Donna Tartt - The Secret History (1992)

89

Edit: alright I've given myself time for rumination on this and here are my real real thoughts not tainted by liking the first part so much. While I get things are supposed to go awry after the characters leave Francis's house out in the country, I'm gonna be so honest, I really did not care for anything that happened afterwards. Now don't get me wrong, acts II and III are both good, but there was just a bit too much filler for this to be all killer: did we need the part where Richard gets hypothermia from sharing a shack with a hippie? Was it necessary? the murder plot shift was kinda stupid and felt unecessary given how strong the start was. Woulda cared more to see the quirks of Richard and his five odd, geeky, and pretentious companions and the murder twist just kinda threw all that out the window. Something I'm still kinda on the fence about is this book's choice to have every character turn out to be a, generically speaking, bad idiot, cause I DO LIKE the feeling of disappointment you're supposed to have upon learning the quirky college kids were actually just murderous weirdos, although what I dislike about it is that their sudden transformations feel unnatural because of how little you get to know them prior to the twist, and their transformations feel like they were caused entirely by the "greek ritual" Henry and co. do (or whatever) instead of just following the train of logic that the people themselves were inherently pretty odd to begin with. I think this book feels like six books mashed into one, and honestly this would be much better if it was a melodrama about disillusionment that focuses on the whimsicality of the five other students gradually revealing themselves to be more than meets the eye rather than having it be a glorified thriller novel. Still a great book though. Just wish the first 100 pages of sheer perfection didn't feel like a footnote in what's just, plainly, a "good" book rather than a "perfect" one.

Kinda like the Great Gatsby but everyone is a college student. Pretty much every character turns out to be a horrible person to an unapologetic degree but you gotta love it. This book really helps show the dangers of being friends with everyone in your Chess Club (yes I'm aware they all take greek but it's the same type of people you'd expect to see at a chess club). Now that I think of it, this kinda reminds me of the part of Fire Emblem Three Houses where you get un-cryogenically frozen and you see that pretty much all of the students you didn't have are either dead or evil