Books like Ninth House

Donna Tartt's The Secret History is the book that invented dark academia as a genre, and Bardugo has spoken openly about its influence on Ninth House. Six Classics students at a small Vermont college become so immersed in their studies that they commit a murder, and the novel follows the fallout as guilt, paranoia, and class loyalty tear the group apart. Like Ninth House, the novel examines how elite academic environments create conditions where terrible things can happen and be covered up.

Both books feature outsider protagonists who are drawn into circles of privilege and danger, and both treat their collegiate settings with a mix of seduction and suspicion. Where Bardugo adds literal magic, Tartt achieves a similar effect through psychological intensity and the intoxication of intellectual obsession. The moral questions are similar: at what point does participation in a corrupt system make you complicit?

If Ninth House's dark academia elements appealed to you, The Secret History is the book that built the foundation Bardugo works on.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians sends Quentin Coldwater to Brakebills, a secret graduate school for magic hidden in upstate New York, and proceeds to dismantle every comforting fantasy about what it would mean to have real magical power. Like Ninth House, the novel treats magic as something that exacts a price, and the academic setting is marked by competition, disillusionment, and the growing realization that the people in charge are not trustworthy.

Grossman writes with the same cynicism Bardugo brings to her depiction of Yale's societies, and both novels refuse to let their magical schools be places of wonder without also being places of damage. Quentin is a less sympathetic protagonist than Alex, more self-pitying and less resilient, but his struggles with depression and purposelessness connect to Alex's own attempts to find meaning after trauma.

The magic system is more developed than Bardugo's, and the world-building is more expansive, but both novels use their magical-school settings to ask uncomfortable questions about privilege, escapism, and the cost of getting what you wish for.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic shares Ninth House's DNA in ways that go beyond their shared genre. Both novels feature young women entering worlds of institutional power and hidden violence, and both use Gothic conventions to examine how elite systems exploit and consume the vulnerable. Noemi Taboada arrives at High Place in 1950s Mexico to rescue her cousin from a decaying family mansion, and what she finds mirrors the corruption Alex Stern uncovers at Yale: power that has been hoarded for generations, sustained by sacrifice and silence.

Moreno-Garcia writes with atmospheric precision, building dread through the accumulation of wrong details in the same way Bardugo builds menace through New Haven's haunted geography. Both novels pair their supernatural elements with sharp social commentary, refusing to separate the horror from the power structures that produce it. Where Bardugo's horror is urban and institutional, Moreno-Garcia's is domestic and biological, but the anger at systems that devour individuals powers both books equally.

This is the closest tonal match to Ninth House outside of Bardugo's own work.

M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains takes the dark academia framework and sets it in a Shakespearean conservatory, where seven acting students become so immersed in their roles that the line between performance and reality dissolves entirely.

Like Ninth House, the novel is about a group of exceptional young people in a rarefied environment where the pressure to be extraordinary creates conditions for violence. Rio writes the theatrical world with the same insider specificity Bardugo brings to Yale's societies, and the ensemble dynamics are equally charged with attraction, rivalry, and the constant recalculation of loyalties. Both novels use a murder as the central narrative engine, and both feature narrators who are unreliable for reasons that become clear only gradually.

The tone is more elegiac than Bardugo's gritty anger, and the magic is metaphorical rather than literal, but the dark-academia DNA is shared. If Ninth House's combination of elite academia and dangerous obsession appealed to you, If We Were Villains delivers the same atmosphere with Shakespearean intensity.

Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is set in the Scholomance, a magical school with no teachers, no exits until graduation, and a monster-infested graduation hall that kills most of its students. El Higgins has the power to level cities but is trying to survive without using her destructive abilities, forming reluctant alliances and breaking the school's social hierarchies in the process. Like Ninth House, the novel treats its magical school as a system that chews up students and rewards those willing to exploit others.

