Guest post written by They Watch From Below author Katya de Becerra
Katya de Becerra was born in Russia, studied in California, lived in Peru, and then stayed in Australia long enough to become a local. She was going to be an Egyptologist when she grew up, but instead she earned a PhD in Anthropology. She is the critically acclaimed, Aurealis winning, Kirkus and Booklist-starred and Shadows nominated author of horror-thrillers When Ghosts Call Us Home, What The Woods Keep, Oasis, and They Watch From Below.
In addition to being a YA writer I’m also an academic. After completing my PhD in 2014 I started my career in academia and haven’t left since. Because of that it always felt inevitable that one day I would give in to the call of ‘dark academia’ and offer my own interpretation of the sub-genre’s staple themes of power, intellectualism and the occult.
But for years while I happily consumed campus-based stories as a reader, in my own books I went out of my way to situate my protagonists as far from the hallowed halls of academia as I could. My debut was a dark contemporary fantasy set in the magically infested woods, while my sophomore novel was a first contact tale unfolding in the desert. My most recent book is a horror drama about two sisters who used to live in a haunted house.
No campuses to be found anywhere.
When I reflect on the reasons of my avoidance I wonder if it’s because the campus has long been my comfort zone as well as a source of regular stress (I really do not enjoy marking assignments). For a while writing a book set at a university felt too close to home.
And besides, the campus novel genre is already bursting at the seams.
Academic writing on the topic (literary scholars love to navel-gaze!) tells us that Donna Tartt’s 1992 The Secret History is perhaps the most influential work in the campus novel category, at least in our recent past, and it certainly inspired a lion’s share of more contemporary works. But earlier books, like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be seen as forerunners of the genre.
In YA literature, dark academia is an offshoot of the campus novel where the protagonists are teens. They typically find themselves at a boarding school or other university-like environment, where they are cut off from everything they know and where strange things begin to happen almost immediately. Typically, there’s a mystery of some sort, and the plot often leans into the Gothic, and even into the horror genre.
From my recent dark academia reads, several stories stand out. There’s R.F. Kuang’s excellent Babel which offers a razor-sharp critique of imperialism and capitalism. There’s Erica Water’s brilliant (and unsettling–in the best possible way) All That Consumes Us, where a fish-out-water protagonist finds herself drawn to, and then exploited by, a campus-based secret society which year after year churns out the best and the brightest alums—but at what cost? And there is, of course, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, where the reader gets to stare into the rotten abyss of Yale’s hidden occult elite through the eyes of the unlikeliest freshman, Alex Stern.
It is not uncommon for a dark academia story to be told from the point of view of an outsider who finds herself immersed in the lush and dazzling academic reality which seems too good to be true. Centering the outsider gaze, dark academia stories tackle the matters of power, privilege, whiteness, and the othering. Privileged cliques roam the grounds, while scholarship kids are desperate to fit in.
But, as we learn in the end, nothing is free, and those in power aren’t keen on sharing it.
If I were to write a dark academia story of my own, did I have anything new to add? A new perspective to explore?
Something happened a few years back that gave me inspiration. Turns out, I had a dark academia story in me after all, and it was desperate to be told.
I’ve been cleaning my home office one day when I came across some lecture
notes from my freshman year at college. Hidden in the notes there was a piece of paper containing a message with esoteric instructions scribbled in an unfamiliar hand. I had no memory of writing the message, no idea where it came from.
The notes were for the Concepts of Natural Science, a subject focused on the history of science and philosophy. Though it was the Concepts professor who made the subject stand out from the slew of freshman offerings. The professor was fascinating, full of mind-blowing ideas. Her presence was electrifying. An inner circle has quickly formed around her, of which I was a member.
But years later my fellow alums seemed to have no recollection of this professor who had burned herself into my memory. Later yet, when I found the hidden message in the notes, I wondered if my own memories could be trusted. That was when I knew I had no choice but to work through these experiences in the best way I knew how. By writing a book.
In They Watch From Below I explore the themes of family legacy, and the weight of expectations, weaving intergenerational trauma into the story of a young woman who finds herself reliving her mother’s ‘glory days’ on campus of the university that seems to have an unnatural hold on her bloodline.
This story is perhaps my most emotionally honest yet.
And, of course, there are monsters.
I love a good monster in a story! But whenever I encounter one, the academic in me asks, ‘but what does the monster mean?’
I could write another essay just on that, arguing the monsters in They Watch From Below represent the past that wants to pull us back, preventing us from moving on and moving forward.
But then it’s probablybest to leave it up to my readers to interpret.
