I'm currently working on a dark academia TTRPG and wanted to read some lesser-known (and shorter) works in the genre, so I picked up this anthology. Subterranean Press have a track record of putting out good work, so I was hopeful.

I should have realised what I was getting into when the marketing blurb talks about "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" with an implied (derogatory) behind it. There's a common thread in this anthology of the stories being reactionary, tinged with right-wing rhetoric about "snowflakes" (one literally uses the phrase "Snowflake Generation" to describe Millenials) and a fear of anything resembling social justice or equity, and are deeply misogynistic. I think it's obvious that the majority of these stories were written by white American men in their 60s and 70s (an observation that Jane Hamilton's "Writing Maeve Dubinsky" would likely take issue with, as it examines identity politics through a lens of "straight white women should be able to write about whatever they want, and are probably better at telling the stories of queer and Black people than they are themselves, even when they have to steal them to make it possible").

Alongside the aforementioned plagiarism story we have tales about a professor who murders her students for being too woke (after seducing them); a man with a PhD in Medieval Studies who can't get a job and so shoots down a plane full of tenured professors with an RPG to create openings in the job market; a school where they learn to murder non-white and disabled people; a story that introduced its female main character as being "smarter than most of the male students [...] and damn near all the women" but who isn't, it turns out, smarter than the male characters who fuck her over and have her killed; and a woman who is raped by her boyfriend's PhD supervisor but says nothing because everyone knows she's slept with other men before and so it was basically her fault, if it was even rape. That last one might be trying to make a point about why women don't report these things, but if it is it does it clumsily and in a way that seems to point the finger at the victim.

It's not all terrible. Ian Rankin's story of a man investigating an historic murder in a secret society is gripping and genuinely very good right up until its slightly clumsy ending. Owen King's "That Golden Way" takes a step sideways into weird otherspaces horror and was really fun, even if it wasn't quite what I was looking for from "dark academia". Seanan McGuire's tale of a girl with a dark past and a darker future in her first days at university was a really nice fish out of water story right up until the very surprising twist into supernatural territory and I wish it had been longer.

Normally in anthologies I find that one or two stories strike me as being great, and that the rest are just fine aside from a couple of stinkers. Here I spent most of my time wondering if there was going to be a single story in the book that I liked even a little bit. Out of the 18 stories here there were only 3 that I actually thought were good, with the rest veering from bad to actively offensive. But, based on the thesis of most of these stories, maybe I've just spent too much time in these soft leftist halls of learning and need to toughen myself up.