Catherine House

Catherine House is a highly selective college hidden in the Pennsylvania woods. Students give it three years of their lives, completely cut off from the outside world: no phones, no internet, no contact with family. In return, the school promises a future of limitless power. Ines Murillo arrives expecting discipline and instead finds sanctioned excess, but beneath the revelry something sinister is happening in the school’s experimental program.

Why Read This

Where The Secret History and If We Were Villains focus on small groups of friends, Catherine House turns the institution itself into the antagonist. The college is seductive, opulent, and deeply wrong. Thomas writes atmosphere like few other novelists: the hazy, drugged-out quality of life inside Catherine House is almost physically disorienting. This is dark academia as body horror, where the school does not just shape your mind but claims something far more fundamental.

What to Expect

A slow, dreamlike novel that builds unease through atmosphere rather than plot. At 320 pages, it is the shortest book here, but it feels longer because of its deliberately languid pacing. If you prefer your dark academia with gothic dread and institutional conspiracy rather than murder mysteries, this is the one. Think Never Let Me Go crossed with a haunted boarding school.