Fall, to me, means it’s time to pull out the dark and spooky reads. As someone who is not a fan of horror, I turn to one of my favorite fall genres: dark academia. This name is a bit of a misnomer as dark academia is a broad term that applies across genres to novels that center on the symbols of higher education.
If you’re unsure what I mean by dark academia, check out on of the books below! These dark academia books were published in 2025. This is by no means a complete list. As of this writing, all of these books are owned by the Davenport Public Library. Descriptions are provided by the publishers.
Let us know in the comments if you have other favorite dark academia novels!
The Dark Library by Mary Anna Evans
Can a family’s dark history repeat itself?
Estella Ecker has returned to Rockfall House, the last place on earth she wants to be. Years after she ran away from her overbearing father, she has been forced back home to walk in his footsteps, teaching at the college he dominated and living in the fabulous home where he entertained artists and scholars for decades—and perhaps she owns it now, because her mercurial mother has disappeared. At the center of everything—the whispers, the rumors, the secrets—is her father’s library of rare books, which she had been forbidden to touch while he was alive to stop her.
Everyone in town is watching Estella, with her dead father’s name on their lips, and no one seems to care about her missing mother. Who were her parents, really, and is the answer hidden somewhere in the depths of Rockfall House? And who will Estella be, if she gathers enough courage to find that answer? What she discovers is that no one can escape the secrets hidden in this dark library.
Suspenseful and unsettling but ultimately triumphant, The Dark Library by acclaimed author Mary Anna Evans is a compelling tale of mystery, family secrets, and the quest for truth. – Poisoned Pen Press
The Dollhouse Academy by Margarita Montimore
Ivy Gordon is living on borrowed time. For the past eighteen years, she has been the most famous star at the Dollhouse Academy, the elite boarding school and talent incubator that every aspiring performer dreams of attending. But now, at age thirty-four, she is tired of pretending everything is fine. In secret diary entries, Ivy begins to reveal the truth of her life at the Dollhouse: strange medical exams, mysterious supplements, and something unspeakable that’s left Ivy terrified and feeling like a prisoner.
Ramona Halloway and her best friend, Grace Ludlow, grew up idolizing Ivy. Now both twenty-two, neither has made much headway in showbiz until a lucky break grants them entry to the Dollhouse. They’re enchanted by the picturesque campus and the chance to perform alongside their idols. When Ramona begins to receive threatening anonymous messages, it’s easy to dismiss them as a prank from a rival. Her bigger concern is Grace’s skyrocketing success, while Ramona struggles to keep up with the fierce competition. As the messages grow more unsettling, so does life at the Dollhouse. Can Ramona overcome her jealousy and resentment to figure out what’s really going on? Will Ivy finally find her voice, before another young performer follows her catastrophic path?
With dark academia twists and enormous heart, The Dollhouse Academy is a novel about the complexities of friendship, our desire to be seen and understood, and the true cost of making our dreams a reality. – Flatiron Books
This title is also available in large print.
Flashout by Alexis Soloski
A thrill-seeking young woman joins a radical theater troupe in this taut, suspenseful novel of art, seduction, and the deadly limits of liberation.
New York, 1972. A cloistered college student slips out of the dorms to attend a performance by a legendary experimental performance troupe. Within months, she has left campus life behind and joined the company, infatuated by its charismatic leader and his promises of absolute freedom.
California, 1997. A theater teacher at an exclusive private school receives an unsettling letter. With her job at risk and her past clawing at her carefully constructed present, what will she do to protect the life she has made?
Riveting and atmospheric, Flashout is a coruscating coming-of-age story and an immersive thriller exploring the enchantments and perils of art. – Flatiron Books
Fox by Joyce Carol Oates
Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.
A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery. – Hogarth
Heart the Lover by Lily King
You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today. – Grove Press
History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook
As a newly minted junior professor, Daphne Ouverture spends her days giving lectures on French colonialism, working on her next academic book, and going on atrocious dates. Her small world suits her just fine. Until Sam Taylor dies.
The rising star of Harrison University’s anthropology department was never one of Daphne’s favorites, despite his popularity. But that doesn’t prevent Sam’s killer from believing Daphne has something that belonged to Sam—something the killer will stop at nothing to get.
Between grading papers and navigating her disastrous love life, Daphne embarks on her own investigation to find out what connects her to Sam’s murder. With the help of an alluring former-detective-turned-bookseller, she unravels a deadly cover-up on campus.
This well-crafted, voice-driven mystery introduces an unforgettable crime fiction heroine. – Soho Crime
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
“Look at you, eating magic like you’re one of us.”
Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school’s boundaries from demonic incursions.
Walden is good at her job—no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from—is herself. – Tor Books
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:
The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….
Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.
With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.
But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom. – Harper Voyager
This title is also available in large print and CD audiobook.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic–with very unexpected results–in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.
Jamie is the average New England academic in-training–she has a strong queer relationship, generational trauma, and an esoteric dissertation proposal. But she has one extraordinary secret: she’s also a powerful witch.
Serena, Jamie’s mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.
Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn’t know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.
Now it’s up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives. – Tor Books
The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers.
Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled.
But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together.
If they don’t, this school will eat them alive… – Tor Nightfire
Modern Divination by Isa Agajanian
The colour of magic was gold . . .
Twenty-three-year-old witch Aurelia Schwartz has always had to carefully balance her human life with her secret magical one. With a place at an elite Cambridge University college, she almost has everything she could possibly want within her grasp. Just so long as she follows the rules: make no promises. Tell no one what you are. And never stay the night.
Except Aurelia’s gift of green magic has begun to fade. Worse still, someone is hunting witches – and stealing their powers. Reluctantly, Aurelia needs the help of fellow witch – and dreadfully arrogant classmate – Theodore Ingram. Together, they seek refuge among his family in the remote corners of an already-desolate town. But as she grows closer to Teddy, the power-hungry witch-killer, too, draws nearer. And they threaten to destroy everything Aurelia holds dear . . . – Pan Macmillan
Notes on Surviving the Fire by Christine Murphy
At a Ph.D. program in Southern California, Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, spend their time working on their theses, getting high, and keeping track of the poor air quality due to nearby forest fires. No one believes Sarah when she reports a fellow student for raping her at a party—“He’s such a good guy!”—and the Title IX office simply files away the information, just like the police. Nathan is the only person who cares.
When Sarah finds Nathan dead of an overdose from a drug he’s always avoided, she knows something isn’t right. She starts investigating his death as a murder, and as the pieces fall into place, she notices a disturbing pattern in other student deaths on campus.
As a girl, Sarah grew up in the forests of Maine, following her father on hunts, learning how to stalk prey and kill, but only when necessary. Now, she must confront a different type of killing—and decide if it can be justified.
Notes on Surviving the Fire is a story about vengeance, the insidious nature of rape culture, and ultimately, a woman’s journey to come back to herself. – Knopf
Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay
In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families gather over dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up to dinner.
At first, everyone thinks they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours tick by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.
Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella—The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths soon call them—come from very different families. What drew them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril—or a threat to the friend group from within?
Told from each family’s point of view—and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift—Parents Weekend explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days in the dorms when friends become family. – Minotaur Books
This title is also available in large print.
Rules for Ruin by Mimi Matthews
No one betrays the Academy. But now Euphemia must decide: break the rules for her enemy, or let the rules break her heart.
On the outskirts of London sits a seemingly innocuous institution with a secretive aim—train young women to distract, disrupt, and discredit the patriarchy. Outraged by a powerful lord’s systematic attack on women’s rights in Parliament, the Academy summons its brightest—and most bitter—pupil to infiltrate the odious man’s inner circle. A deal is struck: bring down the viscount, and Miss Euphemia Flite will finally earn her freedom.
But betting shop owner Gabriel Royce has other plans. The viscount is the perfect pawn to insulate Gabriel’s underworld empire from government interference. He’s not about to let some crinoline-clad miss destroy his carefully constructed enterprise—no matter how captivating he finds her threats.
From the rookeries of St. Giles to the ballrooms of Mayfair, Euphemia and Gabriel engage in a battle of wits and wills that’s complicated by a blossoming desire. Soon Euphemia realizes it’s not the broken promises to her Academy sisters she should fear. . . . It’s the danger to her heart. – Berkley
This title is also available in large print.
Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson
Art student Jo Kozak and her fellow classmates and best friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are one another’s muses–so close they have their own language and so devoted to the craft that they’ll do anything to keep their inspiration alive. Even if it means naively resorting to the occult to unlock their creativity and to curse their esteemed, if notoriously creepy, professor. They soon learn the horrible price to be paid for such a transgressive ritual.
In its violent aftermath, things are changing. Jo is feeling unnervingly haunted by something inexplicable. Their paintings, once prodigious and full of life, are growing dark and unhealthy. And their journey together–as women, students, and artists–is starting to crumble.
To right the wrong they’ve done, these five desperate friends will take their obsession a step too far. When that happens, there may be no turning back. – 47North
The Wildelings by Lisa Harding
Jessica and Linda have been best friends since the first day of school. Both girls are from very different broken homes – and beautiful, wilful Jessica has always ensured their survival.
Now eighteen, the two girls have come to Wilde – an elite university in the heart of Dublin, far away from their troubled childhoods. Jessica thrives immediately, and, with the faithful Linda at her side, finds herself at the heart of a new circle of friends.
But then Mark enters the picture. A philosophy student a few years older than them, he has strange and compelling ideas about self-discovery. When Linda and Mark start dating, Jessica is disturbed by the change in her friend – and how quickly she seems to have fallen under this abrasive, charismatic man’s control.
It turns out that Mark’s influence is not limited to Linda alone; and Jessica soon finds out that her whole group of friends are keeping secrets for him – culminating in a terrible tragedy that strikes at the end of their first year.
Years later, Jessica is still grappling with her guilt over what happened at Wilde. And when Mark resurfaces, she knows she owes it to herself – and Linda – to set the record straight once and for all. – Bloomsbury Publishing
