These Violences
We Crave
Dark academia • Speculative fiction • Substack serial novel
Synopsis
1961. Student Yelena Nazarova moves from Soviet Russia to a small New England town to study at the prestigious Attwell Institute for Advanced Studies. She is seeking a powerful relic to bring her dead mother back to life, the Promissum Mortis. There she meets with a group of misfit students—Oscar Whitley, Augustus Attwell and Thomas Barlow—with whom she searches for the relic. As they attempt to pierce the fade with an experimental drug, they are transported to a liminal space where they meet with a faceless entity—the Collector—who feeds on raw emotions. In exchange for leeching on theirs during seven gruelling trials, he promises the relic. The students agree, but each Leeching is worse than the last, soon testing the limits of their willpower, as well as their morality.
These Violences We Crave is a gothic dark academia story of grief and moral decay that asks whether the dead are truly worth saving if saving them requires the living to become something monstrous.
Upcoming free serial novel on Substack.
