doing its own thing and there is a pretty cool reveal about the overarching plot/lore. But a lot of the plot was intermediary steps that I didn't really care too much about because it lacked stakes.

Lots of action, lots of blow by blow fight scenes but I can't honestly say that I was hit hard by any of the emotional moments.

Good hook at the end of the book though. I'll probably still read the next one.

SimonChris posted:

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, it always annoyed me a bit that the whole thing about him being a "consulting detective" is almost completely dropped after the first novel. Lestrade still consults with him, of course, but most of the later stories have him accepting cases directly from clients like any other private eye. I think the idea of a detective who exclusively helps other detectives solve their own cases is pretty cool. Has anyone else written stories like that?

Kchama posted:

Sadly it seems to be the exclusive province of 'Defective Detective' types on TV, like Monk, Castle, or Psych.

SimonChris posted:

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, it always annoyed me a bit that the whole thing about him being a "consulting detective" is almost completely dropped after the first novel. Lestrade still consults with him, of course, but most of the later stories have him accepting cases directly from clients like any other private eye. I think the idea of a detective who exclusively helps other detectives solve their own cases is pretty cool.

Jedit posted:

Holmes was never meant to not be accepting cases from the public. At the time private investigators didn't work with the police; they were in competition with the police, who frequently took their existence as an affront and harassed them if they tried investigating crimes rather than just finding missing persons and exposing philandering husbands. Holmes's self-bestowed "consulting detective" title comes from him being so good at his job that police officers would go to him for help with criminal cases.

A Study in Scarlet posted:

“Well, I have a trade of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective, if you can understand what that is. Here in London we have lots of Government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault they come to me, and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first. Lestrade is a well-known detective. He got himself into a fog recently over a forgery case, and that was what brought him here.”

SimonChris posted:

Runcible Cat posted:

It was the only one that worked. There would be a certain incongruous humour in Holmes whipping out his pocket Necronomicon and revealing his thorough knowledge of the Mythos, sure, but that just does not work with his character and history, and none of the other authors seemed to get that. Gaiman's story does, perfectly.

Though it's just topped by Kim Newman's The Red Planet League for me; Moriarty's hilariously over the top revenge on an astronomer who dissed Dynamics of an Asteroid is too glorious for words. (Don't bother with his other Moriarty stories though; The Hound of the D'Urbervilles sucks.)

Jedit posted:

I do feel that you're misinterpreting that. All it says is that Holmes is the only detective that other detectives go to, not that it's all he ever does. The most important thing is that he only takes cases if they interest him. If there's no challenge he leaves it to lesser men.

DurianGray posted:

I know I'm probably an outlier but I found The Secret History incredibly grating and it's almost (never say never, etc.) made me swear off anything else pitched as "Dark Academia." Looking at various reviews, I felt like I had somehow read a totally different book from everyone who enjoyed it.

Though I did enjoy Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo, but that was like 80% hillbilly car racing and gay ghosts, and only 20% academia. Maybe I just need to find something with the right ratio of 'academia' to 'dark.'

cheat at solitaire posted:

Ugh, that book really wasted its cool premise and spooky backstory. I enjoyed it up until about halfway through, until I got confused about character motivations and why nothing was really happening regarding the mystery. I guess the story started as fanfiction of Maggie Stiefvater's The Dream Thieves and the author didn't want to deviate too far from those characters, but it's still a shame. The book really ran out of steam near the end.

DurianGray posted:

I know I'm probably an outlier but I found The Secret History incredibly grating and it's almost (never say never, etc.) made me swear off anything else pitched as "Dark Academia." Looking at various reviews, I felt like I had somehow read a totally different book from everyone who enjoyed it.

SkeletonHero posted:

Okay but

Where are the Lovecraftian mystery stories starring Columbo?

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Also, I hated all the characters.

SimonChris posted:

https://inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL+2972-2

You can check INDUCKS for all the different editions. There are a bunch of Fantomius stories scattered across different magazines. The originals are Italian and published in Topolino magazine. The French translations appear to have been published in some Mickey Mouse magazine. There are also various collections available.

Europeans are hugely into ducks, so you can get these stories in pretty much every language expect English.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

I wouldn't mind reading about Holmes in a lovecraftian setting, but less because he's going to solve the mystery and more because it's so goddamn weird and out of left field he's just like "I have no idea what's going on and no idea where it's going but goddamn is it good to be stumped by a mystery!"

DurianGray posted:

Hahah, yup. I know it's supposed to be a satire, but I needed more/more interesting/faster pay off to make up for how annoying they were for me. I also found it goofy how the whole thing was centered around Greek classes, but except for maybe two instances, they seemed to always used Latin if they used an ancient language.

Pivoting a bit, I recently finished Spear by Nicola Griffith. It's a sort of Arthurian 'retelling' where a major-ish character is instead a woman who takes up the role of a male knight. It's not really revealed for a ways into the book (though it's a novella, so it doesn't take too long), but she's Percival.

I don't think I have a super deep knowledge of Arthuriana (beyond general cultural osmosis, some books about teen Merlin I read in middle school, and movie adaptations like the 80s Excalibur or the recent Green Knight), but I liked how this was sort of in the vein of all the Greek myth retellings that have been hot lately, but it wasn't Greek. I've also always found the huge amount of Arthurian stuff (ancient and more modern) sort of intimidating, but this was a nice little window into it.

Rags to Liches posted:

If you want to get more into Arthur, read The Once and Future King by T.H. White, which is his reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend. I read it again during lockdown a few years ago and thought it still held up pretty well! The Sword in the Stone starts it off and it's a fun read imo.