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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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Review: The Secret History

More than twenty years after its release, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History continues to bewitch readers with the tale of a group of decadent Classics students at an elite Vermont college in the 1980s – and for good reason. The novel’s first scene is that of a group of friends, including nineteen-year-old narrator Richard Papen, driving back to Hampden College after murdering a friend and classmate. The rest of the novel is a breathtakingly poised explanation of how the murder was allowed to happen (for this reason, The Secret History has been described as a ‘whydunnit’), and its devastating effects on the characters.

The greatest draw of The Secret History is alluded to in the title. “This is the only story I will ever be able to tell”, Richard claims in the prologue; immediately we see how Tartt’s skill is in giving the reader the impression that they are being let in on an enormous secret. This is in spite of a cast of characters who teeter constantly on the verge of lapsing into caricatures of spoilt liberal arts students, and Richard’s self-confessed tendency to lie with exceptional conviction. It is Richard’s ability to play fast and loose with the truth that allows him to ingratiate himself with a small group of eccentric Classics students and their mercurial professor, Julian Morrow: he casts aside his humble origins in small-town California and invents a past filled with expensive boarding schools and oil-tycoon parents to fit in with his affluent classmates. These classmates are wonderfully observed: the Macaulay twins, clad in white; Henry Winter, an orphaned linguistic genius from Missouri; Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran, a brash financier’s son run to seed. It is a considerable feat for Tartt to present us with this cast of curious and dishonest characters, and yet make it utterly believable when the group tells Papen of how a Bacchanal they undertook in rural Vermont ended in tragedy.

As he is not included in the group’s efforts to reach the state of ecstasy found in the Greek cult of Dionysos, god of wine and sensual pleasure, Richard is the perfect guide for the reader as both try to understand what possessed four well-to-do students to pursue such a state of hedonistic delirium. Here, The Secret History owes a lot to Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae , which dwells on the dangers of cultivating an ordered mind at the expense of the sensual revelry of Dionysian ritual. As the novel progresses, the order of Greek lessons is replaced by various practices – alcoholism, incest, prescription drug abuse – that the characters use to shield themselves from the evil that they committed with a chilling calm. This, of course, is the tragic irony of the work: in their efforts to respond to their own depraved Bacchic actions in a rational manner, the students find themselves drawn towards a different kind of escape, one that reveals the horrifying banality of evil. There is plenty for students of Classics to enjoy here, including allusions to Sophocles, Homer and Plato, but there is more than enough for those with no knowledge of the subject to enjoy the novel. Indeed, a significant part of the novel’s attraction is its exploration of why, despite their practical obsolescence and esoteric nature, we continue to hold dead languages in a high regard. Richard’s ‘morbid longing for the picturesque’ is something with which Oxford students, reading in ancient colleges and libraries, can surely identify, regardless of their field of study.

I read this book on the recommendation of friends, all of whom remarked that it is a book perhaps best enjoyed before the end of school, when one does not have one’s own idea of the realities of university life. There is certainly something in this: the nitty-gritty of academic life is never really at the forefront of this book, and students reading this during their own university experience might grow impatient with the self-indulgence the characters exhibit. Reading it immediately after the end of term, however, proved immensely rewarding: one is more tolerant of Tartt’s romanticised take on life at an elite university, and there is more time to dwell on the brilliant pitch and pace of Tartt’s prose. The Secret History is probably a little too long to justify reading for pleasure during term time, but when read during the vac, its depiction of life amid the stunning surroundings of an elite university will haunt student readers long after their return to Oxford.

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University Libraries Blog

Book review: the secret history by donna tartt.

Written by Benjamin Clanton, Government Publications

The coming of age tale has long held an important and cherished place in American literature, and the college novel has taken this genre to complex heights in the past several decades. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is arguably one of the best examples in recent memory, as it examines both the seductive and alienating aspects of the modern campus. Richard Papen, the main character and narrator, flees an unfulfilling existence in California for the small and exclusive environs of Hampden College in Vermont. There, he soon falls in with a small group of Classics students: stoic and brilliant Henry; the enigmatic twins Charles and Camilla; neurotic Francis; and oafish Bunny. Their elitist instructor, Julian, leads them in the search of beauty and knowledge, creating a bubble that exists on the edges of the school. On the surface, it appears to be a dream existence for all of them; however, a series of tragedies shows that dreams never last, and the real world always brings a harsh reckoning.

Richard remains an outsider through much of the book, despite becoming part of the group and forming close relationships with the others; he shows shame concerning his background, creating fabrications or withholding details about his past in California. Bunny, in particular, tends to needle him for being different from the rest of them, constantly cracking jokes about things concerning Richard’s past that do not add up. Bunny, in his interactions with the rest of the group, is unable to realize that things which are just a game to him are of the utmost seriousness to the others, causing constant mental strain that eventually forces a disastrous break.

The social dynamics of the group create both a unique sense of comradery and constant tensions that build up over time. The members largely come from some form of affluent background, save Richard, and already have a skewed idea of how the world works. Julian, their teacher and talisman of sorts, is independently wealthy and thus separated from the world around him in many ways. Richard even observes that the rest of the group seem disdainful of what is going on in the larger world in regards to politics and other current events. The group is also barely aware of their community beyond the Classics courses, which is already a tight nit and exclusive liberal arts college attached to a small New England community. All of this creates a sense of elitism, especially in Henry. He is content with becoming lost within the Greek translations Julian assigns, or some other literary or artistic pursuit that he alone understands or has interest in. He cuts himself off in numerous ways from everyone, including his closest friends, though we do get glimpses of humanity from him, especially when it concerns Julian.

The class and the group become their entire world. Some take it more seriously than others. It is arguable that Bunny takes nothing seriously, that life is a series of games and jokes and the only thing of importance to him is the fulfillment of base desire. Charles, Camilla, and Francis often seem along for the ride, in search of some form of comradery in a world they do not feel connected to. However, Henry, like Julian, is a true believer, though they are possibly searching for different things to believe in. Julian is clearly drawn to beauty, whatever that may mean; he finds most things in the larger world ugly and vulgar. Henry, with his youthful obsessions, seems to be searching for some form of truth that he cannot find, and most likely does not exist. The others often fall in lockstep with him, which leads them down a road of destruction and madness. And then there is Richard, who just wants to find something that matters, and clings to that idea for as long as possible until it shatters like everything else. Perhaps that is why he moves forward slightly better than the others. Despite his deceptions of who he truly is, to the others and to himself, perhaps being that type of nobody, the type of person that can shift identities as a situation necessitates, allows him to drift through the world without being consumed by its many tribulations.

Ultimately, Richard and the rest of the group are just kids, college students trying to find their way in the world. It is possible that Julian does them a disservice by cutting them off from the rest of the college’s community; he sees this as a positive and the best way for them to learn, but the subsequent isolation and loneliness eventually accelerates their deterioration. Bunny and Richard do a moderately better job in remaining connected to other people. However, Henry, Charles, Camilla, and Francis become trapped in a kind of echo chamber, stranded with each other and, often, inside their own heads. They are the ones that were in the forest the night of the local farmer’s death, which begins the group’s cataclysmic fall; they are the ones that act as the driving force for the climactic event of the novel; and they are the ones that ultimately suffer the most in the end. Richard does as well, of course, but in a different way. He always seems to be the one that is completely afloat, never fully becoming part of the tight band of friends. The others are completely aware of what came before Richard and their fateful Bacchanal. After that ideal falls apart, they are unable to find anything to hold on to and cannot deal properly with the guilt of what they have done.

I did not read this book when I was college student. I read it several years after finishing graduate school, and reread it recently, which prompted this blog post. I cannot say for sure if it would have been a positive or negative force for me at that point in life. It is easy to become lost in the Romantic aspects of the plot: the closeness of the main characters; their experiences with good books and good food; and being young and beautiful in a place that allows escape into a world of deceptively few consequences. However, this can blind the reader to all the negative aspects of that world that Tartt skillfully uncovers: the strange solitude and self-isolation, even when surrounded by so many potentially likeminded people, and the odd unreality of being stuck between youth and adulthood. One of the driving forces of the novel is that when young, one is often shocked into realizing life and its many decisions have actual consequences. Tartt’s characters, including Julian, the primary example of ‘adulthood,’ become trapped in a dreamlike revelry, and, when yanked out of it, must deal with this fact. As they discover, you rarely come out of the other side of these situations the same person, and sometimes, you do not come out of the other side at all.

Library promotion time! The 3 rd and 4 th floor stacks are back open for the fall semester. However, if you have reservations about browsing these areas or getting a book from upstairs, McWherter Library is still offering an Item Pickup Request service; you can find the online form here . Our workers in the Circulation Department will pull the book and notify you once it is ready for checkout. Remember: please be wearing your mask and have your University of Memphis ID card ready in order to get into the library. And most importantly: stay safe and healthy!

If you want to read The Secret History by Donna Tartt, it is currently available for checkout at McWherter Library and can be checked out using the Pickup Request service.

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Donna Tartt answers 11 questions about 'The Secret History'

" The Secret History" was published 30 years ago — and ever since, fans have been looking for a follow-up that delivers the same intoxicating blend of mystery, mythology, tight-knit friend groups and unreliable narrators.

Jenna selected Donna Tartt's debut novel, and veritable modern classic, for the last Read With Jenna pick of 2022.

“With a book as layered as ‘The Secret History,’ there’s going to be new revelations every time you read it. I feel like this is the type of book that needs to be reread every 10, 20, 30 years,” Jenna tells TODAY.com.

After 30 years, readers like Jenna have racked up quite a few questions. Below, Tartt answers a few of them, sourced from Read With Jenna members and Jenna herself.

Questions from Jenna

What has the response of the book over the past 30 years meant to you.

Donna Tartt: I love that it’s meant something to people — that readers have not only enjoyed wandering around in the imaginal space of the book but have kept returning to it. For me, writing a novel doesn’t feel like an address to an audience so much as a direct interaction with one other person — the solitary person who pulls the book off a shelf and reads it, whoever that happens to be — so I’m less concerned with the broader impact of the book than with how it reverberates in the lives of individual readers. If the book keeps someone company during a difficult time in their lives, I’m happy. I’ve had some moving letters from people in prison. I’ve also loved hearing from young people who have been inspired to study Classics after reading the book.

How has your life changed since the book was published?

On one level, the tasks that have fallen to me since publishing the book have almost zero to do with the factors that that enabled me to write the book in the first place, but I’ve had a life filled with travel (the book has been published in 40 languages) and it’s been more than wonderful to have a following and the freedom to write what I want.

Questions from readers

Did you imagine, back then, the impact the book would have.

I’m thrilled with how the book continues to resonate with readers — I couldn’t have wished for anything better. The people who connect with 'The Secret History' are passionate about it — it’s not a book for everyone but the responses to it, for better or worse, are seldom lukewarm.

Where do you get your ideas for fiction?

Everywhere — from travel, from history, from gossip, from true crime, from stories in magazines at the dentist’s office, from childhood memories, from rumors and songs, from dreams (I mean this literally — I keep a dream journal, and dreams often make their way into my books). I think the assumption is that novelists get some giant idea all in one piece, and then all they have to do is sit down and write it. And that may be true for some novelists but for me a book is a storm, a swarm, a party. Ideas don’t drop down on me singly, in monumental chunks, but flow in from thousands of different sources and tributaries evolving over a long period of time, and I think the texture of my books reflects that.

Have you ever re-read 'The Secret History'? If so, what was the experience like?

I re-read it about 15 years ago, and it was uncanny because it brought back to me with great clarity where I happened to be and sometimes even what I was wearing when I wrote certain passages. Other passages seemed foreign and as if someone else had written them.

How do the characters of the book still live on for you?

There’s no way to build a solid or realistic literary character without putting a good deal of yourself in it. With "The Secret History," my DNA is recognizably twined throughout all the characters — which is only to say that a gesture or a turn of phrase or an intonation of my own voice will unexpectedly conjure up Francis, say, or Henry, and the emotions and ideas that went into creating them.

Richard in 'The Secret History" lives on for me in a more practical way than any character I ever wrote, however. Richard’s voice, to start with, was an invented voice, constructed for the purposes of the story I wanted to tell, but because I spent so many years when I was young writing almost exclusively in Richard’s voice, his narration ended up influencing my own writing voice pretty profoundly.

We are forever looking for a book like 'The Secret History.' Are there any books you recommend as follow-ups?

Not really as follow ups, though I can direct people to some books that were important to me when I wrote "The Secret History" that admirers of the book might enjoy. I couldn’t have written or even thought to write "The Secret History" without "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", which is sharp and shocking as ever on the page—it’s a short novel, very tight and modern by 19th century standards.

"Le Grand Meulnes" by Alain Fournier has a lot to do with the elegiac mood of the novel, the sense of a lost, magical past — so too does "The Great Gatsby ."
"Cold Heaven" by Brian Moore and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson helped me to keep an open sense of what’s possible in a literary novel.
It’s too bad that people mostly seem to know the film version of "The Talented Mr Ripley" because the novel, by Patricia Highsmith, differs in key respects and is and far superior.
The books of George Orwell and of Evelyn Waugh were very important to me during the time I was writing "The Secret History" and still are. I was reading them obsessively during that time—novels, essays, letters, everything.
The novels of Vladimir Nabokov are touchstones, as well.
Anybody wanting to know more about the ideas behind the book should read "Bacchae" by Euripedes (I like the Richmond Lattimore translation) and "Phaedrus" and the "Apology" by Plato—a lot of people will be put off by the mention of Plato but these two dialogues in particular were life-changing.
"Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice" by JF Martel had not yet been published when I wrote "The Secret History" but it articulates very clearly some of my ideas about art as a meeting place for ideas otherwise inexpressible and a conduit to realities beyond the human: “True beauty is not pretty. It is a tear in the facade of the everyday, a sudden revelation of the forces seething beneath the surface of things.”

