Seven mysterious & unsettling novels set on campuses

Caroline Wolff is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. She lives in downtown Manhattan.

Wolff's new novel The Wayside

takes place at Paloma College, a (fictional) liberal arts school in Northern California. The novel opens with a pair of hikers discovering the body of Jake Cleary, a student at Paloma, at the bottom of a cliff. Local police deem Jake’s death a suicide. But as Jake’s mother Kate uncovers the secrets of his life on campus, she becomes convinced that something even more sinister might have pushed Jake over the edge.

[Q&A with Caroline Wolff]

At Electric Lit Wolff tagged seven more mysterious and unsettling novels set on campuses, including:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Pessl’s debut novel is ambitious, eclectic, scrappy, and wildly unique—probably why it garnered such extremes of praise and scorn when it was released in 2006. It’s very much a “black licorice” novel, but it appeals to my tastes. This follows Blue van Meer, a precocious teenager who enters a new private school and is soon drawn into the “Bluebloods,” a clique of rich and popular students. The group’s mentor, Hannah, is a cool film studies teacher who takes a special liking to Blue. When Hannah is found dead, Blue takes it upon herself to solve the case. This reads less as a mystery per se than a coming-of-age story that happens to include a murder, but I think its genre-bending, formally inventive nature is what makes it so compelling.

Read about another entry on the list.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is among Erin Mayer's eleven disturbing cliques in literature, Kiley Reid’s five top novels with incredible child caregivers and Brian Boone's fifty essential high school stories.

The Page 69 Test: Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

--Marshal Zeringue