Chilling dark academia reads you can’t escape!
YOUR BELOVED REMAINS by Quinn Connor
9781250461049 | 10/6/26
Archivist Celia Kiel has spent her life on the remote campus of Basin College in the southern Ozarks. Once a jewel of women’s higher education in the South, the school now molders on its mountaintop, its endowment thinly supported by the bequeathed estate of 19th century writer Beatrice Donahue. Celia guards the legacy of this venerated yet scandalous author who has been the object of her illicit desire since childhood.
When the administration announces the college’s imminent closure, Celia discovers a manuscript pickled in formaldehyde, and with it, a chance to save the only home she’s ever known. She will forge Beatrice’s infamous lost work, a spellbinding horror written toward her life’s tumultuous end. To do it, she is forced to recruit her professional rival, literature postdoc Joan Harriot, who has both an astounding talent for mimicry and a dark secret of her own. As their world closes in and the ghosts of the Victorian past encroach, their creative collaboration spirals into an obsession more twisted than even their beloved Beatrice could have penned.
HEART OF RUIN by A.C. Arthur
9781649378477 | 11/3/26
HALLOWED BONES by Lucy Smoke
9781250413741 | 10/6/26
Their souls are damaged, hiding secrets and harboring just as much hate as I am.
Ezra Bishop
Cameron Goode
Lyall Corey
Reyes Scott
And me. Haven Wardwell.
They are the monsters hidden in the shadows, but I am no novice when it comes to monsters. We are all legacies, but there’s one grand difference between us. I am the first female witch born in four hundred years. Now that I’m here, there’s no telling what the dark gods will ask for in return. Death and ghosts haunt the corridors of Ipswich Academy. If I’m not careful, I might become one of them.
NIGHTCURSE by Emma Hinds
9781250369550 | 10/13/26
Emrys Swift is so dead. One hundred and fifty seven years worth of dead, to be exact. He’s a Revenant, nightcursed, destined to be stuck being seventeen forever. Hidden away, he spends his infinite days as an undead librarian of witchlore at the NeverEnd library–until a new Revenant arrives and magical artifacts start going missing, jeopardizing his beloved home.
Emrys’s mortal enemy and annoyingly attractive shapeshifter Aubrey Vale is determined to solve the mystery—with Emrys’s help. Suddenly Emrys and Aubrey are magically bonded together on a quest into the dark and frost-bitten world of night-kin. But as Emyrs and Aubrey interrogate ghosts and face drowning by mermaids, deathly creatures aren’t the only spectres haunting them. With the ghoulish Night Hunt chasing them down, can they outrun the secrets of Emrys’ death and Aubrey’s life? And if they can save NeverEnd’s future, can they have a future together?
Hauntingly gorgeous and tender, Emma Hinds’ NIGHTCURSE is both a Gothic mystery and an enemies-to-lovers romance about navigating life and love in the face of death.
DREAMWEAVING by O.O. Sangoyomi
9798890034465 | 10/13/26
Raised by a hidden coven of witches, Deja Freeman is forbidden from mentioning two things: 1) magic, and 2) her mother. But when she discovers her mother’s death is linked to Tanglewood Prep—a prestigious New England boarding school—she enrolls, needing the truth.
Tóbi` is Tanglewood’s future valedictorian. Popular and driven, she has her eyes set on Junior Class President, even if it means facing down the institutional prejudice running rampant in her school.
When Deja and Tóbi begin having terrifying visions, they realize one thing lies at the center: the mysterious demise of Tanglewood’s first Black female student. In investigating the school’s dark history, the girls must trust each other and their crew of friends if they hope to avoid the administration’s suspicions—or something far worse.
MOTHSBLOOD by Lynn D. Jung
9798260200438 | 10/13/26
On a rain-soaked night in modern-day Paris, Larkspur Lee and her academic rivals find themselves at the center of an impossible crime—the murder of their university’s headmistress, the immortal Petronelle Flamel.
In the aftermath of Flamel’s death, the school devolves into chaos. The mysterious investigator assigned to the case, Violaine, believes a cult known as the Promethean Genesis is responsible for Flamel’s murder. But Lark, who knows all too well what kind of horrors that the Prometheans commit, will do anything to stay out of the cult’s reach. Matters are complicated when the mentor she crossed an ocean and a continent to escape re-enters her life, enticing her to his side once again while secretly wielding an agenda of his own.
As the Prometheans’ plans come to fruition and the university’s dark history comes to light, Lark has no choice but to decide whether the power she desires is truly worth the price.
BODIES OF MAGIC by Freya Marske
9781250341655 | 9/15/26
At the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr, every mage with the healer’s gift has five years to master their power and to prepare for the infamous Grand Exam—a five-day trial whose results will determine their entire future.
The list of exam rules includes:
• You will perform five practical cases.
• Your exam group is chosen at random.
• You pass together, or fail together.
It does not include:
• On the first day, your exam group will find a classmate’s dead body in the exam hall.
And as they will soon discover, this particular group all have something to hide . . . and all have a connection with the dead girl, a brilliant scholar who would have been first in their class.
Five scholars. Five secrets. Five days in which to solve a murder, pass the most important exam of their lives, and uncover a secret larger than all of their own combined. One with the potential to change the world.
Are you ready? Let’s begin.
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