Between 'The Secret History' and 'The Goldfinch,' what do you find most compelling about writing young characters in this general age? What qualities do they have in terms of development and plot that older adults don’t?

Younger characters tend to be more malleable than older ones because they are less determined by circumstance and have more space to grow. Though with older, more fixed characters, there’s more capacity for reversal and surprise.

What inspired the names of the characters? We couldn’t help but notice Charles and Camilla — like the current king and queen of England — feature prominently.

I can’t remember how Charles got his name, but Camilla got hers from Camilla the warrior maiden in the Aeneid — Virgil calls her “a sacred falcon” and there is a beautiful passage where the mothers of Italy gather to watch Camilla heading off to battle. I was reading the Aeneid for a class right around the time I started writing The Secret History. Camilla is as strong and heroic as any soldier in the poem, and her name stuck with me.

At some point after the book was published, my publicist Bogie telephoned me in excitement because “Charles and Camilla” had been mentioned prominently in some notable news feature as personalities of the year. But of course it turned out that they were talking about a different Charles and Camilla and not my characters.

Why aren’t you on social media?

I was warned off it early on. Years ago, in India, I was the only America at a big dinner where everyone was talking about social media, which at the time was very new. A few of us (including me) had never heard of it — I was trying to understand what it was and how it worked, but Becky Swift, Margaret Drabble’s daughter, was very emphatic: "You should never get social media Donna, it’s a terrible idea for you, it’s noisy and shallow and distracting and it will sneak into your reading and writing life in a thousand horrible ways and and be a monstrous waste of your energy and time. Promise me you’ll never touch it."

And I didn’t. It would be years before people started talking about how destructive social media was, or how insidious it would turn out to be on so many cultural, political and personal levels. So I’m hugely grateful to Becky for steering me away from it before I stumbled into it unawares — Becky died young, and I am sad I never got a chance to tell how much that conversation changed my life for the better.

Do you have any guilty pleasure books or TV shows?

Most television doesn’t appeal to me — a rare exception was “Better Call Saul.” I love the Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" episodes, and noir movies from the forties and fifties and old RKO or Universal horror films.

I don’t feel guilty about reading any book I enjoy or that keeps me interested, though sometimes I feel guilty about listening to an audiobook instead of reading the book on paper. That’s probably silly though because I listen to audiobooks at times when I wouldn’t be reading anyway, when I’m walking the dogs or ironing shirts.

Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

The Literary Edit

Review: The Secret History – Donna Tartt

In amongst the BBC’s Big Read ‘s overwhelming list of classics are a few hidden contemporary gems, of which Donna Tart’s The Secret History is one of the most compelling. I was interning at John Murray Publishers shortly after graduating and asked the girls with whom I was working what their favourite books were; The Secret History was mentioned and having seen it on the BBC’s Big Read I bought myself a copy.

The Secret History is a rare find: both intelligent and complex, the well-drawn characters and an effortless writing style create an evocative and informed read. Set against the Gothic backdrop of a college in Vermont, the novel follows a close knit circle of six Classics students whose lives begin to mirror that of the Greek Tragedies they are studying. A detective story of sorts, The Secret History is narrated by one of the six students, Richard Papen, who reflects, years later, on the situation that led to a murder within the group, the murder being confessed at the outset of the novel but the events otherwise revealed sequentially.

Beautiful and claustrophobic, the frequent references to Greek Mythology lend an air of antiquation to the student’s warped world of academia. The eccentric characters who form the heart of the novel, and the horrific secret they are hiding lead to an irrevocable trail of deceit and destruction; one from which they may never recover.

The Secret History has all the ingredients of a modern day classic – an elegant plot, intimately composed characters and a baroque undertone that is consistent and sinister. This psychological thriller truly deserves its place among the greats in the BBC’s Big Read and it’s easy to see why many cite it as one of their all time favourite reads.

About The Secret History

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last – inexorably – into evil.

About Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014.

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Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

By: Author Laura

Posted on Published: 6th January 2017 - Last updated: 10th January 2024

Categories Book Reviews , Books

Book Review: The Secret History Is A New Modern Classic

The Secret History Summary

The Secret History Review

The Secret History is the story of six Classics students at Hampden College, New England. It is told through the eyes of Richard Papen, a financial aid student from California desperately trying to escape the banal life his parents wish for him.

When Richard arrives at Hampden, he is told of an elitist group of students taught by Julian M. Naturally, he wants to join. Little did he know, this reckless decision would result in dire consequences that would haunt him and his new ‘friends’ for the rest of his life.

First of all, this book is pretty damn long. It may not look like much, but it’s actually over 600 pages long. I don’t know many authors who could sustain a gripping story throughout all those pages but Donna Tartt does it magnificently.

There was not a single part of The Secret History when I didn’t feel engaged and enthralled by the plot. I guarantee you will be in one of two states when reading this novel: tearing through the pages, desperate to find out what happens; or slowly savouring Tartt’s beautiful writing, never wanting to reach the end of this story. Tartt has this way of lulling you into a false sense of security and then ripping everything you thought you knew out at the seams.

The are seven main characters: Henry, Richard, Charles, Camilla, Francis, Bunny and Julian, their teacher. They are all despicable human beings and yet there’s something about them that draws you in. I guess that’s exactly how Richard got sucked into their elitist little group in the first place.

Each member of the group has their own eccentricities that you discover as the story unfolds and nothing is as it first seems. Each character has their own secrets but what’s most interesting is the relationship between all of them.

These characters are tied together by some sort of twisted bond that is completely captivating. They are all flawed but it is not until the very end of The Secret History that you find out just how messed up they all are.

I totally agree with the assertion that The Secret History is a modern classic. Instead of making us wonder what’s going to happen, Donna Tartt makes us fear it. We are told right from the outset that a murder has occurred and from then on you’re anticipating it, looking over your shoulder to check if the murderer is coming to get you.

The author and her characters draws strongly from Greek myths, little too strongly given what happens to them and the group ends up becoming something of a modern myth themselves.

To conclude, Donna Tartt is now ranked amongst my favourite authors. The Secret History is both twisted and beautiful at the same time dealing with friendship, love, desire, hedonism, jealousy and tragedy.

She tells a dark story but she tells it so well you can’t help but be entranced. There were a few sections that made me feel physically sick and others that I’ve put to memory amongst some of my favourite quotes.

The characters themselves are Tartt’s greatest triumph and there is no way that you won’t find yourself completely wrapped up in their story, both wishing you were part of their little group and thankful that you’re not. The Secret History is a must-read for all.

So there’s The Secret History book review! Have you read The Secret History ? Who is your favourite character?

Buy The Secret History by Donna Tartt: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

If you liked this post, check out these: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller The Vegetarian by Han Kang Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller How to Be Both by Ali Smith The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Editor of What’s Hot?

Thursday 27th of May 2021

Her writing is wonderful, I've read her three novels and i hope she writes another one.

Monday 24th of September 2018

I absolutely loved this book. I gave it a go because I'd heard so many good things about it (but I hated The Little Friend and so wasn't holding out much hope for The Secret History). It's definitely one of my favourites, and one that I'll read again, finding new things every time and a new hatred/love for each character.

In fact I wrote my own book review here: https://www.dreamofhome.co.uk/2018/01/18/book-review-the-secret-history-by-donna-tartt/

Thursday 26th of January 2017

I haven't red this, sounds interesting and I love long books that I can get engrossed in so 600 pages sounds like my cup of tea

Thursday 19th of January 2017

I haven't read this book or any of the author's works. However, I am quite interest by how this author make a twist of the story. By your short synopsis, it thrills me to know what is the story all about. do they have a soft copy of it? I'll surely love to get one!

nicolepaler

Monday 16th of January 2017

"We are told right from the outset that a murder has occurred and from then on you’re anticipating it, looking over your shoulder to check if the murderer is coming to get you."

This is what is drawing me to read said book. I think I'm gonna check it out because I am curious of the ending, if there really is a 'murderer' or if it was just a rouse to keep us distracted from the real thing happening. There are stories I've read that have made it happen so, wherein you're so concentrated on the mystery that there are other things happening under the subcontext of the story that you only realize until the end. :D

critical book reviews

Donna Tartt
Aug 23, 2020

The Secret History - critical review: explored as a Greek Tragedy

Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' follows a year of six classic student's lives at a New England College, starting the novel off with the declaration of a murder. When I read 'The Secret History' (1992) by Donna Tartt, what struck me most was its connection with the classical world. I wanted to explore this connection further, and so read Aristotle's 'Poetics' as well as Peter Burian's article 'Myth into muthos: the shaping of a tragic plot' to use as sources to judge the novel by, in terms of what classical tragedian conventions it used. Furthermore, I wanted to explore why Tartt connected her novel so much to that of a Greek Tragedy, and I read Francois Pauw's 'the classical intertext in Donna Tartt's The Secret History' to understand this further. Jean-Pierre Vernant's definition of tragedy: "the field of the problematical, the area where the familiar institutions are called into question and the moral vocabulary, no longer adequate, becomes ambiguous or self-contradictory" fits exactly into the novel and what it is portraying: it questions morality, youthful ignorance and hubris, the denial of modern reality and a dark side of intellectual endeavour. Moreover, the novel fits with the themes of a Greek Tragedy: the idea of conflict, sacrifice, retribution, knowledge, fate as well as the characteristics: hamartia, narration, language, unity. It also has a direct reference to a Greek tragedy since much of its plot is based on Euripides' Bacchae: which is centred, as is The Secret History, around the God Dionysus: The God of wine, disguise, and ritual madness. Therefore, not only does The Secret History's structure, plot and characters seem to resemble that of a Greek Tragedy, but through doing this, it encapsulates the characters' 'hamartia', or fatal flaw, which leads to their downfall.

Aristotle claimed that the moral and phycological framework of a Greek Tragedy is 'Hamartia', or fatal flaw of the character, which is what leads them to their downfall. In the first sentence of chapter one, Richard, our narrator, asks 'Does such a thing 'as the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?' and then answers 'I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.' This mention of the hamartia at the beginning of the novel shows its centrality to both the plot and morality of it, as the novel as a whole seems to be a portrayal of the significance of human flaws in individuals' fate. This idea that Richard's fatal flaw is the 'longing for the picturesque at all costs' echoes the hamartia of all six students: the desperation to see the world as it is not. This can be seen through their obsession with the classical world, shown through the constant comparisons or references to Greek figures, ideologies or literary, displaying that it becomes for them a form of how they want the world to be. The comparatives they make of modern reality to classical world references remain consistently present throughout the novel. For example, Julian's profile is described to compare with "an Etruscan in a bas-relief", Francis' country property is described as a "mock tholos" and the feeling of wet grass ignites images of Olympus or Valhalla for Richard. This constant use of metaphors and similes to describe people, objects and nature show their vision as thwarted with the classical world: as their reality is always influenced their aim to see their world as something else. This interest in the classical world connects with their denial of modern reality. This is seen literally through Henry's lack of knowledge of a man landing on the moon, but also symbolically through their classroom: the fact it is geographically and personally cut off from the rest of the students (Julian, their professor, "conducts the selection on a personal rather than academic basis") and described as "the Lyceum" and a "platonic microcosm of what he thought a classroom should be" shows this disconnection with the real world. Furthermore, the use of the Greek or Latin in their speech in public or in front of other students at university in order to be secretive could be interpreted as another portrayal of their attempt to cut themselves out of the modern world and live in one that they feel is superior. This consistent use of comparatives not only shows that it influences how they see the world, but it could be interpreted it explains how they act in the world: making it a flaw, instead of merely a characteristic. They justify themselves and their actions through their version of the world's morality, instead of the standards that everyone else lives by. When Henry dismissively mentions the idea of being arrested for the murder of Bunny, he claims "Frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers' interest or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in Vermont Jail" and when referencing the murder of the farmer during their Dionysian experiment, he claims, "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed." Through referencing his and the taxpayers' "interests" as well as labelling the victim as "not Voltaire", we see this complete denial, or lack of awareness, of justice, which could be interpreted as being a result of their tainted vision of reality: in which their intellectual obsession with the classical world becomes how they see their reality and how they act within that.

