The real villain was the academia that we ignored along the way.

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that this book led to a midnight panic attack/my first little breakdown of 2024. One that was centered around emails from a graduate studies supervisor. Because we follow Andrew, and Andrew is starting a masters one semester after his best friend did. He's researching a similar topic, meeting with the same supervisor, and really just continuing his best friend's work. All this right after his best friend's funeral. 

While Andrew is quite literally haunted by southern gothic entities, the portrayal of graduate studies in this book made it incredibly hard for me to read. After I finally realized that my fitness tracker was marking high stress whenever I picked this one up, I nevertheless chipped away at it. The writing was excellent and I was intrigued by the mystery and the characters. This story had layers, side plots, and a pining romance that I didn't see coming. And gorgeous writing. 

This book unfortunately did too good of a job of re-awakening my grad school nightmares and that, combined with how incredibly unfocused it was (the cars??), led to me having a bad time with it. While this wasn't right for me, I do recommend it if you like your dark academia mixed with slowburn southern gothic imagery, slow burn pining, and don't find 22 year old frat guys annoying. 1.75 stars on SG to reflect my personal enjoyment of it, rounded to 2 stars for GR.