First published 2024
Gela Nathaniel needs six students fast. Her Multimedia Art master's program at Royal Hastings University is hemorrhaging funding, and she will take almost anyone. She gets a sculptor named Jem who wants success at any cost, a gallery-savvy Jonathan who has never made anything with his hands, a technophobic art supply shop owner named Patrick, a single mother and graphic designer named Ludya who treats assignments as obstacles to a paycheck, a marketing professional named Cameron looking for a new direction, and Alyson, an established artist who is oddly overqualified for the whole thing. Together they build an art installation for a cloud-based solutions company as their final project. That collaboration is where things start to crack. Agendas surface. Tensions harden into something uglier. When an external examiner sits down to grade their final submissions, he reads through essays, text threads, and online discussions. The picture that assembles itself from those documents is not an academic record. It is a warning. Something was wrong with this cohort from the start, and the course itself may have been designed that way.
Genres: contemporary, psychological-thriller, 21st-century, mystery-thriller, academia, dark-academia
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, suspenseful, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: epistolary-narrative, found-family, secrets-and-lies, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Royal Hastings University
Period: 21st-century
501 pages · Paperback · Viper
Content warnings: gaslighting