The idea of the audience knowing the fate of the characters is central to Greek Tragedy and Epic: like that of the Iliad in which the readers know the end of the plotline, but the suspense is created in questioning how and why one gets there. This is echoed in 'The Secret History', as the victim and murderers of the case are given in the prologue in the novel, meaning the central question is not 'who done it?' but 'why?'. It has been interpreted that the novel in itself comments on divine fate and that all the characters provide a study for what happens when a person attempts to escape their fate. Contrastingly, it has been argued that the novel is a tale of characters as a victim of chance. This idea could be supported through the characters reasoning for being in the Greek Class: in which Richard chose it in order to sleep later on Monday's, Henry's interest resulted from a childhood car accident when he was confined to bed for a long period of time, and for Bunny it is an attempted solution of therapy for his dyslexia, and that the ending was, in fact, a "horrible string of coincidences.". However, I think it is more convincing to portray that all the characters acts and consequences are brought about by human agency, and instead, chance or fate has little to do with it, apart from it being sources for what the characters want to believe their situation can be explained by. This can be seen through Henry's planning of Bunny's murder, in which he is "allowing Bunny to choose the circumstances of his own death", compares the plan to a "chess game" and when Bunny walks past them waiting for him, Henry exclaims to him that "it's very lucky" that he walked past them. This is what Henry wants to believe, that both Bunny himself and luck were equal partners of causality in his death. This is contrasted by the description of the murder, in which it is portrayed that the woods were "deathly still" and "silent", and that "there was no wind; not a bird sang, not a leaf stirred." This is contrasted by the description of Henry who "took a step towards him [Bunny]." The absence of the involvement of nature: as it was "silent, not a sound" and motionless: "still" "no wind" "not [..] stirred", juxtaposed with the active verbs of Henry stepping, along with the passivity of Bunny as Henry steps "towards him", could be interpreted as confirming this idea that there was nothing but the human agency that brought them to this result: no luck, chance, or the natural world intervening. Therefore, through looking at the language of the narrative of the death compared to Henry's dismissive planning of it, it further echoes their denial of reality. The fact the readers know the fate of the victim, similarly to Greek Tragedies, means the suspense is built up through understanding the phycology of these characters in order to explain what led them to this action.

The novel's structural similarities such as the units of time, place and action and unity between 'episodes' further create the novel to directly echo that of a Greek tragedy. In 'Poetics', Aristotle portrays that tragedies are not histories which show all the happenings of a single person or event, but instead, they are the narrative of a part of it, therefore the poet "should be concerned with a unified action, whole and complete, possessing a beginning, middle parts and an end". He interestingly uses the example of The Iliad and The Odyssey, in which they are both narratives of "one part" of something much bigger: for the Iliad: the Trojan War, and for the Odyssey: the life of Odysseus. This structural technique is adopted in The Secret History, in which the novel is based around one academic year at the college, and within that has a beginning, middle parts and end surrounding the unified action of the murder of Bunny. Furthermore, Aristotle advocates the importance of the events in tragedies as needing to be necessarily what would happen theoretically: it should be "the kind of thing that would happen, i.e. what is possible in accordance with probability" meaning there is a connection between events. Tartt achieves this, in the way that the events that occur are probable due to the character's fatal flaw of excessive elitism leading to their dismissal of the modern world, which in turn leads to their actions.

Another aspect that Tartt shares with Greek tragedies is the emphasis on both knowledge and language. Aristotle in 'Poetics' displays that tragedy can involve moments of recognition, in which characters change from ignorance to knowledge. This idea surrounds the plot of the novel, in which the threat of the 'recognition' of society drives their action of murder, and haunts them afterwards. Furthermore, the reader itself is a vehicle for recognition, in which they are moved from ignorance to knowledge on the answer to why they committed the crime as the novel progresses. Through this recognition comes the importance of language and words. The importance of language is consistent in Greek tragedies, not only due to the necessary constraints of a stage, meaning the action is often not shown but often told to the audience through verbal interaction, but the issues of tragedy on moral, political, philosophical and theological issues are all created through verbal interactions and exclaims of characters, meaning knowledge is directly connected to language. This is used in The Secret History, in which the ignorance of society to the student's crime is dependent on Bunny's verbal act of merely telling someone about what they did. Furthermore, the idea of the readers experiencing the action of the plot through verbal interaction is used in the novel, in which the Dionysian experiment is narrated not directly to the reader, but through Richard's conversation with Camilla and Henry in which they narrate it, and the murder of Bunny is told retrospectively through Richard. This creates this emphasis on language as the accuracy of the situation is dependent on the honesty of the narrators. Therefore, this emphasis on knowledge is shown through that the importance of language: as that is the source for displaying or hiding knowledge. Since humans are the source of both knowledge and language, it could be suggested that this emphasis on them further displays the fact that it was human autonomy, and with that their fatal flaw, that is the complete cause of their downfall.

With this idea comes the narrative style of the novel, which also is linked to that of a tragedy. A tragedy lacks a single authoritative and moral voice, meaning that they are filled with 'multiple voices' which exclaim their own ideologies and justifications to matters such as morality, politics and theology. In the same way, The Secret History lacks an authoritative omniscient narrator, as, through the first-person narration, the accuracy of the narration is necessarily undermined: and the readers lack a just and moral framework to judge the other characters by. However, since Richard is 'the outsider' of the group, it has been interpreted that his first-person narration echoes the Greek chorus, a neutral source of narrative for the audience: as he is a witness of the events, not truly involved in the action. However, it may be more convincing to argue that instead, his narrative voice creates this further idea of unreliability to the narration. We know, from the beginning of the novel, that his flaw is his "morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" and he acknowledges himself that he has an "inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light." Therefore, not only is the plot a chain of causality that started with the character's hamartia, but the narrative itself is too. Richard's inability to see anything in its "true light" echoes the seemingly collective hamartia of the group: the inability to see the world in it's "true light" but instead through their own thwarted classical lens. Therefore, as readers, this lack of an authoritative voice is prevalent and significant, as Richard is merely another 'point of view' in terms of the views of morality and justice in the novel, and the way the story is told becomes part of the plot itself: being a result of, what could be interpreted, the center of the novel: the fatal flaw.

Moreover, this idea of undermining characters goes against one of Aristotle's characteristics of a tragedy that he portrays in his 'Poetics', as he claims that it is "an imitation of people better than we are." This statement, at first glance, does not fit with the characters of The Secret History. However, from their constant comparatives to the classics, to their often reference to fiction itself, it could be suggested that the characters almost want their story to be a version of a Greek Tragedy, and for them, in this, they represent the 'better' people compared to the contemporary audience. This idea could be supported by the quotation "monstrous as it was, the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry's feet, to be discovered when the lights came up", along with the description of Bunny as "an old familiar jokester cast […] in the tragic role" and that Henry, when referencing his interaction with the FBI, "had waited in the wings a long while" so "he could step onto the stage and assume the role he'd written for himself." This theatrical lexis: "prop", "stagehands", "tragic role", "wings" further creates this idea of the character's refusing to see the world as it is: and in their idealized 'Greek Tragedy' version of reality, they believe they dominate 'better people' than their contemporaries. However, through looking at another of Aristotle's statements, the audience can understand the true nature of who envelopes the identity of the 'tragic hero' in the novel. Aristotle claims that the identity of the character who has the tragic fall cannot be "decent men" as this "does not evoke fear or pity, but disgust", neither can it be the "wicked person" as this is "agreeable." He concludes, therefore, that they must be "the person intermediate between this" who is "not outstanding in moral excellence or justice" and his tragic downfall is "not due to any moral defect or depravity but to an error of some kind." If we judge the characters of The Secret History through this definition, then we are left with Richard as the 'tragic hero' of the novel, as the other characters are mostly unamiable. Richard himself defines himself as fitting this categorization, as he claims that "I do not consider myself an evil person […] while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am a spectacularly bad one." Furthermore, his downfall remains consistent with Aristotle's definition, as it is due to an "error of some kind" instead of "moral depravity". Unlike the other characters, Richard's involvement in Bunny's murder is mainly passive, as his membership of the Greek class, knowledge of the happenings and location of being where Bunny's death occurs is by accident. Therefore, it could be argued that the character's desire to distort reality is further shown by the use of theatrical comparatives, emphasizing that they would aim for their story to be a Greek Tragedy: this would be an achievement for them, and by which they feel would encompass the "better people". However, for the reader's version of the tragedy, the characters are neither justified or "better" than contemporary society in the moral sense, but instead completely delusional to it. In the novel, therefore, the 'tragic hero', can be defined as our narrator, Richard, who we can feel both pity and fear for, as his "morbid longing for the picturesque" is the "error" that leads to his suffering.

To conclude, the novels consistent references to the classic world is a necessary part of the centrality of the novel: the student's ignorance at real reality, despite their intellectual talent, and with that, their determination to see the world as it is not, which can be labelled as the characters' 'fatal flaw', and reason for their ultimate downfall. The hostility of the characters vision of the world is shown at the beginning of the novel, prior to the prologue, in which a quote of Nietzsche is used, in which he asserts that '1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are' and '2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.' Reading the novel through this quote, their flaw is not only fatal as it leads to malice actions which they feel are justified, but it is fatal because it is necessarily unachievable: they cannot fully understand the classical world and live through this vision and its standards as members of the modern world. The characters dismiss this idea and are determined to see the world through an alternate lens. This necessarily creates issues on illusions: their desire to be in the presence of the God Dionysus: "the master of Illusions" and consistently live in a world they are not, and knowledge: the danger of it is what leads them to feel justified in their actions. Therefore, this inability to achieve an alternate reality, simultaneously with the inability to address, live in and live through the standards of the modern world leaves them to be unable to live through any perspective at all.

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A Close Reading of the Chilling Prologue of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

"why, looking for new ferns.".

I have been re-reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History every other year for almost two decades. I should say that I don’t make it a point to do this; it’s more that, somehow, I wind up with the book in my hands at regular intervals. And unfortunately (fortunately?) for me, if I pick the book up to read a page or two, or find a favorite line, I always feel compelled to read the whole thing again. Yes, it’s a sickness.

My re-reads usually happen in the winter, but I’ve noticed that I also gravitate to the novel during moments of personal anxiety and uncertainty. So you may not be surprised to hear that I’ve been reading it again recently. This time, I was struck anew by the book’s masterful prologue, which manages to beguile the reader, fire up the plot, and preview Tartt’s artistic concerns all at once. No small feat for the first page and a half of a debut novel.

The Secret History is so frequently referred to as a “why-done-it” (as opposed to a “who-done-it”) that I can’t identify the original source of the phrase (it was probably Tartt’s publicity team, all things considered). It’s easy to understand where this description comes from—after all, our narrator gives the game up right away. In the prologue, our narrator Richard sketches out what has become the defining moment of his life: when he and his friends kill someone named Bunny. Of course, on a first read, we don’t know who Bunny is, or why they’ve killed him. Which is exactly the point: it’s a ploy, a way to get a reader invested, telling them that you killed someone and that you’re going to explain yourself. Not bad, as a literary tool. But this is only what the prologue is doing in the broadest of terms. There’s much more to unpack here.

So let’s start at the beginning:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming in from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.

The first sentence in the book could, in many ways, stand in for the whole thing. It neatly juxtaposes the beauty of the natural world (mountains, melting snow, a sense of spring) with matter-of-fact murder (that stark, clean “Bunny had been dead for several weeks”), and then hints at the real genius of the book: the moral ambiguity of all of the characters—or at least their essential resistance to anything other than their own elaborate, quasi-hypothetical, Greek tragedy-infused narrative of themselves. (Richard later remarks on this more explicitly: “I suppose we’d simply thought about it too much, talked of it too often, until the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own . . . The idea of murdering Bunny was horrific, impossible; nonetheless we dwelt on it incessantly, convinced ourselves there was no alternative, devised plans which seemed slightly improbable and ridiculous but which actually worked quite well when put to the test.”) I mean, several weeks? They kill him; ten days later, the body is found; still it’s only weeks later, when they appreciate the magnitude of the response—an army helicopter!—that they come to “understand the gravity” of the situation. These are, after all, children playing at murder and myth, trying to touch the other side.

Right away, too, Tartt sets up the tone and storytelling style of the novel. The first sentence is formal, even a little stiff in its beauty—“the gravity of our situation”—while the second slides into this conspiratorial, storytelling mode of Richard as Everyman, even after so much time spent imitating his patrician friends. “He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.” Both the lean in and the lowered voice are implied.

But then, as if feeling how close he’s getting to the story he both wants to tell and to avoid, Richard circles away, reeling back from the reader, filling the space between himself and Bunny’s death with state troopers and helicopters and a list of all the states around Vermont.

Oddly, the next two paragraphs begin with the same phrase: “It is difficult to believe.” Here’s the first, which kicks off a chilling paragraph about how they weren’t even trying to hide the body, and that there would have been no story “had it not been for the snow that fell that night” and muddled up the narrative of a hiking accident:

It is difficult to believe that Henry’s modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events.

And here’s the second:

This is interesting, the kind of repetition that an editor might try to get you to vary before your final draft. (Circumstantial evidence would suggest that Tartt is resistant to editors, which I would consider in her case to be another mark of her genius, but I cannot prove this.) The second paragraph also comes after a hard stop, a horizontal line indicating a break in the narrative, which feels unusual in a prologue, especially one this short, but this underscores the functionality of these two mirrored paragraphs, both beginnings of a kind. The first focuses on what happened, what they did; the second is about Richard being the one (or one of the ones) to do it. Again, this is a reflection of the themes of the book writ large: Richard is almost equally baffled by the fact that any of this happened at all and that he was included in it, when he was so different from these alluring, amoral rich kids, bound to them only by their mutual obsession with beauty.

I wonder whether there was ever a draft in which the second “It is difficult to believe” was the first sentence in the book. It feels like it could be, but it’s the more subtle of the two, the less fantastic. If so, the choice to demote it was a good one, structurally, but for me, it gets closer to reflecting the most intriguing thread of the novel: Richard’s self-knowledge, or lack thereof.

After these paragraphs, we have turned the page, and we quickly see that we are coming to the end of the prologue, which is fine, because now we’ve come to the real crux of it: next, Richard recounts the moment just before Bunny’s death. Here it is as it appears in the prologue:

What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.

Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.

The actual murder is completely elided here, given no space at all: the next sentence and paragraph begins “And after we stood whispering in the underbrush. . . ” Richard simply moves on; after all he’s only trying to get you invested in his narrative. He’s not going to give you everything yet.

