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A review by ghostboyreads
And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh
4.0
"Music is like pain. You forget what it was to experience it in the moment. You only know that there was no such thing as time, and your whole self was splintered into fragments, connected to everything that ever mattered and ever would."
Dark Academia is such a difficult sub-genre to break into, and it's an even harder one to get right. Naturally, any novel like this one, that ventures into this highly saturated sub-genre, is going to get endlessly compared to The Secret History. Thankfully, And He Shall Appear does enough to make it stand upon its own two feet. Leaning heavily into the academic side of things, there's this rippling undercurrent of danger that runs throughout this novel, but, it's not overt or in our faces, it's simply there, lingering below the surface. Fantastically open to interpretation, And He Shall Appear shows just how to write an unreliable narrator correctly, depending on how much trust we wish to place in our narrator, it can entirely change what it is that happened.
This is a fantastic example of how to debut, there's just, so, so much to love here. It's a confusing, befuddling and perplexing enigma of a novel, one that seems to have layers of greatness to it. What starts as a dark academia novel of obsessive friendships quickly descends into something far more sinister and magical, something that's all queer yearning and devastating deaths. There's a real hazy, dreamlike quality that lingers around this novel, making everything feel muted in a rather powerful and intimate way, there's still an intense vividity to the storytelling, and the prose is still haunting and mesmerizing, it just feels like one of the most memorable nightmares of your life. There's something so very sad and tragic about And He Shall Appear, it has a real air of misery.
Dark Academia is such a difficult sub-genre to break into, and it's an even harder one to get right. Naturally, any novel like this one, that ventures into this highly saturated sub-genre, is going to get endlessly compared to The Secret History. Thankfully, And He Shall Appear does enough to make it stand upon its own two feet. Leaning heavily into the academic side of things, there's this rippling undercurrent of danger that runs throughout this novel, but, it's not overt or in our faces, it's simply there, lingering below the surface. Fantastically open to interpretation, And He Shall Appear shows just how to write an unreliable narrator correctly, depending on how much trust we wish to place in our narrator, it can entirely change what it is that happened.
This is a fantastic example of how to debut, there's just, so, so much to love here. It's a confusing, befuddling and perplexing enigma of a novel, one that seems to have layers of greatness to it. What starts as a dark academia novel of obsessive friendships quickly descends into something far more sinister and magical, something that's all queer yearning and devastating deaths. There's a real hazy, dreamlike quality that lingers around this novel, making everything feel muted in a rather powerful and intimate way, there's still an intense vividity to the storytelling, and the prose is still haunting and mesmerizing, it just feels like one of the most memorable nightmares of your life. There's something so very sad and tragic about And He Shall Appear, it has a real air of misery.
"We came together a few nights later, fellows looking on, the saints gazing down from sunless glass. I have no memory of whether we were triumphant or merely tolerable. Because, with Bryn, memory is slippery. Like, what colour was his hair, exactly? I know it shone darkly, like new leather shoes. But while in some of my memories it has a reddish cast, in others it appears completely black. And what about his eyes? Not blue or green. Certainly not brown. In my mind, they're the colour of shadows moving across an icy field, darkening and lightening with the rise and fall of the ground."
Something that this book does extremely well, and something that I damn well adore in literature, is when authors write their passions, when they fearlessly weave their hearts into the text. Music, which, is clearly, a subject the author is well versed on, is such an integral, important part of this story. All of the greatest stories are self-obsessed, it's a quality I highly admire in writing, and something I loved in And He Shall Appear. This is a fantastic novel, and one that's highly enjoyable, even if it's not particularly revolutionary. Despite what the synopsis would have you believe, this is way more than just a tale of an amateur magician, there's something delightfully creepy underneath it all. A familiar sort of novel, but a brilliant one, all the same.
"Maybe one day, terribly awake, I'd catch an uncertain glimpse of him shifting through a crowd at a train station, or I'd pass him at a pedestrian crossing in the driving rain. Perhaps I'd find him waiting in the stairwell outside the flat. Who would he be, then? Would he return to me as the tortured soul or the scene-stealing showman, the conqueror or the conquered?"