From a mesmerizing new literary voice comes a story of obsessive friendship, chilling powers, and untimely death for readers of dark academia classics like If We Were Villains and The Secret History.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Kate van der Borgh’s And He Shall Appear, which is out October 1st 2024.
An unnamed narrator arrives at Cambridge University in the early aughts determined to reinvent himself. His northern accent marks him as an outsider, but thanks to his musical gifts, he manages to fall in with his wealthy classmate, Bryn Cavendish.
A charismatic party host and talented magician, Bryn enthralls the narrator. But something seems to happen to those who challenge or simply irk Bryn—and they aren’t ever the same again.
The narrator begins to suspect that Bryn may be concealing terrifying gifts under the guise of magic tricks. As the tension between them grows, a harrowing encounter is followed by Bryn’s death.
Alternating between their time as students and the narrator’s return to Cambridge years later, where he fears the ghosts of his past are waiting for him, And He Shall Appear performs an astounding slight-of-hand that throws every version of the story into question.
This propulsive novel about the dark power of privilege will haunt readers like a familiar piece of music with endless iterations.
Stopping at a glass cabinet, Bryn announced: “Here we go.”
Reaching inside, he retrieved two glasses and an ancient-looking bottle. Then he took a corkscrew from his pocket.
I tried to remain nonchalant. “That’s not . . . expensive, is it?”
“Nah. They’ve got cellars full of this stuff.”
“Are you sure?”
“Totally.” The cork was already out, the glasses full.
Bryn motioned at the piano, and I sat. Then, leaning on the gleaming spruce, he handed me a glass. I looked at the syrupy stuff inside, then back at Bryn’s irrefutable smile. “It’s fine,” he said. “Trust me. Here’s to us.”
“To us,” I replied, taking a large swig. The liquid was rich and sweet, intensely dark, with a hint of something burnt. Unable to wait a moment longer, I put my music on the stand and touched my fingers to the keys.
Musically, we were tentative at first, like people on a date who accidentally speak over one another and apologize unnecessarily. We each anticipated the other, blamed ourselves for little misunderstandings. But eventually we began to stretch the tempo here and there, intuitively giving space to special harmonic moments or melodic turns.
Bryn drank the majority of the wine—not wanting to make a twat of myself, again, I was determined to slow down—but soon we both became silly and excitable. We giggled at small things. My fingers occasionally stumbled over themselves. Bryn mixed up his words, and when he mangled the lyrics “heart and soul” into “shart and hole” I sank my head onto the keys, weeping with laughter.
Yes, this was fine now. Better than fine.
At some point, Bryn decided we should have a break. He retrieved a second bottle from the cabinet, refilled our glasses, and we each relaxed into a doughy armchair. “So,” he said, “you’re clearly finding your way around college.”
I didn’t feel the need to lie. “Not really,” I replied. “It’s still a mystery to me.”
“How do you mean?”
I thought for a while. “The dining hall? Before I came here, I’d never even seen a room like that. And now I’m meant to have my Bran Flakes there, as if that’s normal.”
Bryn considered this. “I guess. Our hall at school looked exactly the same.”
“And then there’s the gowns and the Benedic, Domine business.”
“Ah. We always said Grace, too. Although we had our own slightly ruder version.”
I smiled, sadly. “You know, in our first week, I got chatting to a girl in a lecture, and it turned out her family had owned coalfields in Northumberland. I told her, my grandad had worked in one of them. The girl made a joke about how she’d keep a position for me at the pit, in case the bassoon fell through. I know she was kidding, but . . . People must look at me—” I stopped. The idea that people had any kind of opinion about me was pure narcissism. But someone like Bryn must consider how they were observed, assessed.
I changed tack. “If you could find out what other people secretly thought of you, would you?”
He snorted. “Fuck, no.”
“Why not?”
“Why would I? Would it make you happier, knowing what other people think?”
“It’s not about being happy, it’s about knowing the truth.”
He shook his head. “Nobody wants the truth. We’re not built for it. Anyway, whose truth? You think other people know you better than you know yourself? Their version of you is just that: a version.” He stretched, drained the liquid from his glass, and stood. I picked at a loose thread on my T-shirt, feeling like a child getting lost in grown-ups’ conversation.
