Something Bad Happened When I Was At College, Now It’s Coming Back To Bite Me

There’s a new sub-sub-genre in town, and I have to say I’m loving it. This one  combines elements of both psychological thriller and dark academia, and it always has the same plot: the straight white female narrator, now a successful professional woman, is haunted by something bad that happened while she was at college (I know, UK readers, university – but these novels are always set in the States), and now she’s being forced to dig up the past. Often, her own culpability is called into question. Invariably, these novels flash between college days and the present, and enjoy exposing the toxic teen culture of the 1990s/early noughties.

Formulaic? Yes, a bit. But I can’t resist a campus novel, and these ones run the full gamut from enjoyably trashy (Ashley Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold A Knife) to genuinely thought-provoking (Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You). Here’s two that are coming out in the UK in the next couple months.

Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead, Jenny Hollander’s first novel, focuses on Charlie, who is now a successful magazine editor, but is haunted by the events of ‘Scarlet Christmas’, when three students died at her journalism school nine years ago. Struggling with trauma-induced panic attacks, she’s well aware there are ‘black holes’ in her memory, and is terrified of what exploring them might reveal. When fellow student Steph announces that she is making a movie about that night, Charlie is desperate to stop it. As a thriller, this definitely delivers, especially in the clever way Hollander withholds the exact details of Scarlet Christmas from the reader until the very end, leaving us to make our own assumptions about what happened. Charlie’s PTSD is effectively explored, and I liked how her own uncertainty about what she might have done in the past fed into her shaky morals in the present – there’s a sense that if she’s already ‘bad’, she might as well do whatever she wants now. The secondary cast, especially Cate, Tripp and Gunner, were also much more fleshed out than is usually the case in thrillers. The final twist is both guessable and boring – but I’d recommend this to fans of Andrea Bartz’s The Lost Night (which is also a Something Bad Happened When I Was At College book, but without the college).

The wibbly moral uncertainty of Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead – which is not the same thing as moral complexity – is, however, thrown into relief by another superior novel in this vein, Genevieve Scott’s The Damages. Scott makes a very brave choice: her book is about somebody who really is completely unremarkable. I’ve long thought that the general moral standard of fictional protagonists is too high, probably in the pursuit of ‘likeability’; most people, in real life, don’t behave as well as made-up people do, and this especially wouldn’t be the case if we had access to the insides of their heads. Ros, the protagonist of The Damages, is pretty shallow and self-centred, but she is realistic. At nineteen, she does wrong but is punished for it beyond anything she deserves. In her early forties, she tries to do right but probably doesn’t actually help anyone at all, including herself. There’s no big redemption arc for Ros, only the acknowledgement that being told you’re a bad person in your teens really can get in the way of you becoming a better person, and I loved it.

I also loved the first 40% or so of The Damages, which is set during an ice storm at a small university east of Toronto, modelled on Queens. I was a kid in the 90s, but I felt that Scott perfectly captured why it was so horrendous to be a teenager in the 90s and the 00s: how you weren’t allowed to care about anything, how coolness was all, how any hint of being different was aggressively punished. Ros is absolutely a part of this culture, but she also suffers because of it. Scott also properly evokes the atmosphere of the ice-bound campus and the rising tension when a girl goes missing. The next 60% of the book, which flashes forward to the Covid-19 pandemic, is less gripping (it could have been shorter) but largely necessary. I’ve read plenty of #MeToo novels, but Scott really picks apart how we handle changing social mores, and how unacknowledged wrongs are still important. It also made me reflect on, despite how times have changed, Ros still doesn’t have the language for what was done to her. Other characters rightly call out racism and sexual assault on campus, but Ros’s systematic social shunning, which led her to drop out of university, is difficult to voice. A reminder that you don’t have to like a character to feel their pain. Another hit from Verve Books (the UK publisher for this Canadian novel), who are fast becoming one of my favourite indies.

I received free proof copies of these novels from the publisher for review. Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead is out in the UK tomorrow, February 6th. The Damages is already out in Canada, but publishes in the UK on April 25th.

Have you read any Something Bad Happened When I Was At College books? If so, tell me! I want to read them all!