The Night Stairs by Erin Kelly - Dark Academia Thriller Book Review

This was an all-consuming, claustrophobic, gothic, dark academia style thriller. I am obsessed.

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At an isolated Catholic boarding school for girls, legend has it that a long-deceased nun, Sister Matilda, keeps the school safe if her words “God forgive me” are kept chalked at the top of the stairs on the wall of the night chapel. The school is going through a tricky time with a merger, and deputy head, Fiona Fox is at the helm of it, and suddenly the girls are experiencing “the spins”, a mass psychogenic illness that spreads through the school. This has happened before, when the words on the wall were allowed to fade about 20 years ago, and ended in an incident so terrible that it is only revealed in parts to us as we flash back into the past. Fiona has to get her school in order before its secrets are uncovered.

Right from the opening page, this book was so uncomfortably familiar to me. I went to a Catholic boarding school (albeit it as a day girl) on the edge of the North Yorkshire moors that was set in a valley where “valley fever” was a widely talked about school issue. It was so eerily similar to my school experience (minus the more extreme version of the mass hysteria that affects the school) that I actually turned to Ben to ask if I had written this without realising! I was drawing parallels here, there and everywhere, and my actual school was name-dropped not that far into the book which was a surreal experience.

I was utterly enthralled by this book. Clearly it felt true to life for me, and not just from the eerie parallels.

While the story sounds like a basic adolescent YA dark academia novel, having teachers’ perspectives makes it that bit more grown up. Those of us who grew up reading the coming of age boarding school books are now the grown ups, and while it’s vaguely thrilling to look back at the intensity and toxicity of those teenage years, we now find ourselves identifying just as much with the adults. But now these adults are “trapped” back in a world they never really left. I know how easy that would be – the valley always draws you back. The adults are supposed to be grown up, saving the school from financial ruin (is that ever truer for private schools than right now!), but they still feel juvenile – I’ve never seen anyone describe valley fever in a more true to life way.

Looking at the other reviews, there is some discourse about what’s known as “dead lesbian syndrome”, and I can absolutely see where this is coming from. It’s a harmful stereotype and as such, the storyline needs to be careful not to fall into the trap of framing its only queer characters through a villainous or tragic lens. However, looking at it from the perspective of the fictional characters – this viewpoint is so true to how anyone even vaguely suspected of having anything outside of totally straight attractions might have been perceived. Having been in a Catholic boarding school in the 90s and 00s, if you were slightly different, you were classed as one of the weird ones, and for some reason, the narrative went down the path that you must be lesbian – and that was a “bad thing”. I’m definitely not saying this is okay – this is the context this story is written in and it feels so true to life for me. Even the adults in this story still act like children, they’re party to all kinds of deceptions and lies – and keeping them that way demonstrates their immaturity. They might be talking about school mergers and financial difficulties, but at the end of the day, from the lay teachers to the nuns, they’re people abusing their positions of power for their own gain. They’re stuck in their ways from their youth, the same way that they’re stuck in the valley.

I get that it’s tricky to navigate this trope, and it’s a valid conversation to have. But in my eyes, erasing that element would mean sanitising the very real prejudices of that specific era and environment. The story relies on showing how that toxicity breeds

Aside from all of the above, the story was told so well. I love a good thriller, and this one was next level for me. It was dark and twisty. It also had similarities to stories from my all-time favourite author, Carol Goodman in her books like The Lake of Dead Languages. It throws you back into the past, then into the present, the story paralleling the reading experience as you flip-flop between timelines and perspectives so you feel like the poor girls experiencing the spins.

Even before it was published I’d already recommended it to an old school friend, and will probably mention it to a handful more. Maybe I just connected so well with the story thanks to how well I knew this type of life, but it was such a brilliant all-consuming book.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publishers for an ARC of this book.