A Lesson in Vengeance

Product Information

Dark Academia Aesthetics: Revealing A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee". Tor.com. November 18, 2020. Definitely read it if: you want more (dark) sapphic thrillers, or if you like books with lots of underlying psychology and things to analyse. Bottom line: I am going to call my experience with this book Suffering For Character Development and move on. Victoria, you have a well documented love for The Secret History and the Dark Academia genre. What were the most important elements of dark academia that you wanted to carry into your own work? Honestly, I love female villains—and female bad girls, unlikable girls, cruel girls, antiheroines, and so on—a lot, partly because society tends to conflate femininity either with gentility and passivity, or with an unstable, erratic pure-emotional state. But to be a proper villain, or a proper bad girl of any stripe, one must have agency. Neither Ellis nor Felicity are passive in their story. They don’t always make good or selfless decisions. They are self ish and shortsighted and obsessive and sometimes callous. All of us have the capacity to do both good and bad things, even if we believe ourselves to be perennially honest, upstanding, morally righteous social citizens.

Then Ellis arrives. Ellis is the seventeen year old winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who also somehow is a method writer and goes on grand adventures and gets grants and acclaim for what sounds like some YA genre fiction. This might not have been a solid win but parts of it worked so so well for me. I'm definitely looking forward to more from this author, especially if they write more in this darker vein, but I think Lee would absolutely excel at an adult story. I hope one day it happens. The material "is patently offensive in the description or depiction of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, sadomasochistic abuse, or excretion" [15]We’re excited to reveal the cover for Victoria Lee’s A Lesson in Vengeance, a dark atmospheric thriller about a boarding school haunted by its history of witchcraft—and two girls dangerously close to digging up the past. Let’s talk for a moment about how well written this is too. The worlds are practically lyrical, they’re put together that well. I love books that have a certain rhythm to them and keep the reader entertained at the same time. I’d have to say that this is the most well written book I’ve read this year thus far. Draws you in and never let’s go, but the voice it’s written in is just perfect.

So what is A Lesson in Vengeance, then? It’s a dark academia that holds you in a vice-grip until you reach the end. It’s beautifully written and a deep-dive into the occult. There’s candid and at times uncomfortable depictions of mental illness, but still honest to the experiences of the author. Lee writes a nuance in the portrayal of trauma that I don’t typically see offered to female characters in the same way it’s granted to their male counterparts. The exploration of these grayer shades of morality provides depth beyond the more conspicuous aspects of the story.Dalloway School is a very isolated school, and the house that Felicity is going to be sharing with four other girls is even more isolated from the rest of the campus. And even though there are beliefs of witchcraft all over the school, the Godwin House is where five young suspected witches lived before they were murdered 300 years ago. What strikes me most about A Lesson in Vengeance is the atmosphere. It’s vivid and disquieting, full of the occult and a sinister sense of foreboding. Lee has effortlessly combined atmospheric writing with an intense, academic setting to create a dark academia novel for the ages. With elbow patches, thesis topics and poetry readings in the woods at 3am, this novel has taken the cornerstones of dark academia and ran with them. The writing is beautiful and lends itself perfectly to the unsettling, haunting nature of the story. Witchcraft is woven into Dalloway's past. The school doesn't talk about it, but the students do. In secret rooms and shadowy corners, girls convene. And before her girlfriend died, Felicity was drawn to the dark. She's determined to leave that behind now, but it's hard when Dalloway's occult history is everywhere. And when the new girl won't let her forget. You’ve mentioned before that neither of your protagonists are really “good” girls. What was the most exciting part of that to write?