The Secret History
1992
- fiction
- college students
- teacher-student relationships
- classicists
- murder
- murderers
- detective and mystery stories
- fiction, psychological
- college teachers, fiction
- vermont, fiction
The story
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil.
What it’s like
Dense, lush prose that lingers on autumn in rural Vermont: frost on the fields, gold and rust foliage, candlelit dormitories, wood-panelled libraries and the hush of a New England college campus. The narrator's voice is retrospective and fastidious, slow to unspool, rich with classical allusion, Latin tags and close observation of clothes, food and weather, so the reading feels like being walked through a beautiful, slightly airless world. Its mood is opulent melancholy sliding into dread, the sensation of a warm room whose windows are slowly darkening. The pace is leisurely for long stretches, then tightens sharply into suspense in its later sections. Violence is infrequent but shocking when it comes, described plainly and without gore, and there is drinking, drug use and a sexual undercurrent, including a teacher-student dynamic handled with unease. The arc follows a circle of privileged, intense students whose intellectual idealism curdles into complicity and moral collapse. For readers who love atmospheric literary fiction, campus settings, and slow-burn psychological suspense, and who don't mind an unsettling, morally bleak ending.
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