Novik writes with sharp humor and genuine menace, and the Scholomance's rigid social structure mirrors the hierarchies among Yale's societies. Both protagonists are outsiders by temperament and circumstance, people who see the system's corruption clearly because they have never benefited from it. El is funnier than Alex, with a sardonic narration that provides comic relief the darker Ninth House does not, but both characters share a stubborn refusal to play by rules that were designed to destroy people like them.

The pacing is relentless, making this a strong pick for readers who want Ninth House's themes in a faster-moving package.

Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth drops nine necromancer-cavalier pairs into a decaying space mansion to compete for ascension to godhood, and what follows is a locked-room mystery wrapped in a necromantic power fantasy narrated by the most irreverent protagonist in modern fantasy. Like Ninth House, the novel takes place in a world where magic is real, dangerous, and controlled by institutions that do not have their participants' best interests at heart.

Muir writes with manic energy and gallows humor that provides a tonal contrast to Bardugo's grimmer register, but both novels share a fascination with the cost of magical power and the ways institutional systems consume the people who serve them. Gideon herself is a more outwardly confident protagonist than Alex, all bravado and swordsmanship, but both characters are survivors who process trauma through action rather than reflection.

The world-building is wilder and more baroque than Bardugo's, but the structural similarity, a competition among magicians in a haunted building with a body count, makes this a natural recommendation for Ninth House readers.

R.F. Kuang's Babel is set in 1830s Oxford, where the Royal Institute of Translation uses the power of translation and silver to fuel the British Empire.

Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan recruited by the Institute, must choose between the institution that gave him everything and the resistance fighting against its imperial violence. Like Ninth House, the novel examines how prestigious institutions use the talented and the marginal as fuel for systems that serve the powerful. Both books feature protagonists from outside the elite who are brought into privileged spaces and must decide how far they are willing to go to fight the corruption they witness.

Kuang writes with academic density and political fury that matches Bardugo's anger at privilege, and both novels refuse to let their magical systems exist without showing who pays the cost. The historical setting grounds Babel's fantasy in real colonial violence, while Ninth House's contemporary setting does the same with class inequality. Both are angry, intellectually demanding novels that use magic to make visible the invisible violence of institutional power.

Olivie Blake's The Atlas Six is the secret-society fantasy Ninth House readers reach for when they want the society moved to the center of the story. Each decade the Alexandrian Society, keepers of lost knowledge from the ancient world, recruits the six most gifted magicians alive and offers them a year inside its archive.

The catch is that only five will be initiated, and the sixth is not allowed to simply walk away. Blake gives each of the six a different talent and a different reason to distrust the others, then lets their alliances curdle as the year wears on.

The book trades Bardugo's haunted-Yale mood for a colder, more cerebral kind of menace, all philosophy seminars and quiet betrayals. Recommended for Ninth House readers who liked Lethe's gatekeeping of forbidden power and want a story where the secret society does the bleeding.

Mona Awad's Bunny is the strangest entry on this list, and the closest to Ninth House in the way it fuses an elite institution with literal blood magic. Samantha is a scholarship outsider in a tiny MFA fiction program, repelled by the clique of rich girls who call each other Bunny and speak in saccharine baby talk.

Then the Bunnies invite her in, and their off-campus "Workshop" turns out to involve conjuring things that should not exist. Awad writes the slow loss of self with real horror, letting the word "I" dissolve into "we" as Samantha disappears into the cult.

The elitism of the program and the occult sit in the same place, exactly the way Bardugo binds Yale's old money to Yale's old magic. Recommended for Ninth House readers who want the cult dynamics turned up and the ground pulled out from under them.

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra is the magic-school novel for Ninth House readers who found the haunted-Yale machinery too comfortable. Sasha is coerced into attending the Institute of Special Technologies in rural Ukraine, where the curriculum is incomprehensible, the textbooks rearrange the mind, and failure threatens her family in the world outside.

The magic here is not wands and spells but grammar made flesh, students slowly transforming into parts of speech that can reshape reality. The Dyachenkos write study as terror, with a dread that builds page by page and never quite resolves.