But here is the same moment as it appears 265 pages later, at the book’s midpoint:

“Tell me,” Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note of suspicion. “Just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?”

The woods were silent, not a sound.

Henry smiled. “Why, looking for new ferns,” he said, and took a step towards him.

This is followed by more blank space than anywhere else in the novel; it’s the end of Book I. In my copy that means a full six pages of space in which to imagine Bunny’s murder—the push, the fall—before Richard reappears at the beginning of chapter six to cringe and say “Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!).” And then he hems and haws and doesn’t really describe it at all. “I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story,” he tells us, and goes on to justify himself by explaining how he’s just like all the other murderers who keep the details of their crimes close to the vest. He claims a sense of unreality, but it’s a deft move by Tartt: she manages to keep the suspense—about a murder we’ve known from the first page would happen, no less—alive by continuing to shroud it from us. How much different would this scene feel with even the slightest description of Henry pushing Bunny?

But back to the repeated moment just before the push, which I find particularly fascinating. The prologue version has no dialogue markers, a move which often gives an exchange a kind of inexactness—the sense is of summarization or general recounting as opposed to an exact reporting of who said what. This makes perfect sense; Tartt sets up the prologue to introduce Richard’s story as one being written years after the events of the book’s present action. So by the time Richard is writing the prologue, this exchange, the moment before the act he couldn’t come back from, has become a kind of personal legend. Of course the two recountings aren’t exactly the same. Except when it comes to Henry.

Maybe this is just because Henry’s line here is so ineffably incredible. I mean, it’s essentially Henry’s entire character in one sentence: erudite, false, menacing, but also somehow innocent (faux-innocent?), hopeful, secret-seeking, nature-seeking. It’s such a sweet and weird and terrifying thing to say before you murder someone. “Why, looking for new ferns.” That “why,” those ferns!

But it’s also because this is a novel about one person being fully transfixed by another, about Richard’s shame and pleasure at being led up to the edge of the cliff and off of it. If the moment just before Bunny’s death has become legend for Richard, Henry himself has become myth. In my reading, it’s Henry, not the murder of a friend, that Richard can’t quite shake.

The prologue ends like this:

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Of course, as we already know, he is barely capable of telling it. He circles and circles and tries not to look. Which, of course, makes us the rest of us look all the harder.

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Emily Temple

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Slanted Spines

The Secret History: A Book Review

Reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt is like drinking black coffee and smoking a cigarette at a hotel bar while a well-dressed stranger recounts the tragedy of their New England college experience in an academic cult of Greek scholars. It delivers you something bold, dark, and electrifying that washes down your throat with a sophisticated melancholy, while also stimulating you with a smoky, lonely buzz which sobers the heart and leaves you with exquisite yearning; as soon as you’re done with your first cup and cig, you immediately reach for the next to begin the addicting cycle again as hours pass and the stranger talks on and on.

The narrator of our story is a gentleman named Richard, and he begins The Secret History with a shocking confession: we pushed Bunny off a ledge in the woods and left him for dead in the ravine . Richard uses the prologue to explain that he and his colleagues didn’t mean for Bunny to be missing, but for ten days, he lay in that ravine undiscovered, beneath blankets of unseasonably late snow. Grimly, Richard reflects that this is now the only story he can ever bear to tell—and, hooked by this blatant admission, the reader desperately wonders, Why did they kill this “Bunny”?

Chapter One begins with Richard’s musings on “the fatal flaw”: he writes, “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (p. 5) He confides that he has always liked to capture reality through an aesthetic filter. His compulsion is to doctor the truth, manipulating it towards some beauteous ideal and as the book progresses, we see that conveyed in the way that Richard casually lies about his origins. At Hampden College in Vermont, when Richard speaks to others about his life growing up in California, he never mentions that his father runs a gas station nor that his mother answers phones at a factory; rather, he orates his “fictive childhood” of “orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents” (p. 5). His desire for beauty comes at the price of his moral integrity, and he maintains his lies even in the face of others’ doubts.

A scheduling dilemma arises in his first week at Hampden: Richard wants to major in Greek, but in a rather unprecedented situation, the singular Greek teacher, Julian Morrow, only accepts five students into his class and teaches practically every class those students take. All five positions are full, and although Richard has prior education in Greek, he is turned away from the exclusive program.

Because of their removed nature from the rest of Hampden’s student body, the five Greek students evolve in Richard’s mind, and from afar he studies their poised, scholarly nature and old-fashioned, quirky routines. Their distance and mysterious nature excite Richard’s fixated imagination. During his first encounter with the group at the campus library, he writes, “It was if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoke to me” (pp. 21-22). With persistence and a carefully calibrated demeanor, Richard manages to persuade Julian to accept him as a sixth student, and thus, Richard joins their removed society.

Its imagery is vivid and moody, and the first hundred pages warmly encapsulate the autumnal experience in eastern United States:

“The sun was low, burning gold through the trees, casting our shadows before us on the ground, long and distorted. We walked for a long time without saying anything. The air was musty with far-off bonfires, sharp with the edge of a twilight chill. There was no noise but the crunch of our shoes on the gravel path, the whistle of wind in the pines; I was sleepy and my head hurt and there was something not quite real about any of it, something like a dream. I felt that at any moment I might start, my head on a pile of books at my desk, and find myself in a darkening room, alone.” Page 68

For me, the beginning of this novel conjured the melancholy mood of a displaced Salinger character such as Holden in The Catcher in the Rye or the candor for academics ignited in a work like Dead Poets Society . However, as the autumn setting transitions to winter and some darker atmosphere, the novel slinks into the shadows to lick its wounds and hunker down for a long and snowy winter, and into an even less-hopeful spring.

Brilliantly eerie, one of Julian’s first lectures foreshadows the themes of the novel. In a discussion about the dangers of an ordered civilization repressing its irrational animal instinct, the following conversation transpires:

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” Page 41

As the reader, we know that these concepts hint at what is to happen, but we wonder, What could it be? It is as if we are wandering through a fog which obscures the horizon, yet we know we must tread carefully, nerves attuned and alert.

This novel is quite a slow-burner, yet tension is constantly mounting. The narration is expert—although in the view of first-person, Richard is an academic, so we experience the poised and restrained tone of a narrator poignantly reflecting. And even more expert, although Richard delivers precisely what transpired, we do not see what is truly happening behind the scenes until it dawns on him, in time, as well. In this way, we are truly able to experience how Richard became so inundated in the group of the Greek students, how he was so easily able to sweep away any definite sense of morality in order to adhere to the group’s ambiguous “best interest.” Because he is so indoctrinated within their mini-society and kept blind about just the right things, it is shocking how he can be steered in just the right direction to do the wrong thing.

While there were many elements of this book I was able to appreciate, there are, I’m sure, countless other allusions which went over my head, as I know little of Latin or Greek literature or language, of which the characters are so elaborately educated. In searching Donna Tartt’s own words about this book, I discovered that she began writing it while she was attending college in Vermont, and it wasn’t until some years later and much work that she finally managed to conclude the manuscript and sell it to a publisher as her debut novel.

In reflecting on this book’s overarching elements, I found myself drawing likenesses between it and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Richard’s an unreliable narrator, much like the The Great Gatsby ’s narrator Nick Carraway. In the latter, Nick begins the novel by confessing that some years have transpired since the book’s events, and while he will do his best to recall them accurately, he is still subject to bias in that he truly did admire Gatsby, even after everything was said and done. Similarly, Richard narrates The Secret History seven years after the novel’s events and begins with his admission of his “fatal flaw” being a fixation on beauty and the elegantly contrived and how the upcoming story is one of particular preoccupation for him. The characters in The Great Gatsby are wealthy, white, young adults who enjoy partying and have little regard for consequence, until events inadvertently go awry and result in casualties. Although significantly more academic in nature, the characters in The Secret History are wealthy, white, entitled youth who spend their leisure time roaming about a mansion, getting absolutely drunk, and feeling as though they can do whatever they want—even when there are casualties. In the end, both novels feature characters with “larger than life” personas, carefully articulated facades that present to the world a contrived notion of their identity, and how from all this, there may be some deadly consequences.

This is not to say that Donna Tartt set out to mimic The Great Gatsby , nor that she was even influenced or inspired by it, but for my own satisfaction of sketching a literary parallel. More likely, Tartt was influenced by classics like Dostoevsky; however I have no experience reading these books and have spent a great deal of my own academic career analyzing The Great Gatsby . And where Fitzgerald’s classic is ambiguous and brief, Tartt’s is thorough and lengthy.

Certainly, while this book is many things, it’s not a book that boasts diversity—all of the characters are privileged and white, and only one or two main characters are even women. I also noted the following trigger and content warnings: Drug and alcohol abuse, heavy use of tobacco, murder, minor animal abuse, one rape fantasy, suicide, homophobic speech, and Islamophobic speech.

While this book, to me, is darkly engaging and gorgeously crafted, it is also quite challenging. The writing is elaborate and rambling, and the emotions it evokes are anxious and agitated. It is no casual reverie, but rather a beast quite rewarding to slay. Because of this, I think that some readers may not enjoy it like I have; however, I cannot blame anyone for this. I recommend this book highly if this genre speaks to you, and if you have read this entire review, then I believe you will have rather instinctual understanding of whether or not you would like reading The Secret History . Ultimately, I rated it 5/5 stars because I think it is a genius story written excellently.

Reviewer’s Note: This book review was written using the UK Penguin edition and therefore page numbers may differ.

Visit this page for more Book Reviews by Slanted Spines.

Book Review: The Secret History

Donna Tartt and her debut novel The Secret History is one that will stick with me for quite a long time. The Secret History follows insecure Richard Papen, a somewhat timid boy from Plano California. Richard, desperate to leave Plano and his unattentive parents, decides to go to college at Hampden, a school in Vermont, specializing in Humanities. Of course, when Richard arrives, he completely falls in love with Hampden and its very "Dead Poets Society" vibe to the school. Previously wanting to be in the medical field, but soon after developing a distaste for the field, Richard promptly decides to turn to studying the classics. We discover Julian, the only teacher of Greek in the college, who only takes five students a year in his class. Somehow, Richard makes it into this selective course, becoming the sixth member. We as readers are introduced to the slightly odd and quirky members of the Greek class, and come along with Richard as he slowly develops a friendship with each of them. However, Richard deduces that something is off about his new friends, and with this, dark secrets are unraveled, and we watch as each of the classmates descend into madness. The Secret History touches upon the study of human morality, and the concept that terrible things hold a kind of beauty to them. I really enjoyed reading this novel and being forced to face psychological dilemmas. What is good? What is evil? What makes someone good or evil? The Secret History really led me around by the nose, and I enjoyed the twists and turns I experienced because of this novel. There were many influential quotes in this story and the writing was beautiful. Even though the novel might have a darker mood, I couldn't help but be enraptured by every word Tartt set out for me. Overall, if you enjoy a "dark academia" style of book, and is willing to read this novel with an open mindset, The Secret History is definitely for you.

Reviewer Grade: 11

Literature & Fiction
Genre Fiction

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The Secret History Paperback – September 11, 1992

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Print length 576 pages
Language English
Publication date September 11, 1992
Dimensions 5.13 x 0.99 x 8 inches
ISBN-10 1400031702
ISBN-13 978-1400031702
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Alfred A Knopf (September 11, 1992)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400031702
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400031702
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 0.99 x 8 inches
#33 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
#102 in Literary Fiction (Books)
#163 in Suspense Thrillers

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About the author

Donna tartt.

Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch.

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The secret history, excellent choice.

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A murder mystery about a group of classicists at a small New England college and a page-turner that makes reference as easily to T. S. Eliot as it does to TV and fast food.

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Unreliable narrator

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

Free sample

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.

It is difficult to believe that Henry’s modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn’t intended to hide the body where it couldn’t be found. In fact, we hadn’t hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until the snow above it was packed down like ice.

It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it—the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl—without incurring a blink of suspicion. But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.

What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.

Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.

And after we stood whispering in the underbrush—one last look at the body and a last look round, no dropped keys, lost glasses, everybody got everything?—and then started single file through the woods, I took one glance back through the saplings that leapt to close the path behind me.

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Why I love it

James Kaplan

Writers, against all reason (and whatever we pretend), are competitive creatures. And so when Vanity Fair assigned me, in the spring of 1992, to profile the author of that fall's big, hot novel, a first novel that had fetched an advance of close to a million dollars, my initial reaction, as a recent first-novelist myself who had garnered some moderately good reviews and sold a couple of thousand books, was envious and dismissive.

Until I read the novel in question: Donna Tartt's The Secret History .

From the first sentence— The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation —I was drawn almost feverishly into what turned out to be, of all things, an intellectual thriller: a murder mystery whose core characters were a group of classicists at a small New England college, likely to break out at any moment into Latin or Attic Greek; a page-turner that made easy reference to T. S. Eliot, Pliny, and A. E. Housman—and, just as easily, to TV, movies, and fast food.

The book was infused with the thrill of the life of the mind, but its true secret was that its pleasures were visceral. The plot was dark and breathless and tumbling, the writing simple and clean and compelling, filled with images so beautiful they cleared the nasal passages. Repressed sexuality—of all kinds—ran like a river of hot lava throughout, now and then bursting into startling flame.

