Five top dark academia classics

Christopher J. Yates is the author of the novels Black Chalk, Grist Mill Road, and The Rabbit Club.

Black Chalk was an Indie Next Pick that was also named a best book of the year by NPR, and a “must read” by the Boston Globe, BBC.com, and the New York Post.

Grist Mill Road was an Entertainment Weekly "Must Read" and one of the NPR Book Concierge's "Best Books of the Year."

At Bustle Yates tagged his "five favorite books set in dark, dusty campus corridors. They’re the original dark academia tales...." One title on the list:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Jean Brodie, a charismatic but unorthodox teacher at an exclusive Edinburgh school for girls, selects “the crème de la crème” for her “Brodie set,” six pupils whose lives and passions she intends to shape. (Fans of The Secret History might already be getting goosebumps.) Brodie is also in the throes of a love triangle with two of the male school masters, the handsome-but-married painter Mr. Lloyd and the less-enticing singing teacher, Mr. Lowther, who is at least a bachelor. “I am in my prime,” Miss Brodie states, repeatedly and somewhat desperately. Meanwhile, the teenage girls of the Brodie set find their schoolmistress’s romantic life both fascinating and titillating, and as these girls grow up under Brodie’s eccentric tutelage, what unfolds is a tale of power, lost innocence, and betrayal. Spark’s beautifully written novel is witty, dark, and deliciously subversive.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is among Karen Lord's top six works that remind us of the roots of violence in history, Meg Wolitzer’s ten desert island books, E. Lockhart's five top books about women labeled “difficult”, Adam Ehrlich Sachs's top ten funny books, Sebastian Faulks's six favorite books, Stuart Husband's top ten fictional teachers, Rachel Cooke's top ten spinsters, Karin Altenberg's top ten books about betrayal, Megan Abbott's five most dangerous mentors in fiction, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on teaching and learning and Ian Rankin's six best books. Miss Jean Brodie is one of John Mullan's ten best teachers in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue