College is thought to be a formative time in students’ lives. Those years are perfect for exploring your identity, making friends, and getting experience through campus organizations. But what happens when beloved universities are home to secrets and lies? Danger, corruption, and ulterior motives lurk behind the golden facade of the higher education institutions in these five books.
The Gilded Butterfly Effect by Heather Colley
“I’ll tell you something about happiness, real happiness: there is such stuff as dreams are made on. And it’s packed tight and chemical, into the right kinds of pills. Pills which I deserved.”
Sorority girl Stella is dealing with the traumatic aftermath of a freshman-year relationship with Trip Swindle, the leader of a “top-tier” fraternity called The Church. Stella soon befriends a loner named Penny while the frat brothers begin their annual “Pig Roast,” a contest in which they compete to bed and photograph the women they deem most unattractive on campus. Meanwhile, Stella and Penny grow extremely close, their bond growing obsessive as they navigate campus elitism, impossible beauty standards, and constant partying.
Bunny by Mona Awad
“I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.”
An outsider in her highly selective MFA program at Warren University in New England, Samantha Heather Mackey prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of her fiction writing cohort, which includes a clique of rich girls who call each other Bunny. But soon Samantha is invited to the Bunnies’ notorious Smut Salon, and as a result, she becomes engrossed in their sinister world and ditches her only friend, Ava. Before long, Samantha’s friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will culminate in a deadly encounter.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.”
A group of intelligent, eccentric outsiders at an elite New England college stumble upon a new way of thinking and living that is drastically different from the dull lifestyle of their contemporaries. However, the crew winds up going beyond the boundaries of morality, falling from obsession to corruption to betrayal, and inevitably, evil.
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
A feeling of being seen, beautiful and young, seated at a mythic table. On bad days, I could feel the whole year swinging underneath me like a dead thing. And you have suffered through your own selves—your own critical eyes, your own standards, your own minds. Your spirits are beautiful, but they are not easy.
Hidden deep in the rural Pennsylvania woods, Catherine House is an ultra-selective liberal arts college with an experimental curriculum and notably brilliant alumni. Accepted students are required to give the House three full years completely removed from the outside world in exchange for a future of power and prestige. In this year’s upcoming class is Ines, and the House becomes the closest thing to a home she’s ever had. And yet, it begins to feel like a gilded prison, and she starts to suspect that the school is hiding a dangerous agenda connected to a tight-knit group of students studying the most mysterious curriculum.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
“A monster with a knife was among them, unseen, prowling the streets, apparently able to strike and then melt away invisibly into the darkness … His invisibility made him into something more than human, something supernatural: a creature born from myth, a phantom.
Except Mariana knew he wasn’t a phantom, or a monster. He was just a man, and he didn’t merit being mythologized; he didn’t deserve it.
He deserved only—if she could summon it in her heart—pity and fear. The very qualities, according to Aristotle, that constituted catharsis in tragedy.”
Cambridge University alumna Mariana Andros is convinced Greek Tragedy professor Edward Fosca is a murderer. Fosca is adored by both staff and students, but especially by the members of a secret society of female students called The Maidens. When one of The Maidens, a friend of Mariana’s niece, is found murdered, Mariana believes Fosca is to blame. The former student and troubled group therapist becomes obsessed with proving Fosca’s guilt, which threatens to destroy her credibility and close relationships.
College has always been about balancing more than just academics, but the stakes are raised with lives on the line. These novels use mystery to address elitism, the quest for power, loneliness, and toxic campus culture, all of which are often critiqued in the literary world today.
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Find these books and more on our Heart Racingly Good Thrillers and Mysteries booklist on Bookshop.org!