Who could have produced such a work? The author, it turned out, was a piece of work herself: tiny and mildly androgynous in her boy's clothes, with dark bobbed hair, spooky pale-green eyes, an ever-present Marlboro Gold, and an ever-flowing stream of quotations from Buddha and Plato and Thomas Aquinas, from A. A. Milne and Talking Heads. Tartt came from a tiny hamlet in deepest Mississippi, and she had pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma at Ole Miss before transferring to Bennington, the intellectual-bohemian hothouse of a college in chilly Vermont which bore more than a passing resemblance to Hampden College, The Secret History's Gothic setting.

Surely, I thought, Donna Tartt's own unusual life was a key to the book's puzzles. Yet she deftly parried my biographical prying, salting the basic information she vouchsafed with ever more entertaining quotations and references, cocking her head teasingly like the rare and strange bird she was.

Tiny feathered creatures, it turned out, meant a great deal to her. One in particular: "Goldfinches are the greatest little birds," she told me then. "They're the last to settle down—they just fly around and they're happy for a long time, and just sing and play. And only when it's insanely late in the year, they kind of break down and build their nests. I love goldfinches — they're my favorite bird."

Two decades later, of course, Tartt would publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning third novel called The Goldfinch . Could she have had any inkling in 1992 in which direction her work would take her? Good writers know how to keep their secrets.

Member ratings (7,053)

Lindsey P .

The best book I’ve read in at least a year. It’s always about the journey in Tartt’s books but the ending will still surprise you. I simply can’t stop thinking about this story and its characters.

Neotsu , OR

❤️this book! A deep read, very well thought out; find yourself swept along the current of mystery and intrigue alongside the story’s core players as they discover the interplay, & horror they created!

Dillon , MT

I honestly don’t know why I like this as much as I do. It’s morbid, and filled with unlikeable characters. The writing is wonderful though, and it’s a perfect book to get lost in during the late fall.

Jenkintown , PA

I absolutely loved Tartt’s style in The Goldfinch-it’s so rich and vivid. That same style shines in The Secret History. It’s an absorbing read of a group of students drawn deeper into a dark spiral.

Terrell , TX

Although it wasn’t a book that I was instantly entranced into, I began to really get into it as the pages flew by. I came to love each of the eccentric characters and didn’t want it to end. Great book

March 10 The newsroom is open! Contributions welcome.

The student news site of Brimmer and May School | Chestnut Hill, MA

Book Review: A Secret History

Since 2022, The Secret History by Donna Tartt has made itself known through social media, book groups, and other online reviews. A modern classic, Tartt weaves a tale so complex that it leaves the reader thinking about the ending for days.

Following Richard Papen, a student studying classics at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, the story twists and turns as he struggles through mental and physical problems.

Murder, money, and the lives of young adults captivate the audience in this riveting book.

Told from an older Richard’s perspective, the ordinary life of a small, tight-knit group unfolds into an adventure, one that takes more from its occupants than it gives. Bunny, Henry, Charles, Camilla, Francis, and Richard learn from an eccentric, wealthy professor who’s teaching a dying subject: classics.

This theme is consistent throughout the book, providing reasoning behind some of the more extreme actions taken by the young adults to keep a secret.

Realistic human emotions such as longing, jealousy, innateness for people-pleasing, and insecurity are represented through the protagonist, a factor that is very important for an immersive read.

This book is categorized as a mystery novel, but it seems more like psychological fiction. The reader spends more of the book figuring out whether

Richard’s recounting of the events of his life is reliable, introducing a whole new level of mystique. When he finally feels included in the friend group of his dreams, he realizes that not everything is as it seems.

Are his friends really what they seem, and how far will they go to keep a secret?

This is an “I will stay up reading until 2 a.m.” book. It’s almost physically impossible to set it down, and when put away, it leaves the reader thinking and theorizing more and more.

As a many-layered story, you can’t just read it once. To fully comprehend the amount of what’s going on, a second read-through would be helpful.

Though the buildup is long and drawn out, the ending is abrupt and everything happens a bit too quickly.

For all of the months that Richard and his friends spent meticulously planning and weaving their web of lies to a T, the whole thing collapses a bit too easily.

Of course, this could be interpreted as young people’s emotions running high under pressure, though it just seems a bit too quick to be a satisfactory finish.

On TikTok for (maybe) the past year, the book has gained lots of traction. It’s become incredibly popular for book lovers, and for a while, I couldn’t understand why it was sweeping across the internet.

But now, it makes me wonder; are there other books out there that are just as good that deserve to be talked about?

The Secret History is a book that is perfect for discussions, and it’s no astonishment that everyone is talking about it. Tartt’s thrilling story is perfect for a not-too-long, but still intellectual and controversial read.

The student news site of Brimmer and May School | Chestnut Hill, MA

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Amanda Eppers • Nov 14, 2023 at 1:16 pm

Nice review Polly! Having gone to Bennington, the college “Hampton” is based on, 30 plus years ago when the book was published, it’s lovely to see Donna’s book re-surface with such an interest.

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Jewish refugees in Lübeck, Germany, September 1947.

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone review – a timely corrective to a shifting narrative

An erudite account of the Nazi genocide reiterates neglected truths and exposes modern attempts to rewrite the facts

I n many ways, writes historian Dan Stone, “we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust”. His remarkable book offers both a narrative overview and an analysis of the events, challenging many common assumptions and often returning to how this terrible history remains “unfinished”.

Some recent scholarly studies of the Holocaust, Stone argues, have stressed “the reactive nature of German decision-making, driven primarily by military circumstance”. He does not dispute the importance of contingent factors, such as rivalries between different Nazi factions, or how the leadership ramped up the level of persecution after the public largely failed to object to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 and then the T-4 euthanasia programme. But he also puts a firm emphasis on “ideology, understood as a kind of phantasmagorical conspiracy theory, as the kernel of Nazi thinking and action”.

Another issue Stone addresses head on is the sheer variety of Nazi brutality. The Holocaust is sometimes seen as “characterised by the modern efficiency of factory-line murder”. In reality, as the book makes clear, such “industrial genocide” was accompanied by “huge numbers of Jews [who] were shot in face-to-face killings reminiscent of colonial massacres, albeit on a vast scale” or “in ghettos, where they were starved to death”. Even Auschwitz was “low-tech, partly built on scavenged materials”.

A powerful chapter explores what happened when the war ended. Liberation, claims Stone, “needs to be understood in inverted commas: many survivors died soon afterwards, too ill to be helped, and many more, amazed to have outlived the Nazi regime, were shocked to discover that they remained captive, unable to go where they wanted” – the last displaced persons camp was not closed until 1957. Jews who managed to return to homes in western Europe found their suffering and stories “subsumed into official narratives of resistance, patriotic sacrifice and national solidarity”. For most east European Jews, “home no longer existed”. Though prewar Jewish politics were “remarkably varied”, as Stone points out, it is hardly surprising that “Zionism prevailed” in the DP camps, where inmates “felt rejected by Europe, which they rejected in turn”.

Although the Holocaust was obviously initiated by Germans, it was very much “a continent-wide crime” and found willing and often enthusiastic collaborators right across Europe. Such people, according to Stone, were motivated by “greed, nationalist aspirations and ideological affinity with Nazism”, but he also points to “the disturbing fact… that many perpetrators appear to have taken part because they enjoyed doing so”.

This may not be news to historians, but many countries, particularly in post-communist eastern Europe, have been slow to acknowledge their level of complicity. Recent national commissions of inquiry have shed valuable light on this troubling history, but they have also bred what Stone calls “the ressentiment ” that is “one of the roots of the revival of fascism in Europe today”.

A 2018 law made it “ a criminal offence to accuse Poles of being complicit in the Nazi murder of the Jews”. According to a scholar called Jan Grabowski, he and his fellow “independent historians of the Shoah continue to face today, in Poland, the full might and wrath of the state”.

Nationalists in post-communist eastern Europe have understandably emphasised the appalling atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. But Stone flags up the way this is sometimes linked to the notion that communism was “a ‘Jewish’ ideology” brought into the region from outside, implying that the Holocaust can be seen in this light as “a justifiable response”.

As this may suggest, Stone is sceptical about the oft-proclaimed benefits of Holocaust education and commemoration. Back in the 1990s, he believes, awareness of the Holocaust was not only widespread but “channelled in favour of human rights, cosmopolitanism and progressive ideas”. Since the millennium, however, “this confident narrative has been derailed. The use of Holocaust memory to further nationalist agendas, to facilitate geopolitical alliances on the far right or to ‘expose’ progressive thinkers for their supposed antisemitism or anti-Israel bias is now a familiar part of the landscape.”

The implications of all this could hardly be more sobering. Just as “Nazism was the most extreme manifestation of sentiments that were quite common, and for which Hitler acted as a kind of rainmaker or shaman”, suggests Stone, the defeat of his regime has left us with “a dark legacy, a deep psychology of fascist fascination and genocidal fantasy that people turn to instinctively in moments of crisis – we see it most clearly in the alt-right and the online world, spreading into the mainstream, of conspiracy theory”. His book offers a brisk, compelling and scholarly account of the Nazi genocide and its aftermath. But never for one moment does it let us believe that the events are now safely in the past.

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The Observer
Second world war

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Simon Pure's debut as Redcoat delivers on comedy and mischief in a world where history meets fantasy.
Ghost Machine's newest series kicks off strong, setting up a fun and exciting universe with more surprises to come.

Warning! Spoilers ahead for Redcoat #1! Fans of wildly alternative history and comedy are in for a serious treat with Image Comics and Ghost Machine's new series, Redcoat . Simon Pure is the newest character in the Unnamed Universe to get a series and his debut does not disappoint.

Ghost Machine has brought together some of the biggest names in the comic book industry and the imprint is hitting the ground running with its first wave of comics. Redcoat might be the new kid on the block, but this new comic's creative team has put together a title that has the potential to become a real fan-favorite.

Redcoat and His Role in the Unnamed Universe

Ghost Machine is nothing but ambitious and has been building up a universe since before the imprint was even announced. The Unnamed Universe is an interconnected world that began with Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's Geiger , the series about a radioactive hero who fights his way through a nuclear wasteland. The universe was later expanded with Junkyard Joe , a series about a mysterious robot soldier who fought alongside the United States Army in the Vietnam War. Both series in the Unnamed Universe touched on war and the effects it has on soldiers.

The first volumes of Geiger and Junkyard Joe are available in collected editions from Image Comics!

After the imprint was officially announced, Ghost Machine and Image Comics gave fans a better look at what to expect from the new line of comics with Ghost Machine #1 . The sampler not only provided a refresher on series like Geiger, it provided a timeline of the grander Unnamed Universe, giving readers an idea of just how wide-ranging this universe was. Ghost Machine #1 also provided a look at Redcoat , aka Simon Pure, and how he fit into this wild new universe.

Redcoat is an immortal who once served as a soldier in the British army in the 1700s. However, at some point, Pure became an immortal and later a mercenary, leading him to live a life where he’d wind up meeting some of the most famous figures in history such as Benedict Arnold, Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, and even Einstein. Redcoat’s powers don't mean he can't die , he just comes back to life after a short period. Redcoat also has a nasty habit of making enemies out of everyone he meets.

Redcoat #1 is an Excellent Blend of History, Magic, and Humor

Redcoat #1 by Geoff Johns, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, Brad Anderson, and Rob Leigh kicks off in 1775 as Paul Revere rides through the streets warning of the coming Redcoats. Unfortunately, his message comes too late as he’s attacked by a swath of British officers. But things quickly turn in Revere’s favor as the soldiers are attacked by magic fireflies summoned by John Hancock. Hancock reveals that thanks to the Founding Fathers’ magic powers, the tide of war will turn in the patriots' favor .

After Simon is killed in a bar fight, he wakes up while his coffin is being dug up by a young Albert Einstein.

A year later, British soldier Simon Pure runs for his life as he's hunted by Americans. He hides in a church, where he discovers a magic ritual is being performed on Benjamin Franklin. However, Pure accidentally botches the ritual and the power meant to be transferred to Franklin is given to Pure instead. The power is too much and causes a massive explosion in the church, which kills Simon. But sometime later, Pure wakes up, the first of many resurrections for the man who’d become known as Redcoat .

In the late 1800s, Simon is a deadbeat on the run from dozens of people who want him dead. However, a bright young German man spots Redcoat and starts to follow him. After Simon is killed in a bar fight, he wakes up while his coffin is being dug up by a young Albert Einstein. Einstein attempts to recruit Redcoat to stop a “great evil”, but before Simon can tell the young man ‘no’, the two are surrounded by the magic order Redcoat interrupted over a century ago .

Redcoat #1 is a Hilarious Journey Through Time

Ghost Machine released several other titles in its first big wave, and none of them are funnier than Redcoat . This series knows exactly what it is, a lighthearted story that’s out to make its audience laugh, which it does thanks to its central character. Redcoat is reminiscent of characters like John Constantine , a morally flexible jackass who can’t help but get himself into trouble thanks to his unique powers and way of living. Redcoat’s a fun character and he stands out compared to the more serious protagonists found in Geiger or Rook: Exodus .

The prospect of Redcoat making enemies or allies out of other famous people in future issues is an intriguing one.

It’s a bold choice to present the Founding Fathers as a magic and powerful cabal, but it makes for a hell of an opening chapter. From the get-go, fans know that this story is going to be something different. Geoff Johns gets a lot of mileage out of using real-world figures like Ben Franklin or Albert Einstein. The prospect of Redcoat making enemies or allies out of other famous people in future issues is an intriguing one (especially if they’re also given a sinister, magic makeover).

