The Cloisters

It's time to graduate from Dark Academia University. Congratulations on not getting murdered! Sadly, your humanities degree is useless in the real world - time to enter the equally murderous world of Dark Post-graduate Internships!

The Cloisters is set in a small New York University where a charismatic researcher and his beautiful interns are researching the artistic history of tarot cards. Murder, intrigue, and betrayal ensues.

I really loved this book. I think the characters were really compelling and interesting to read, the occult elements were given just enough ambiguity to make the book feel slightly eerie without tipping into any magical realism territory and there was the odd twist that really took me by surprise.

The one thing that somewhat lets it down, for me, is actually the setting. I kept thinking that the author really wants reviewers to bring out the old ‘the setting was really another character in the book' cliche, but she never really earns it. Every so often we are told how much the Cloisters are impacting the characters' psychologically, but I couldn't see any evidence of it. This element felt like a total miss, which is a great shame given that it's a brilliant idea - a medieval cloister turned into a museum: claustrophobic, haunting, and mysterious - it could have been so great.

But this is a small gripe. Overall I really loved it and would put it up there with books like The Secret History as top reads in the Dark Academia genre. I hope Katy Hayes writes more books, I will definitely read them!