Heather Darwent got filed under “deliciously dark” the way publishing files anything that looks expensive and cruel: a sleek cover, a smart setting, a promise of secrets that will behave themselves by the final chapter. But her Edinburgh dark academia isn’t a candlelit aesthetic. It’s a social experiment with teeth. She writes the university not as a gothic playground but as a sorting machine—one that teaches young people how to weaponise taste, money, and silence while calling it ambition.
The Things We Do To Our Friends doesn’t treat the University of Edinburgh as a romantic labyrinth of libraries and lamplit closes. It treats it as a stage where the rich rehearse dominance and the not-quite-rich learn the cost of wanting in. Clare arrives looking for reinvention, and Darwent doesn’t present that as aspirational. Reinvention is a hunger, and hunger makes you pliable. Tabitha’s world—wealth, glamour, a private-language friend group—doesn’t “tempt” so much as it recruits. The point isn’t that the clique is toxic. The point is that toxicity is the culture’s preferred bonding agent: it seals people together through exclusion, humiliation, and the thrill of choosing who counts.
Cosy packaging is just a PR strategy for cruelty: it tells the reader they’re here for “atmosphere” when they’re actually here to watch a hierarchy chew someone up.
Darwent refuses cosy in two ways. First, she won’t let you pretend the setting is neutral. Dark academia often works like a polite disguise: dress the story in tradition so the violence feels refined, almost deserved—like a moral tax paid for beauty. Darwent keeps dragging the beauty back to its function. Champagne doesn’t mean celebration; it means money in the room deciding the temperature. Art history doesn’t mean sophistication; it means gatekeeping made elegant. Even the friend group name—Shiver—lands like a warning, not a brand. This is a book that understands how quickly “belonging” becomes complicity, and how universities sell the fantasy of merit while quietly rewarding social inheritance.
Second, she won’t give you the comforting villain. The cosy payoff would be one charismatic monster you can blame, then eject, so the institution remains intact and the reader gets to feel morally clean. Darwent’s nastiness is more accurate: the system is the antagonist, and the system doesn’t die when you unmask someone. The social theatre keeps running. People keep choosing the version of events that protects their future. Reputation keeps getting treated like a human right, while actual humans get treated like collateral.
Her background sharpens the lens: she studied history of art at Edinburgh and stayed in Scotland; she’s worked in advertising and in a tech-start-up world that thrives on persuasion. That combination shows. Her prose understands branding, the performance of self, the way language can make predation look like taste. And it makes her impatient with the genre’s soft lies—especially the current hunger for “feminist revenge” thrillers that flatter the reader with righteous heat while still delivering the same old class porn.
Because here’s what cosy thriller packaging really buys: it protects the reader from recognising themselves. It offers you a sealed world and whispers, safely, that you’re only visiting. Darwent won’t collaborate with that. Her book keeps reminding you that the appetite for elite spaces is part of the mechanism. You want to be inside, and the wanting is how you get managed. The “page-turner” speed isn’t just entertainment; it’s the feeling of being pulled through someone else’s rules.
Dark academia is often nostalgia in a black coat; Darwent turns it into a forensic light and makes the reader admit what they came to worship: access, aura, and sanctioned cruelty.
And when she steps beyond campus into her second novel’s territory—wellness culture, manipulation, the body treated as a project—she’s still refusing comfort. Different costume, same scam: institutions selling “fixes,” communities built on exclusion, language designed to make control feel like care. She’s not interested in giving you a cosy shiver and a tidy moral. She’s interested in showing how quickly people will trade their judgement for a seat at the table.
So stop shelving Heather Darwent as a “cosy dark academia treat.” That’s the industry trying to launder what she’s actually doing. Her work is about systems that look beautiful from the outside because beauty is how they keep recruits coming. Read it with your eyes open. Keep the packaging off. Insist on the teeth.
