Dark academia, unreliable narrators, reunions, murder

There's something about an unreliable narrator that I find endearing. Novels starring protagonists dealing with trauma from years ago, revisiting the scene of said trauma, often physically and sometimes mentally, hold a peculiar fascination for me — even though, when I'm not reading one, I tell myself they're too exhausting to trudge through. And I have read several books with the trope, and keep returning for more — when my bank account permits.

 

An unsurprisingly large number of such novels also incorporate the dark academia trope. Urban Dictionary describes Dark Academia as an aesthetic involving old and classic literature/philosophy, and themes of  existentialism and death. I understood fuck-all of that. All I understand of the trope is "something happened/is happening at an educational institute and students get caught in it". My favourite is usually "classmate gets killed, friends gather for reunion years down the line, crime is solved via filling up of gaps in narration". This sometimes has an additional part — romance. Though appreciated, it isn't a must.

 

A few of the books I've read under dark academia include The Maidens, The Guest List (although here the incident happened at a school and the resolution is at an island years later, at a wedding), In My Dreams I Hold A Knife, and A Good Girl's Guide To Murder.

 

The unreliable narrator trope, however, encompasses a far larger space. From Christie's Endless Night and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, to JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, to name a few, all stand on the shoulders of unreliable narrators. The reveal, or unravelling, thus, is quite immersive in these cases.

 

After I spent a month reading Six Four (neither dark academia nor unreliable narration), which began slow but picked up speed in the last 100 pages, In My Dreams I Hold A Knife was a surprisingly fast read. I sped through it in one-and-a-half days. Currently, I'm reading Final Girls, my first Riley Sager, who is much endorsed by my favourite crime fiction Instagram account. So far, it's going good.