The issue’s inkers, Bryan Hitch and Andrew Currie do a fantastic job of illustrating this book. Simon is a wildly expressive individual, which makes the shenanigans he gets into even more entertaining. But the art is also extremely captivating during the issue’s many magic scenes, such as when Redcoat gains his immortality and the page displays Simon in a recursive pattern. Brad Anderson more than pulls his weight on colors and gives these scenes just the right touch of color to make Redcoat #1 feel like a magic experience .

Redcoat #1 Could Be Ghost Machine's Hidden Star

Ghost Machine is coming out the gate strong with multiple titles and more on the way. From the very first page, Redcoat #1 finds its voice with a unique blend of comedy, magic and historical mischief. While not as serious as some of the other titles, Redcoat #1 plays to its strengths and sets up a fun exciting world that’s undoubtedly got more surprises in the near future. Fans looking for something with action that’s downright fun need look no further than Image Comics and Ghost Machine’s Redcoat #1 .

Redcoat #1 is available now from Ghost Machine and Image Comics.

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Our school review, what our pupils thought.

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“The pictures are comical and the illustrator is talented.”

Out of 5 stars, the pupils give this book:

About the book club:

What our educators thought

“This book has been brilliant for this group. They aren’t keen readers but every single one has asked every day when we’re reading next. They have also taken it home to share with parents and have asked me to find other graphic novels for them. The buzz this book has created for these 6 children is incredible. It’s easily accessible for children who aren’t fluently reading yet and the pictures help to tell the story.”

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Artwork from the cover of the Spanish version of Brandon Sanderson’s book Shadows of Self shows a stylish character attacking another while dual-wielding staffs in an alley.

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2024 Spring Entertainment Preview

A guide to finally getting into Brandon Sanderson books

From Elantris to the latest crowdfunded blockbusters, here’s how to jump in

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Polygon is looking ahead to the movies, shows, and books coming soon in our Spring 2024 entertainment preview package, a weeklong special issue.

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and prolific fantasy and science fiction authors of all time, with a devoted following that funded the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date and has pledged over $20 million on Backerkit for his latest crowdfunding effort.

But his expansive bibliography can make it difficult to figure out where to start if you want to jump into his many worlds and series. With new books set for this spring, we’ve put together a primer to help guide you through the Cosmere and beyond.

Where to start

Sanderson published his first novel, Elantris , in 2005 and began building an audience with impressive world-building and a focus on complex magic systems. Sanderson recommends Elantris as a starting point for his work, especially for readers who don’t have much experience with the fantasy genre.

Elantris is a strong debut, a twisty tale of a cursed prince, a princess who won’t let a failed engagement get in the way of doing her duty, and a warrior priest on a mission of salvation. It’s not too long or full of jargon to be intimidating, and it introduces many of the themes of faith and hope against despair that would be iconic of Sanderson’s work. It’s the first book of his I read, and I immediately wanted more.

A 10th anniversary book cover for Elantris shows a woman standing on steps while looking at a city off in the distance.

$10 at Bookshop.org
$13 at Amazon
$10 at Barnes & Noble

Elantris doesn’t currently have a sequel, but the Hugo Award-winning novella The Emperor’s Soul shares its setting. (Technically, so do a lot of Sanderson’s books, but I’ll get to that later.) The Emperor’s Soul , which tells the tale of a jailed forger given an impossible task, is also on Sanderson’s list of good starting points. It’s perfect if you want to get a tiny taste of the level of creativity and detail the author brings to the genre without much commitment.

My personal favorite Sanderson book is Warbreaker , and it’s where Sanderson recommends fans who like a good romance begin. Warbreaker follows a princess wedded to a terrifying God King, her sister on a mission to save her, and an amnesiac trying to puzzle out the mystery of his own past and the truth about his faith. The book stands alone, but it’s a must-read if you want to delve into Sanderson’s later books given that some of its characters appear in his Stormlight Archive series.

$10 at Amazon
$11 at Barnes & Noble

Sanderson kicked off his first series with the 2006 release of Mistborn . Set in a grim world controlled by an immortal tyrant, it follows a young woman with great power who joins a thieving crew with a plan to change things that involves equal parts ballroom dancing and rooftop fighting. The rest of the trilogy gets progressively more political and cosmic, and Sanderson offers Mistborn as a starting point for veteran fantasy fans who don’t mind diving into the deep end.

$23 at Amazon
$31 at Barnes & Noble
$33 at Bookshop.org

The Wheel of Time and Sanderson’s ascension

Mistborn caught the attention of Harriet McDougal , wife of Robert Jordan, who died in 2007 without finishing his epic series The Wheel of Time . He’d asked McDougal to find someone to complete his work and she chose Sanderson for the job. The release of The Gathering Storm , the first of three books Sanderson wrote based on Jordan’s notes for how the series would end, propelled him to the New York Times bestseller list.

A man stands outside a house in a fantasy setting with his fist in the air on the book cover for The Gathering Storm.

$18 at Amazon
$20 at Barnes & Noble

Reading The Wheel of Time is its own massive 15-novel undertaking, but anyone who put down the series wondering if they should revisit it will find that Sanderson used his deep respect for Jordan’s work and his own skills juggling big casts of powerful characters to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. The generally positive reception to Sanderson’s work on the series brought him a new influx of fans. There were even jokes that Sanderson would finish George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, though it would be hard to pick a worse candidate given how different the authors are tonally.

But Sanderson’s reputation as a closer gave publishers and readers the confidence to invest in his ambitions for a series of his own that would rival The Wheel of Time. After completing the Mistborn trilogy with the The Hero of Ages in 2008, Sanderson released The Way of Kings in 2010 as the first entry in a planned 10-book series called The Stormlight Archive. But it’s turned out to be a lot more than that.

What is the Cosmere?

It turns out Sanderson always intended to make his books part of a shared universe, even though it didn’t seem like it at first glance. The ending of the Mistborn trilogy provided the first real glimpse of his ambitions to tell the story of the Cosmere — a universe based around a murder.

A long, long time ago, the story goes, a being known as Adonalsium — a riff on a Hebrew name for God — was killed and its power was split into 16 Shards taken by people who then scattered to different planets. Whatever they were before gaining those Shards, those people became known by the power they became Vessels for, embodying abstract concepts such as Honor, Ruin, and Devotion.

Sanderson has invented several distinct magic systems over the years, with Mistborn operating on properties of consuming different metals while Warbreaker is all about color and breath. And it turns out the variation is caused by which Shards inhabit which planet, and those who know enough about the way Shards work can move between Sanderson’s worlds, furthering their own ambitions. Sanderson is a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering , and there are strong parallels to that game’s Planeswalkers in his books.

The book cover for The Way of Kings shows a simple golden design on a blue background.

$11 at Bookshop.org
$16 at Amazon
$21 at Barnes & Noble

The Way of Kings starts off much like many of Sanderson’s other books, introducing a fascinating world and a big cast of characters. The world of Roshar is filled with squabbling princes, giant crabs with gems for hearts, powerful storms, and warriors carrying oversized swords. Along with releasing four 1,000-plus-page books in the series so far, Sanderson has also published two Stormlight Archive novellas, Edgedancer and Dawnshard , between books. Edgedancer is a particularly fun read, following a very hungry thief who gets embroiled in a complicated attempt at a succession. The fifth Stormlight Archive book, Wind and Truth , is due out at the end of this year.

You can enjoy The Way of Kings without having read any of Sanderson’s other books, but if you have, the series quickly becomes much more complex, with Sanderson’s world-building growing to encompass thousands of years of history spread across multiple planets. The clashes on Roshar turn out to be just a front in a war between Shards that has roped in characters from previous books. Even if you’ve read everything Sanderson’s written, it can be hard to figure out who’s who, since characters often go by different names or hide the full extent of their abilities and knowledge.

Working on one epic series would be enough for most authors, but from 2010 to 2022 Sanderson also penned four more Mistborn books, starting with Shadows of Self in 2015. These are set 300 years after the original trilogy in a version of the world that’s more akin to urban fantasy or a Western. The characters from the first three books are revered as religious figures, though some are actually still around due to their powers. The events of the fourth book in the series, The Lost Metal , are closely tied to The Stormlight Archive.

Reading all of the Cosmere books in order isn’t necessary. You just might be baffled by why there’s a talking sword or who’s explaining the nature of Shards in a chapter’s intro text. The real problem can come if you get hooked and want to go backward in Sanderson’s bibliography, because you may become unknowingly spoiled for some events.

An easy workaround is to read the Cosmere books in the chronological order here:

Elantris (2005)
Mistborn (2006)
The Well of Ascension (2007)
The Hero of Ages (2008)
Warbreaker (2009)
The Way of Kings (2010)
The Alloy of Law (2011)
The Emperor’s Soul (2012)
Words of Radiance (2014)
Shadows of Self (2015)
The Bands of Mourning (2016)
Edgedancer (2017)
Oathbringer (2017)
Dawnshard (2020)
Rhythm of War (2020)
The Lost Metal (2022)

If you want to focus on individual series to follow the same set of characters, here’s how you would do that, with notes on books you should read first to avoid major spoilers.

The Emperor’s Soul
The Way of Kings
Words of Radiance
Oathbringer (read Warbreaker before Oathbringer )
Rhythm of War (read the Mistborn trilogy before Rhythm of War )
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
The Alloy of Law
Shadows of Self
The Bands of Mourning
The Lost Metal (read Elantris , The Emperor’s Soul , and Rhythm of War before The Lost Metal )

The ‘secret projects’

Unable to go on book tours, attend conventions, or do any other type of traveling during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Sanderson did what he does best and wrote four more books. He turned to Kickstarter in 2022 to fund their publication and raised nearly $42 million. The campaign remains the site’s most successful campaign of all time.

The book cover for The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England shows an illustrated book, a hat, and a futuristic gun.

All of the books have since been delivered and are widely for sale. The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England is a stand-alone story about an amnesiac time traveler. Tress of the Emerald Sea , Yumi and the Nightmare Painter , and The Sunlit Man are Cosmere novels, each set on a different planet that hasn’t appeared in any of Sanderson’s other works and narrated by Hoid, a mysterious character who is prominent in The Stormlight Archive.

They all work as stand-alones, though they do have concepts that are integrated into other series, and knowing Sanderson, they’ll probably tie back into his greater plans eventually. You can read them in any order while waiting for the next Stormlight Archive book or potentially even as an intro to Sanderson based on if you like post-apocalyptic settings ( The Sunlit Man ), The Princess Bride ( Tress of the Emerald Sea ), body swapping (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter ), or just want to try something that has nothing at all to do with the rest of his bibliography ( The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England ).

A new secret project is also expected to ship in 2025 as part of a crowdfunding campaign for leather-bound copies of Words of Radiance , the second (and, in my opinion, best so far) book in The Stormlight Archive.

Sanderson for young adults

While Sanderson’s books often deal with heavy themes like genocide, mental illness, and abuse, he’s never gratuitous or explicit with his sex or violence. He also doesn’t curse, preferring to use swears made up for each world, like “Storms” or “Rust and Ruin.” That means there isn’t anything parents are likely to find objectionable in most of his novels. He’s also written plenty specifically for kids and young adults. The main difference is really the age of the protagonists and the complexity of the plots.

The Alcatraz series about a disaster-prone teen was Sanderson’s first entry in kids’ fantasy and now includes six novels. The Cytoverse series, which focuses on pilots fighting aliens, includes four novels and three novellas. Janci Patterson worked with Sanderson on some of the entries in both series.

The Reckoners trilogy is Sanderson’s YA exploration of the superhero genre, set in a world where almost everyone with powers is an evil tyrant. The Rithmatist is a stand-alone magical school novel.

The Reckoners trilogy

Prices taken at time of publishing.

$31 at Amazon
$36 at Barnes & Noble

What else is Sanderson working on?

Sanderson penned a theory of magic systems in 2007, dividing them into hard and soft — like hard and soft science fiction — based on how much time an author devotes to explaining how they work and adhering to the rules they set out. Sanderson is a believer in hard fantasy to the point that his books all feel like they could easily be converted into settings for tabletop RPGs, so it’s not particularly surprising that one is in the works .

After the publication of Wind and Truth , Sanderson plans to put The Stormlight Archive on hiatus and work on some of his other projects. That will include more Mistborn books, sequels to Elantris , and a novel based on his White Sand graphic novels, which are also part of the Cosmere.

Spring 2024 entertainment preview

A shot of Kaiju No. 8 gearing up to punch with shocks around him

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The 45 Best Superhero Movies of All Time, Ranked

From 'Spider-Man 2' to 'Wonder Woman' to 'The Dark Knight,' this is Collider's ranking of the greatest superhero movies ever made.

There's no doubt about it: superhero movies have been all the rage within the last couple of decades, and don't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. By no means was the genre invented in the 21st century, as there were plenty of iconic superhero films to be released during the previous century. However, the genre's seemed to click with modern-day viewers more than generations in the past, with many of the highest-grossing movies of the century so far being superhero movies.

There might not be as many superhero movies out there as movies in other, broader genres (like action movies, comedies, Westerns, etc.), but trying to pick the best of the best is still a daunting task. What follows is a ranking of some of the most exceptional superhero movies, representing the various ways larger-than-life heroes can be depicted on screen, whether in live-action or animation. These are some of the best in an ever-growing genre, and are ranked below from great to greatest.

45 'The Rocketeer' (1991)

Director: joe johnston.

