Kamilah Cole’s adult debut, An Arcane Inheritance, reads like a fever dream wrapped in ivy—a dark academia thriller that peels back the veneer of elite education to expose the rot festering underneath. This isn’t your typical college-set fantasy where magical hijinks lead to romance and self-discovery. Instead, Cole crafts something far more unsettling: a story where the prestigious institution itself becomes predator, and its most vulnerable students become prey.
The Weight of Forgotten Names
Twenty-one-year-old Ellory Morgan arrives at Warren University three years later than most freshmen, carrying the weight of delayed dreams and an aunt’s medical bills. As a first-generation Jamaican immigrant and Godwin Scholar, she should feel grateful for this opportunity. Instead, she feels haunted. The ornate Gothic buildings whisper with familiarity. Shadows move wrong. And most disturbing of all, Ellory knows—with bone-deep certainty—that she’s walked these paths before, even though logic insists otherwise.
Cole doesn’t ease readers into the supernatural elements. From the opening pages, reality feels slippery, unstable. Ellory finds notes in her own handwriting that she doesn’t remember writing. A mysterious tattoo appears and disappears from her neck. Time loops in ways that make her question her sanity. The author masterfully builds this atmosphere of wrongness, where every Gothic architectural detail and shadowed corridor becomes laden with menace.
What elevates the narrative beyond standard paranormal mystery is how Cole grounds Ellory’s experiences in very real trauma. The protagonist’s struggle to trust her own perceptions mirrors the gaslighting that marginalized students often face in predominantly white institutions. When Ellory discovers evidence of the Lost Eight—BIPOC students who vanished across decades—the personal horror transforms into something larger and more damning.
Magic Built on Bones
The magic system Cole constructs operates on a devastating principle: for magic to live, something must die. Not literal death always, but sacrifice—memories surrendered, identities erased, futures stolen. It’s a brilliant metaphor for how elite institutions have historically consumed marginalized bodies to fuel their prestige.
The Old Masters, Warren’s secret society, have perfected this exploitation. They identify students with “wild magic”—primarily BIPOC scholars brought in through programs like the Godwin Scholarship—and systematically drain them. Some become living batteries, trapped in magical prisons. Others simply disappear, their names scrubbed from history. The school’s Latin motto, “Exstat” (there exists), takes on chilling resonance. These students existed. They mattered. But the institution worked overtime to ensure no one would remember.
Cole’s exploration of three types of magic—evocation, incantation, and divination—feels less like world-building for its own sake and more like a examination of power structures. Who gets to summon? Who must sacrifice? Who has the luxury of seeing the future while others are trapped repeating the past?
Enemies to Allies, Memory to Identity
Hudson Graves enters as the archetypal privileged legacy student: condescending, cold, seemingly everything Ellory should despise. Their initial antagonism crackles with tension, but Cole subverts expectations by revealing Hudson as another kind of victim. Born into a family deeply entrenched with the Old Masters, he’s been groomed his entire life to perpetuate their system. His memories have been manipulated, his choices predetermined.
The slow burn between Ellory and Hudson works because it’s built on genuine partnership rather than mere attraction. They research together, sharing bell hooks quotes and debating political theory. They challenge each other intellectually before acknowledging romantic feelings. When Hudson confesses he’s watched Ellory “fall in love with him again and again” through multiple time loops, the revelation devastates precisely because we’ve watched their connection develop.
Their romance becomes revolutionary in context—two people refusing to let a corrupt system determine their relationship. But Cole doesn’t let love solve everything. Hudson must actively work to break from his family’s legacy. Ellory must learn that accepting help isn’t weakness. Both must sacrifice memories and magic to dismantle the Old Masters’ power.
Prose That Haunts
In An Arcane Inheritance, Cole’s writing style adapts beautifully to adult fiction. Where her YA Divine Traitors duology carried propulsive energy, this novel unfolds with deliberate, atmospheric pacing. Sentences linger like morning fog. Descriptions of Warren’s campus evoke both beauty and menace—autumn leaves that seem to watch, Gothic architecture that feels alive, birds (rooks, owls, hummingbirds) that gather in unnatural congregations.
The interlude chapters, offering historical context about the Godwin Scholars and Old Masters, provide breathing room while building dread. We learn how good intentions twisted into exploitation, how academic curiosity became predation. These sections read almost like academic texts, which makes their revelations about human sacrifice and magical theft even more chilling.