Like Ninth House, the book treats power as something onerous and dangerous rather than a gift. Recommended for Ninth House readers who want a school that genuinely frightens them and a magic system unlike anything else in the genre.

Victoria Lee's A Lesson in Vengeance is the boarding-school cousin of Ninth House, all ivy, old witchcraft, and a heroine who half wants the dark to claim her. Felicity Morrow returns to the Dalloway School in the Catskills to finish her senior year after the death of her girlfriend, taking a room in Godwin House, the dorm rumored to be haunted by five long-dead student witches.

When the magnetic teen novelist Ellis Haley arrives and starts researching Dalloway's witch history, Felicity is pulled back toward the very thing she suspects killed the person she loved. Lee writes grief and unreliable perception with the same blurred-reality menace Bardugo gives Alex Stern.

Hidden gem because it landed as a quieter YA title and never got the BookTok wave it deserved. Recommended for Ninth House readers who want atmosphere, queerness, and a heroine you cannot quite trust.

T.L. Huchu's The Library of the Dead gives Ninth House readers the thing they loved most, a young woman who speaks with the dead, and drops her into a grim, magical Edinburgh.

Ropa Moyo dropped out of school to support her grandmother and little sister, working as a ghostalker who carries messages between the living and the deceased. When the ghosts warn her that someone is stealing and draining the city's children, she follows the trail into a hidden occult research institute, the Library of the Dead, and a magical underworld the city's wealthy keep to themselves. Huchu writes Ropa with the same wry, no-nonsense voice that makes Alex Stern such good company, but trades Yale's privilege for a Scotland of council estates and hustle.

Hidden gem because the series never broke out the way its premise deserves. Recommended for Ninth House readers who want the medium-for-the-dead hook in a fresh, class-conscious setting.

S.T. Gibson's An Education in Malice is the sultriest book on this list, a dark academia retelling of Carmilla that pulls Ninth House readers toward the seduction at the edge of the occult.

On her first day at a remote 1960s women's college, Laura Sheridan is thrown into a fierce rivalry with the beautiful, secretive Carmilla, the favored student of their commanding poetry professor, De Lafontaine. The rivalry curdles into obsession, and the professor's hold on Carmilla turns out to run on blood rather than mentorship. Gibson writes the closed world of the elite seminar with the same hothouse intensity Bardugo brings to Yale's secret societies, where ambition, desire, and danger share one room.

Hidden gem because Gibson's cult readership still outsizes her mainstream profile. Recommended for Ninth House readers who want their dark academia laced with vampires, queer longing, and predatory glamour.

R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, released August 2025, is the dark academia event Ninth House readers were waiting for, and it shares Bardugo's nerve for putting the dead at the center of the plot.

Alice Law has sacrificed her health, her pride, and her sanity to become one of the brightest minds in Magick at Cambridge, studying under the brilliant and monstrous Professor Grimes. When Grimes dies in a magical accident that may be Alice's fault, she descends into Hell itself to drag his soul back, because she still needs his letter of recommendation. Her academic rival comes with her.

Kuang writes the underworld as a savage extension of the university, where ambition curdles into damnation. Released August 2025 from the author of Babel and Yellowface. Recommended for Ninth House readers who want occult academia pushed to its literal, infernal endpoint.

Mona Awad's We Love You, Bunny, released September 2025, returns to the blood-soaked MFA cult of Bunny and gives Ninth House readers a fresh dose of academia-meets-occult menace. The Bunnies are back, and this time the book turns the perspective around, letting the clique that once absorbed Samantha tell their side of the conjuring, the Workshop, and what really happens when their imaginary creations refuse to stay imaginary.

Awad keeps the saccharine horror and the dissolving sense of self that made the first book a cult favorite, while widening the lens on the strange power the program holds over everyone trapped inside it. Released September 2025 from Simon and Schuster.

Recommended for Ninth House readers who loved the elite-institution-as-cult thread and want a 2025 release that pushes that idea deeper into surreal, ritual horror.