A charming film that also goes to show how science fiction doesn’t always need to be futuristic , The Rocketeer delivers an old-school adventurous spirit and feels rather quaint today, given how prevalent the superhero genre’s become. It’s set during World War II, and involves a pilot becoming an instrumental figure for America in the war against Nazi Germany.

Notably, he gets a rocket-pack that allows him to fly around at a great speed, and from there, he takes part in a simple yet thoroughly engaging “good vs. evil” story that works well for what it is. Other parts of The Rocketeer may not hold up as well, at least on the technical side of things, given the film’s age. But, on the other hand, many flaws are able to be overlooked, or even go so far as to add to the film’s charms .

The Rocketeer

*Availability in US

Not available

44 'Chronicle' (2012)

Director: josh trank.

Chronicle takes the found footage format and pushes it in an interesting direction, not being a found footage horror movie but, in actuality, a found footage superhero origin story … in a way. The plot involves three high school students learning that they’re developing strange powers, which at first is thrilling, but then becomes harrowing when one of the three starts enjoying the power he’s been given a little too much.

It's presented in a way that won’t appeal to those sensitive to motion sickness , but might well appeal to those who’ve grown tired of seeing stories about people with superpowers presented in traditionally cinematic ways. Chronicle is grounded, intense, and very well-paced, coming in at under 90 minutes and delivering a simple yet effective story bolstered immensely by its novel presentation.

43 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension' (1984)

Director: w.d. richter.

The textbook definition of a 1980s sci-fi cult classic , The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension can also count itself as an offbeat, charming, and quite funny superhero film. The titular character is a man of many talents, and he runs a gang called the Hong Kong Cavaliers, all of whom band together to defend Earth from alien invaders that hail from the (also titular) 8th dimension.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is wild and more than a bit silly (if you couldn’t tell from the title alone), but it’s the kind of thing that’s unafraid to do its own thing, taking no prisoners all the while. There’s a sense of style and confidence here that’s truly admirable, and those after a superhero movie that feels like no other superhero movie ought to check this underrated 1980s movie out.

Watch on Tubi

42 'Zebraman' (2004)

Director: takashi miike.

Another unique superhero movie, Zebraman comes from the mind of Takashi Miike , the relentless and prolific Japanese filmmaker best known for controversial movies like Audition and Ichi the Killer . Zebraman , however, sees Miike tone down some of his more alarming or disturbing sensibilities, making something that feels like it could generally appeal to people of most (not all) ages, so long as such people also possess suitably strange senses of humor.

Zebraman follows a man going through a midlife crisis, and the way his life changes drastically when he decides to take on a vigilante persona in secret: the titular hero, Zebraman. Absurd comedy and some rather silly action scenes ensue, with things getting even wilder once aliens enter the picture. It’s not going to be for everyone, but its willingness to do something weird and commit to it wholeheartedly does make Zebraman admirable and oftentimes fun .

41 'Dick Tracy' (1990)

Director: warren beatty.

Starring Warren Beatty , Madonna , and a surprisingly Oscar-nominated Al Pacino , Dick Tracy could well claim to have one of the most impressive casts in the history of comic book/superhero movies. Beyond that main three, the cast also includes the likes of Mandy Patinkin , Dustin Hoffman , Dick Van Dyke , Paul Sorvino , James Caan , Kathy Bates , and Catherine O'Hara , to name just a few.

The look of Dick Tracy is similarly impressive, bringing comic book styling and sensibilities to the format of a live-action film in a bolder – and arguably better – way than most comparable films. The storyline, on the other hand, is fairly barebones, revolving around the titular hero taking on a group of vicious gangsters… but it’s the star power and style of Dick Tracy that go hand-in-hand to make it an impressive oddity, and one that still holds up as quite surprising and entertaining to this day.

40 'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' (2021)

Director: destin daniel cretton.

While its action might not quite be great enough for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to feel like an all-time great martial arts movie , it was cool to see a film from the MCU take inspiration from such films . The titular hero is incredibly talented at hand-to-hand combat, leading to plenty of great action set pieces that are melded well with various fantastical elements that also serve to distinguish the film from most other MCU entries.

On top of all that, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings does have the kind of familiar humor and pacing one finds in a modern superhero movie, but it’s all executed better across the board than much of the rest of the MCU’s fourth phase. It gets the job done and then some, and proves to be an incredibly entertaining watch.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Watch on Disney+

39 'Watchmen' (2009)

Director: zack snyder.

Violent and brooding in an uncompromising way, 2009’s Watchmen feels like a Zack Snyder movie through and through , meaning fans of the director’s style will have a blast, and his detractors will likely remain unconverted. It’s an adaptation of the famed comic book series of the same name, and though it doesn’t prove as successful as a deconstruction of superhero-centered stories, it still at least touches upon that side of things.

Watchmen ’s potential thematic shortcomings are easier to overlook, however, when a film adaptation looks as consistently great as this 2009 movie does. It’s bombastic, hyper-stylized, and makes sure you see it all, thanks to plenty of sequences unfolding with healthy amounts of slow motion. Additionally, those who want to see another adaptation align a little closer to the comic series’ tone and themes thankfully have the HBO miniseries to watch , which was released in 2019.

38 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2' (2017)

Director: james gunn.

There were an unusually high number of great movie sequels released in 2017 , and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 just so happened to be one of them. After the 2014 movie did a great job of making the titular squad instantly lovable and fan favorites within the MCU, Vol. 2 of what ended up being a trilogy was able to hit the ground running with already-established character dynamics, and was able to particularly explore Peter Quill’s past following him being reunited with his estranged father.

It might not run as smoothly as the first Guardians film, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 works by once again being funny, visually dazzling, well-scored with plenty of iconic music , and pushing its characters into some deeper and more emotionally intense areas. The mid-to-late 2010s were a good time to be a fan of the MCU, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was one of many reasons for that.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

37 'the super inframan' (1975), director: hua shan.

The Super Inframan is fairly obscure by superhero movie standards, but that doesn’t mean it’s undeserving of being considered up there with the very best. It’s something of a cult classic, being an absurd martial arts movie that also ambitiously sets its sights on being a work of science fiction and a weird superhero film , following a man who agrees to be experimented on, so he can become the titular hero.

From there, his destiny is to battle various monsters that are being led by a dangerous alien who wants to conquer the world, effectively being the only hope for the human race. The Super Inframan is very cheesy and one would be hard-pressed to call it high-budget… yet it’s also super charming and feels a little like it was written by a 10-year-old in the best way possible. It’s the kind of movie where, while watching it, it’s hard to imagine someone not having a good time.

Rent on Apple TV

36 'Super' (2010)

Some years before ever working for Marvel or DC, James Gunn directed his first superhero movie (of sorts) with Super , in 2010. It’s definitely more low-budget and crudely made compared to his later efforts, but it did demonstrate that he had serious potential in both writing and directing subversive or slightly offbeat films that also managed to fit within the superhero genre.

In the case of Super , it’s incredibly dark and brutally realistic, telling the story of a disturbed man with nothing to lose becoming a vigilante known as Crimson Bolt. Super is unafraid to show some seriously graphic violence, especially considering Crimson Bolt’s weapon of choice is a wrench, but those with strong stomachs and a willingness to see something different as far as superhero/vigilante movies go ought to check it out.

35 'Captain America: Civil War' (2016)

Directors: anthony and joe russo.

The third movie within one of the most compelling trilogies in the MCU , Captain America: Civil War is a huge film featuring many of the characters who appeared throughout the first three phases of the MCU. As the title suggests, the heroes are at odds and are torn apart by a series of conflicts that may have been orchestrated by a mastermind who wants to see Earth's mightiest heroes implode.

Captain America: Civil War was a movie that did a good job of shaking up the status quo , with the effects of the film's ending ultimately having an influence on several years worth of movies that followed. Additionally, this movie's also home to one of the biggest and most celebrated action sequences in the entire MCU: that of the airport battle.

Captain America: Civil War

34 'x2: x-men united' (2003), director: bryan singer.

The original X-Men series got off to a decent enough start with the original film in 2000, which was one of the first truly successful superhero blockbusters. Despite that, it's hard to argue against its 2003 sequel - X2: X-Men United - being even better. It revolves around an anti-mutant former Army Commander who causes trouble among the heroes.

X2: X-Men United is a more confident film with more satisfying action, and balances an even larger cast of characters exceptionally well. The icing on the cake of it all is that it's also home to a Brian Cox performance, where he plays the lead antagonist, Col. William Stryker. Anyone who's seen the excellent HBO series Succession will be well aware of how much Cox can bring to a villainous role.

X2: X-Men United

Watch on Starz

33 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army' (2008)

Director: guillermo del toro.

After a solid original Hellboy movie in 2004, Guillermo del Toro really let loose with its sequel, 2008's The Golden Army , by combining superhero action with wonderfully dark fantasy. Hellboy II: The Golden Army also ups the stakes considerably, forcing the titular hero and his team to take on an elvish prince who's threatening to take over the world with his mechanical army.

Some could accuse the first Hellboy of being style over substance, but those people might be ignoring just how good the style is. And when it comes to the second movie, the style's even more stylish. There is also some genuine substance and emotion to its compelling story, making Hellboy II: The Golden Army a remarkably improved sequel and one of the most underrated superhero movies in recent memory.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

32 'batman begins' (2005), director: christopher nolan.

Batman Begins may well be the most comprehensible and least overwhelming movie Christopher Nolan 's ever directed . As the title suggests, it's an origin story for the character of Bruce Wayne/Batman, showing his tragic past and how he came to take on the responsibility of being a vigilante who fights wrongdoers in the crime-ridden city of Gotham.

The best was yet to come, when it came to Nolan's trilogy, but Batman Begins got things off to an undeniably compelling start. It was a breath of fresh air back in 2005 to have a superhero movie take itself so seriously, and generally carry itself well, making this film a historically significant one for how people viewed the superhero genre going forward.

Batman Begins

31 'the suicide squad' (2021).

After a 2016 movie that really didn't work, The Suicide Squad proved to be a reboot/sequel of sorts to Suicide Squad that was an overall much stronger film. Both had similar premises, having criminal characters given dangerous missions to take part in with the promise of reduced sentences if the missions were successful, but the execution made all the difference here.

The Suicide Squad is a blast to watch, and combines violent action, crude humor, and some genuinely emotional moments together to great effect. It's a strange superhero movie, somehow feeling both risky and accessible at once, and thankfully exists to at least in part redeem the franchise after the 2016 movie.

The Suicide Squad

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30 'Blade II' (2002)

The first Blade , released in 1998, was a significant superhero movie in numerous ways, as it pushed boundaries in terms of violence, felt a little more hard-edged than the superhero movies that had come before it, and also was one of the first comic book movies with a Black lead. It is a solid movie, but its sequel, 2002's Blade II , is even better.

While the first laid the groundwork, Blade II is simply more fun, with a little more personality and better action sequences , at least partially thanks to it being directed by Guillermo del Toro . It is unabashedly cheesy and silly at points, but it feels self-aware and confident throughout, making it a blast to watch.

29 'Kick-Ass' (2010)

Director: matthew vaughn.

Nowadays, there are numerous darkly comedic superhero properties that take their characters to dark places while also being unafraid to show explicit violence (demonstrated by shows like The Boys and the Deadpool movies). Back in 2010, this kind of approach felt more novel, and was one reason why Kick-Ass felt like such a breath of fresh air.

Kick-Ass is a tad more grounded than many superhero movies, showing the inevitable struggles that a teenage boy would experience should he one day decide to become a superhero/vigilante. For those who want another violent and darkly funny deconstruction of the genre released in 2010, Super is also easy to recommend. What's difficult to recommend, on the other hand, is 2013's Kick-Ass 2 . That one should be avoided, as it, unfortunately, kicks very little ass.

28 'The Crow' (1994)

Director: alex proyas.

The Crow absolutely screams 1990s in every way, and is all the more glorious for it. It's a dark and brooding gothic revenge movie, adding a supernatural twist to the superhero genre by having the plot revolve around a man who comes back from the dead, and seeks vengeance on the criminals who gunned him and his fiancée down.

The Crow is an incredibly stylish movie, and does a remarkable job of capturing comic book visuals in a live-action format while telling a simple yet emotionally moving story. It's also regrettably one of the few films Brandon Lee ever starred in, as he tragically died at just 28 years old while filming The Crow , after an accident with a prop gun on set proved fatal.

27 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' (2021)

Do not watch the 2017 version of Justice League , as it's a complete mess, lacks both heart and logic, and overall serves as a textbook example of how not to do a superhero team-up movie. Thankfully, the director's cut - Zack Snyder's Justice League - is not a complete mess, and though it's a gigantic and imperfect film, it is an impressive one, and ultimately stands as a much stronger movie.

Zack Snyder's Justice League runs for a staggering four hours, but uses that time to flesh out all the members of the titular team while ensuring their first mission together feels suitably grand. It suffers a bit toward the end, given it has a series of epilogue-type scenes setting up movies that'll probably never happen, but the rest of it works well, and to this day remains the longest superhero movie of all time .

Zack Snyder's Justice League

26 'big hero 6' (2014), directors: chris williams, don hall.

Animation and superhero stories go together well, given the format can be used to depict heightened fantastical and/or futuristic worlds in ways that most live-action films would struggle to. Big Hero 6 is an example of how to do an animated superhero movie right, and holds up as a fun, emotional, and exciting family-friendly film.

It follows a young boy who befriends an inflatable robot called Baymax after a tragedy in his family, with the boy eventually forming a superhero team with said robot and his friends. It's a colorful and heartfelt movie, and one of those great kid's movies where it doesn't feel like it's only designed to appeal to children.

