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Graduate pens ‘dark academia’ novel set in Cambridge college




When Kate Van der Borgh arrived at the University of Cambridge, she couldn’t understand why everyone kept asking which school she had attended.

Immediately dubbed ‘Northern Kate’, she quickly made friends but many aspects of college life appeared baffling. For instance, why did they want to know about her Roman Catholic high school in Burnley?

Author Kate van der Borgh Picture: Alex Krook
Author Kate van der Borgh Picture: Alex Krook

“I genuinely did not understand the reasons they were asking where I went to school. I couldn’t fathom it,” says Kate.

“And then as soon as I realised that there were people who had multiple friends from the same school who were now all Cambridge I was just kind of astonished.

“There was also definitely some hilarity at my accent and my general being. I do think a strong regional accent slightly sets you apart in some circumstances, and at the time I had a very, very broad, Burnley accent.”

This was the first indication that people at Cambridge might belong to a different ‘club’ or be party to some secret knowledge that was out of her reach. And that first inkling of being a fish out of water helped spark the idea for her new novel, And He Shall Appear.

The story revolves around an unnamed northern narrator who arrives in Cambridge as a first year student and finds himself an outsider. The politics and clothes and the grand atmosphere all seem familiar to everyone but him. Then he falls under the spell of Bryn Cavendish. A notorious party boy and skilled magician, Bryn is magnetic and our narrator is desperate to be part of his inner circle. To be exiled from it is to become a ghost haunting the peripheries of campus life.

But as the year continues, Bryn’s magic tricks become more sinister, and the question hangs in the air about whether he is simply charismatic or whether there is more to the source of his power.

“I’ve definitely taken some pretty big foundational elements of the novel from life,” says Kate.

And He Shall Appear, by Kate van der Borgh
And He Shall Appear, by Kate van der Borgh

One moment she lifted directly from her experience was her awe at being seated in the grand dining room of her college, Corpus Christi.

“There’s a moment in the book where the narrator talks to his friend Bryn about the dining room and feeling a bit overwhelmed while having your bran flakes in this very opulent, very old room with all the Masters looking down from the oil paintings. And Bryn says, ‘Actually, my school had a dining room that was just as glamorous as this one’. And that is a real conversation that I had with my now husband.

“My husband went to private school. He went to Dulwich Prep and Dulwich College, and you can still go and look at this splendid building that is still producing these very successful young people. But none of the schools I went to are still standing, they are all gone. There are some of these places that have just so much history and so much gravity, so much richness to them. I guess that’s partly one of the reasons for setting it in Cambridge and one of the reasons why the narrator and Bryn’s experiences are going to be very different.”

However, she is far from complaining about the clash of cultures.

“I don’t want to make it sound like this is everyone’s experience. And I also don’t want to make it sound like it’s sort of anyone in particular’s fault,” says Kate.

“I found it kind of brilliant and daunting in equal measure. I just thought it was this very, very beautiful place.”

But, at the same time, class and privilege and the way those appear to someone outside of them are at the heart of her novel.

“I absolutely wanted to say something about privilege,” she adds.

“And again, I don’t think in the book I’m even blaming people like Bryn, but more saying there are these places that are just built where the Bryn’s of this world can just thrive. When I was at Cambridge, I used to see certain people walking around the place, and they seemed to just have such command of their environment and the command of themselves. And it’s me, I just thought, like, what is this sorcery like this? This looks like magic. It’s like a magic trick where they are able to kind of shape, to bend the world to their will. And then, people just knowing stuff.

“I think, where were you told that? How do you find that stuff out, this kind of secret knowledge that some people seem to have? I just started to think a lot about the idea of dark magic being like a kind of power of privilege. That was definitely what appealed to me about that idea. So, it’s definitely saying something about a certain kind of privilege being wielded in a certain way.”

The other part of the story idea was around ghosts and was inspired by some inappropriate childhood TV viewing. “As a kid, I was a fan of horror films and TV shows like The X Files. I also remember watching Ghostwatch on television when I was about ten and I think it genuinely altered my brain. It was absolutely terrifying! And so as I grew up, I was always a kind of fan of ghost stories. I’ve always enjoyed ghost stories that underneath are saying something about the way you think or live.

“I thought Cambridge would be the right kind of setting for the story, in the sense of, the atmosphere, the architecture, it all has that, like, I say that, that weight of history. It’s a story about the past, and it’s a story about memory. And it’s just as soon as you’re in the city, it’s, it’s all there right in front of you, just this deep, rich history.

“Ghosts are things that occupy a liminal space. They’re sort of in between, neither living nor dead and gone. And I think that is exactly what the narrator is feeling. He’s in a kind of halfway space.”

The book is being marketed as ‘Dark Academia’, a TikTok phenomenon which has seen certain books, especially the Secret History and If We Were Villains, find a new audience.

But Kate explains she started writing the book before the TikTok craze took off. She says: “I think that a lot of Dark Academia stories take the same basic elements like a very prestigious establishment, an outsider figure, sometimes from another class, struggling to fit in. - these are the kind of building blocks that you see in a lot of dark academia tales. So in that respect, we sort of work with similar elements, but I think ultimately each story ends up saying something quite different.”

And He Shall Appear is out now, published by HarperCollins.



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