Literary references abound without feeling pretentious. Ellory and Hudson’s shared love of bell hooks becomes shorthand for their compatible worldviews. Claude McKay’s “Birds of Prey” frames sections, its imagery of predatory birds echoing throughout the campus. These aren’t decorative touches but thematic reinforcement.
The Cost of Revolution
Where some fantasies offer tidy resolutions, Cole presents something messier and more realistic. Ellory’s final confrontation with the Old Masters requires her to siphon away all magic from Warren—including from allies like Hudson and Boone. The victory comes at tremendous cost. Memories are lost. Relationships must rebuild from scratch. The ghosts of the Lost Eight find peace, but their stories required violent reclamation.
The ending avoids neat romance while offering hope. Hudson and Ellory must start over, building their connection without the intensity of shared magical trauma. Magic fades from the world, which the narrative frames as potentially positive—a resource that became too corrupted by inequality to preserve. It’s a bold choice, suggesting that some systems can’t be reformed, only dismantled.
Where Shadows Linger
The greatest strength of An Arcane Inheritance—its complex narrative structure—occasionally becomes its weakness. The multiple time loops, memory manipulations, and reality shifts require careful attention. Readers who prefer straightforward narratives may find themselves disoriented, though that disorientation mirrors Ellory’s experience. A few secondary characters, particularly Ellory’s roommate Stasie and love interest Liam Blackwood, feel underdeveloped given their page time.
The pacing sags slightly in the middle sections, where research and investigation can feel repetitive. Cole sometimes over-explains magical mechanics when mystery might serve better. And while the romance between Ellory and Hudson ultimately satisfies, their initial antagonism occasionally reads more like mutual irritation than genuine chemistry.
An Arcane Inheritance also demands engagement with heavy themes—systemic racism, exploitation, gaslighting, trauma—without offering much lightness for balance. This isn’t criticism of Cole’s choices, but readers seeking escapist fantasy should know they’re getting something far more challenging.
A New Voice in Dark Academia
An Arcane Inheritance marks Kamilah Cole as a significant voice in adult SFF. This isn’t dark academia that romanticizes elitism or makes oppression aesthetic. Instead, Cole uses the trappings of the genre—Gothic architecture, secret societies, arcane knowledge—to interrogate the real violence of academic institutions. The book asks uncomfortable questions about who gets sacrificed for prestige, whose names history remembers, and what it costs to dismantle corrupt systems.
Ellory Morgan joins a growing roster of complex Black female protagonists in speculative fiction who refuse to make themselves smaller for comfort. Her journey from self-doubt to revolutionary action feels earned rather than inevitable. By the final pages, when she’s rewriting Warren’s history to center the Lost Eight, the moment resonates because we’ve watched her fight for every inch of agency.
For fans of R.F. Kuang’s Babel or Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, this offers similar examinations of how institutions consume the vulnerable. Those who loved Mexican Gothic or The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina will appreciate Cole’s atmospheric prose and cultural specificity. And readers of Cole’s previous Divine Traitors duology will find familiar themes—chosen family, systemic resistance, the cost of power—explored with adult complexity.
Similar Reads for Your Dark Academia Shelf
- Babel by R.F. Kuang – For readers drawn to Cole’s examination of how academic institutions exploit marginalized students, Kuang’s meditation on colonialism and translation magic offers even deeper historical engagement.
- A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik – Those who appreciated the sinister magical school setting will find Novik’s Scholomance equally deadly, though with more mordant humor.
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Readers captivated by Cole’s atmospheric Gothic horror and themes of memory manipulation should explore Moreno-Garcia’s nightmarish Mexican mansion.
- The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova – For fans of Cole’s magical realism and family legacies, Córdova offers another story where the past refuses to stay buried.
- Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko – Those drawn to Ellory’s journey from self-doubt to power will appreciate Ifueko’s equally complex Black female protagonist navigating a magical court.
An Arcane Inheritance doesn’t offer easy answers or comfortable escapism. Instead, it demands we examine how power operates, who gets sacrificed for progress, and what it takes to truly remember those history tried to erase. Cole has crafted a haunting debut that lingers long after the final page—much like the ghosts that walk Warren’s Gothic halls, refusing to be forgotten.