Harvard Library removes human skin from book binding

Harvard banners outside Memorial Church on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass.

Harvard University removed human skin from the binding of "Des Destinées de L'âme" in Houghton Library on Wednesday after a review found ethical concerns with the book's origin and history.

French physician Dr. Ludovic Bouland “bound the book with skin he took without consent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hospital where he worked,” according to Harvard Library .

Bouland included a handwritten note inside stating that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” associate university librarian Thomas Hyry said in a published Q&A . The note also detailed the process behind preparing the skin for binding.

The removal was prompted by a library review following the Harvard University report on human remains in its museum collections.

"Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history," a statement from the library said Wednesday.

The removed skin is now in "secure storage at Harvard Library," Anne-Marie Eze, Houghton Library associate librarian, said in the Q&A.

The library will be conducting additional research into the book, Bouland and the anonymous female patient. It is also working with French authorities to determine a "final respectful disposition," it said.

Bouland received his copy of "Des Destinées de L'âme," or "Destinies of the Soul," from the author, Arsène Houssaye, in the early 1880s. The book has been in the Harvard Library collection since 1934 on deposit from John B. Stetson Jr., a philanthropist and businessman.

Katherine Itoh is a news associate for NBC News.

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A Novelist Comes Home to Bury Her Words, and Brings Them Back to Life

In Julia Alvarez’s “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” a boneyard in the Dominican Republic becomes a rich wellspring for discarded narratives.

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THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES , by Julia Alvarez

The best stories live within us long after the final word; characters and places continue beyond the lines on a page. Yet the image of all the unfinished, unsatisfying, impossible stories we leave in our wakes haunts the writer as well as the reader. And with more than 20 books published across a three-decade career, no one may be haunted more than Julia Alvarez.

The hero of Alvarez’s seventh novel, Alma Cruz, is a writer from the Dominican Republic who has come to the United States and created a literary life, beginning with critically acclaimed books about the motherland and evolving into a chronicler of life in the U.S.A. (Longtime readers of Alvarez’s work will recognize her own trajectory, from her early classics like “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies” through poetry, memoir, children’s books and more.)

The famous author has always wrestled shadow and sunlight, laughter and agony, into tales that sometimes felt like ghost stories. Readers knew to seek the truths behind the narrative — to find sorrow in the funniest scenes, or the unexpected outburst of joy in a somber one. Of course, I am speaking about Alma Cruz. (But also, Julia Alvarez.)

One day, Alma decides she has had enough with the fame game, the big career and its ups and downs. She comes to a lovely conclusion: It is time to return to the homeland she fled, and she will take all the drafts of her unfinished or unpublished books and lay them to rest there, giving each a proper burial. She buys a plot of land and begins to build a graveyard.

The locals become a fantastic choir of curious, suspicious, baffled neighbors: One rumor has it that “the place will be a resort, which would provide employment for maids, gardeners, waiters, cooks, watchmen”; another imagines “a grand house, complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, a mini putting green.” Still another posits, “A baseball academy would be a dream come true for the tigueritos roaming the streets. Keep them out of trouble.” But when they realize Alma is building a graveyard, the outburst is comedic: a cemetery! Fear of zombies immediately clashes with the fear of homeless people defecating in mausoleums — and what kinds of jobs, by the way, are there in a boneyard? They have more reckoning to do when they realize Alma intends to put her stories in the ground, literally.

Word goes out that the great author has returned, and the locals flock to her like butterflies, everyone eager to share. A festival of storytelling breaks out in the tropics. Are the neighbors hoping to bury their own or are they giving life to tales untold? No matter. Rumors and gossip, histories and familial dramas swirl around Alma. “A little bird told me. Había una vez. Cuentan los viejos. Some scandal on the news, who is sleeping with whom, what fulano has done or said to fulana, a juicy chisme, a hot rumor. …” Amid the chatter, Alma’s own stories, the ones she has come home to bury, somehow find their place.

Soon Alma is meeting with architects, and more characters join in the cumbia of story — the dueling Perla and Filomena, who have not spoken for 30 years but keep each other’s phone numbers just in case. It is a shadowy feud, of course: “Way back, Filomena destroyed Perla’s peace of mind. The story has been buried so deep, it should have rotted into oblivion. But like Lazarus in la Biblia, it keeps coming back to life.”

Indeed. Here comes the fabulous Bienvenida (it means “Welcome”), with her tragic history that Alma cannot resist. She was once, you see, the wife of the dictator, Trujillo, a loyal and devoted first lady who is cast aside when she is unable to produce an heir. Eventually, El Jefe falls for the charms of another woman — “jealous and possessive, with a will equal to his own” — and Bienvenida’s “death knell comes when this mistress gives birth to a son.”

Men and boys, too, join in with their dramas and secrets, pride and regrets. As voices and stories are set free, it feels like a carnival, a festival. Alma’s first-person voice is jostled. We do not care; we are already in the warm sun and the sea wind and the cooking smells and the music of the dance.

As the book accelerates, the characters seem to become their own novelists. They rewrite their lives, they revise their histories, they reinvent their ongoing myths even as Alma is planning to bury her own stories in their troubled, sacred earth. Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing.

The camino that “The Cemetery of Untold Stories” travels — from Vermont to the Dominican Republic, from literary fame to chosen retreat, from modern American writing to a profoundly Latin American tone — is lively, joyous, full of modern details and old tall tales. Any reader with roots and ancestors in other lands lives in a multiple-narrative story, one that we try to share with everyone, though we have to translate it. Yet we also go back to the ancestral home, and find ourselves translating our Yanqui life as well. Which story is the truest?

This often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac novel begins with a simple exhortation, in English: “Tell me a story.” It ends on a melancholy and evocative note. Spoiler alert: Another single line, this time in Spanish after the last page concludes, announces, “Este cuento se ha acabado.” (This story has ended.) A definitive slam of the door.

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES | By Julia Alvarez | Algonquin | 256 pp. | $28

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COMMENTS

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt. 4.17. 739,067 ratings80,758 reviews. Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal ...
Ten reasons why we love Donna Tartt's The Secret History
10. It lets you in on secrets. Tartt's title is a cracker, not least because it is true to the appeal of the book. We, like Richard, are being given membership of a select group. One secret is ...
THE SECRET HISTORY
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. 10. Pub Date: March 6, 2000. ISBN: -375-70376-4.
Review: The Secret History
Review: The Secret History. More than twenty years after its release, Donna Tartt's The Secret History continues to bewitch readers with the tale of a group of decadent Classics students at an elite Vermont college in the 1980s - and for good reason. The novel's first scene is that of a group of friends, including nineteen-year-old ...
An Honest Review of "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt
I finished my first book of 2024! Woohoo! I had high hopes going into The Secret History, Donna Tartt's first published novel. It's recently made its rounds as a suggestion on BookTok and ...
Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The coming of age tale has long held an important and cherished place in American literature, and the college novel has taken this genre to complex heights in the past several decades. Donna Tartt's The Secret History is arguably one of the best examples in recent memory, as it examines both the seductive and alienating aspects of the modern ...
Donna Tartt answers 11 questions about 'The Secret History'
Dec. 20, 2022, 11:22 AM PST. By Elena Nicolaou. " The Secret History" was published 30 years ago — and ever since, fans have been looking for a follow-up that delivers the same intoxicating ...
The Secret History
The Secret History is the first novel by the American author Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. Set in New England, the campus novel tells the story of a closely knit group of six classics students at Hampden College, a small, elite liberal arts college located in Vermont based upon Bennington College, where Tartt was a student between 1982 and 1986.
REVIEW: The Secret History
5. Ok, so I realise that this book has been reviewed and praised many times over, but I just had to jump on the bandwagon and write about it too; since I read this book just a few months ago, I've regarded it as one of my new favourites. The story is about an elitist group of college students who, through the encouragement of their eccentric ...
Review: The Secret History
In amongst the BBC's Big Read's overwhelming list of classics are a few hidden contemporary gems, of which Donna Tart's The Secret History is one of the most compelling. I was interning at John Murray Publishers shortly after graduating and asked the girls with whom I was working what their favourite books were; The Secret History was mentioned and having seen it on the BBC's Big Read ...
Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Secret History Review. The Secret History is the story of six Classics students at Hampden College, New England. It is told through the eyes of Richard Papen, a financial aid student from California desperately trying to escape the banal life his parents wish for him. When Richard arrives at Hampden, he is told of an elitist group of ...
The Secret History
Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' follows a year of six classic student's lives at a New England College, starting the novel off with the declaration of a murder. When I read 'The Secret History' (1992) by Donna Tartt, what struck me most was its connection with the classical world. I wanted to explore this connection further, and so read Aristotle's 'Poetics' as well as Peter Burian's ...
A Close Reading of the Chilling Prologue of Donna Tartt's The Secret
The first sentence in the book could, in many ways, stand in for the whole thing. It neatly juxtaposes the beauty of the natural world (mountains, melting snow, a sense of spring) with matter-of-fact murder (that stark, clean "Bunny had been dead for several weeks"), and then hints at the real genius of the book: the moral ambiguity of all of the characters—or at least their essential ...
The Secret History: A Book Review
The Secret History: A Book Review. Reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt is like drinking black coffee and smoking a cigarette at a hotel bar while a well-dressed stranger recounts the tragedy of their New England college experience in an academic cult of Greek scholars. It delivers you something bold, dark, and electrifying that washes ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Secret History
To some degree, that's really the whole plot of The Secret History, which spends about half of its length building up to that murder, and the rest of the book watching as the aftermath unfolds. There are some other key events here and there, but the major one takes place off-stage entirely and the other effectively serves as the book's climax.
Book Review: The Secret History
Donna Tartt and her debut novel The Secret History is one that will stick with me for quite a long time. The Secret History follows insecure Richard Papen, a somewhat timid boy from Plano California. Richard, desperate to leave Plano and his unattentive parents, decides to go to college at Hampden, a school in Vermont, specializing in Humanities.
The Secret History: Tartt, Donna: 9781400031702: Amazon.com: Books
Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Writers, against all reason (and whatever we pretend), are competitive creatures. And so when Vanity Fair assigned me, in the spring of 1992, to profile the author of that fall's big, hot novel, a first novel that had fetched an advance of close to a million dollars, my initial reaction, as a recent first-novelist myself who had garnered some moderately good reviews and sold a couple of ...
Book Review: A Secret History
Since 2022, The Secret History by Donna Tartt has made itself known through social media, book groups, and other online reviews. A modern classic, Tartt weaves a tale so complex that it leaves the reader thinking about the ending for days. Following Richard Papen, a student studying classics at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, the story twists and turns as he struggles through mental ...
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
by Donna Tartt. Publication Date: April 13, 2004. Genres: Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller. Paperback: 576 pages. Publisher: Vintage. ISBN-10: 1400031702. ISBN-13: 9781400031702. A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy.
A Story That Will Live Forever: 'The Secret History' Book Review
Beautiful, terrible in the best sense of the word, and everlasting, The Secret History is an unpredictable and unforgettable novel. "And always, always, that same toast. Live forever." The ever present idea of eternal life within 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt applies to the characters in this captivating story and the novel itself.
The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone review
I n many ways, writes historian Dan Stone, "we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust". His remarkable book offers both a narrative overview and an analysis of ...
REDCOAT #1 Reinvents American History with Magic & Comedy (Review)
Redcoat #1 is an Excellent Blend of History, Magic, and Humor. Redcoat #1 by Geoff Johns, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, Brad Anderson, and Rob Leigh kicks off in 1775 as Paul Revere rides through the streets warning of the coming Redcoats. Unfortunately, his message comes too late as he's attacked by a swath of British officers.
Secret Agent Mole: Goldfish-Finger Book Review
This book is a graphic novel about a spy (a naked mole rat). The spy is trying to become a secret agent and has to complete some tasks and pass them. The book is about the tasks and how they go wrong and why. Eventually he becomes a secret agent. Author: James Foley.
A guide to finally getting into Brandon Sanderson books
The world of Roshar is filled with squabbling princes, giant crabs with gems for hearts, powerful storms, and warriors carrying oversized swords. Along with releasing four 1,000-plus-page books in ...
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The 45 Best Superhero Movies of All Time, Ranked. By Jeremy Urquhart. Updated 12 hours ago. From 'Spider-Man 2' to 'Wonder Woman' to 'The Dark Knight,' this is Collider's ranking of the greatest ...
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So I opened Jo Piazza's new novel, "The Sicilian Inheritance," with anticipation. Piazza is a best-selling author and veteran reporter; her work runs the gamut between comic novels and ...
Harvard Library removes human skin from book binding
Harvard University removed human skin from the binding of "Des Destinées de L'âme" in Houghton Library on Wednesday after a review found ethical concerns with the book's origin and history.
Book Review: 'The Cemetery of Untold Stories,' by Julia Alvarez
This often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac novel begins with a simple exhortation, in English: "Tell me a story.". It ends on a melancholy and evocative note. Spoiler alert: Another ...

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Donna Tartt answers 11 questions about 'The Secret History'

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We are forever looking for a book like 'The Secret History.' Are there any books you recommend as follow-ups?

Between 'The Secret History' and 'The Goldfinch,' what do you find most compelling about writing young characters in this general age? What qualities do they have in terms of development and plot that older adults don’t?

What inspired the names of the characters? We couldn’t help but notice Charles and Camilla — like the current king and queen of England — feature prominently.

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The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone review – a timely corrective to a shifting narrative