His fellow students are the very wealthy and very intelligent Henry the exotic Francis the charming twins Camilla and Charles and the relentlessly cheerful Edmund, aka Bunny. He does not have the same class and wealthy background they do, so he invents a background for himself to help him fit in with the privileged world the others inhabit.
He is desperate to properly belong in the group he has fallen in with – a small class of students studying the classics. The story is told by Richard Papen who is discontented with his life in small town California and transfers to a small liberal arts college in Vermont on an impulse. And it's all done in Tartt's beautiful prose. Later, it becomes an exploration of the consequences of that action and about guilt. The book then concerns itself with why the murder was committed (a ‘whydunnit’ rather than a whodunnit perhaps). The opening pages tell us who dies and who did it. It was hard to put down and I stayed up way too late reading it on several nights.Įven though it is described as a murder mystery, this isn't a traditional murder mystery. So, I decided to read The Secret History now, so that I can pick up that mystery novel whenever I feel like it in the future. I've read one of the mysteries, have no interest in six of them, but thought I might one day read the last mystery on the list, The Secret History. Apparently, there are spoilers for each of these mysteries in that book. I read it because I bought a new mystery a few months ago which uses the plots of eight classic mysteries as part of its plot. I didn't really like any of the characters in this book, but perversely, I also started to care what happened to them, and even wanted them to get away with what they had done, especially when their world started to implode around them near the end.Īlthough I've recently come upon the idea of Dark Academia and thought it sounded like an appealing aesthetic, I didn't actually pick this book to read because it is said to be a classic of Dark Academia. The pretentiousness of the main characters is important to the plot and to understanding who they are and why they behave the way they do. That might sound like I didn't like this book, but no, I actually loved this book. If these are indeed the criteria, then The Secret History definitely qualifies. I read somewhere recently that for a book to fit the Dark Academia aesthetic it must be full of pretentiousness, dark happenings and cult-like behaviour. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Opening of Chapter 1, The Secret History “Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't.
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