Dark Things I Adore

A very dark story set at a graduate art institute in Washington DC and in the woods of Maine. It's told in two time frames; one in the summer and fall of 1988 at an artist's camp in Maine and one in the fall of 2018 as Audra Colfax, a degree candidate at the art institute prepares to defend her thesis. There are also descriptions of art pieces submitted by Audra Colfax for her thesis.

The story centers around an artistically gifted young woman with bipolar disorder, and characters who either exploit and abuse her or are complicit in her abuse. There's an implication that the complicity extends to degree granting art departments, since the people involved in the story go on to become art professors. All these issues are present in a well-written page-turner of a suspense novel. You know something terrible has happened and is going to happen, but you don't know exactly what and you can't look away until you find out.