For a moment he ambled silently up and down the bookshelves, stopping to pull a cloth-bound title from its row. “Here’s a truth for you,” he said. “When I was younger, I took an overdose.”
My mouth fell open but no words came out.
He shrugged, no big deal, put the book back in the wrong place. “I was a bit out of control, taking . . . It doesn’t matter. Anyway, one night, I was out with friends and really, really wasted, and I felt disconnected. Not part of the world, somehow. And I became obsessed with the idea of knowing”—he searched for the right phrase—“what was on the other side.”
“What?”
“I know it sounds weird,” he went on, without hearing, “but I felt certain that if I took all the pills in my pocket, if I fucking died, I wouldn’t—“
He paused.
“—I wouldn’t stay dead.”
From beyond the window, the chapel bell moaned. I rubbed my arms. “What happened?”
“I woke up in hospital.”
“Jesus, Bryn,” I said, my stomach dipping as if I stood at the edge of a cliff. “That’s weird.”
“I can’t even remember what I took. Frances was there when I woke up, by my bed. That part was bad.”
“Frances?”
“My mother.” He spread his hands. “But what would other people make of that? That I’m unhappy, unbalanced? Because that’s not what it was. That’s the truth you’re talking about, other people’s truth. Anyway,” he said, “the main thing is, I can handle illicit substances a lot better these days.”
I managed an anxious smile, pretending to understand.
“And you know what?” he continued in a gleeful stage whisper. “The year after, when we were getting toward A levels, I’d done no fucking work whatsoever. So I told my headteacher I was feeling depressed, and she was so worried about me doing something stupid that she kept me off school until exams were over. It took her a couple of calls, but Cambridge made my offer unconditional.”
“Bryn, that’s terrible!”
“I know!”
We laughed raucously, and the mood shifted, eased. “So did you find out?” I asked.
“Find out what?”
“What was on the other side?”
And then: a creak from beyond the door. We froze. Another creak, like someone stepping softly up the stairs. Bryn’s expression was a mixture of alarm and hilarity. “If that’s a porter . . .”
“Could we get sent down?” I whispered.
He shrugged. A cold flush of fear came over me, and I began to murmur feverishly: “Shit, shit, shit . . .”
Seeing my rising anxiety, Bryn made a show of tiptoeing to the door. There he listened intently, a finger on his lips. All the while he looked at me, and his sober expression gave me an inexplicable comfort: nothing bad can happen while he’s here. I held that thought right up to the point he sprang at the piano and began to pound the keys like a hooligan, howling with laughter above his shapeless, cacophonous chords.
“Bryn!” I said, my voice little more than a hiss. “What the fuck?”
His words were laced with laughter and his eyes had a delighted gleam. But I was pure panic. He kept swiping at the keys even as I tried to drag him from the piano stool.
The footsteps were louder now, regular. Coming our way.
Jesus. I pictured myself being instructed to pack my belongings, being driven away from college by my mortified parents, watching the burnished battlements through the rear window until they had disappeared irretrievably from view. My breath came sharp and shallow, and I think my eyes burned with furious tears. Finally seeing my petrified face, Bryn stopped his hammering and—still smiling—sprinted to the window, pushed it open. “This way.”
“Are you joking?”
“We don’t have any choice!” Then he sat on the windowsill and swung his feet up onto it. I merely stood, a deer with feet splayed in headlights, gazing around as if the ancient furniture might tell me what to do.
The footsteps sounded closer still.
Bryn threw open the window and peered at the courtyard below. He’d do it, I knew that much, he’d step out into the biting air. Dropping my sheet music, I dashed into a corner and squeezed myself uselessly between a desk and a bookcase, knowing that my arse would be clearly visible to anyone coming through the door. Crouching on the sill, Bryn turned to look at me.
And then, a moment when we were frozen in time, spellbound: one stuck with horror and the other with glee, our fates tied together in mad camaraderie by wine and music and a magical sort of danger.
Silence, from the corridor.
Silence, followed by the sounds of footsteps moving away, further and further away, then a distant door opening, closing.
I exhaled. Bryn leapt from the windowsill and slumped melodramatically to the floor, cackling at the ceiling. I crumpled to my knees and wiped sweat from my forehead. With relief flooding my body, making me feel almost drunk, my face relaxed into a smile. Actually, that was pretty fucking brilliant.
“I think,” Bryn said, “this might be a good time to leave.”
