Books like The Atlas Six

Donna Tartt's The Secret History is the foundation text for dark academia, and The Atlas Six borrows from it liberally. A group of elite Classics students at a small Vermont college becomes entangled in a murder that grows out of their obsession with Greek ideals of beauty and transcendence. Like Blake's six magicians, Tartt's students are seductive and terrifying in equal measure, people whose intelligence does not protect them from their worst impulses.

The novel's narrator, Richard Papen, is drawn into their orbit the same way readers are drawn to Blake's cast: by the irresistible pull of people who seem to live on a different plane of existence. Both books understand that the most dangerous thing about brilliant people is their capacity for self-justification. Where Blake adds literal magic, Tartt achieves a similar effect through sheer atmospheric pressure.

The Secret History set the template that The Atlas Six works within, and reading it illuminates everything Blake is doing.

M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains transposes dark academia from Classics to Shakespeare, following seven acting students at a conservatory college whose obsessive immersion in their roles begins to blur the line between performance and reality.

Like The Atlas Six, the novel features a closed group of exceptional young people whose talents and rivalries create an atmosphere of escalating danger. Rio writes the theatrical world with the same insider specificity Blake brings to her magical society, and the ensemble dynamics are similarly charged with attraction, jealousy, and the constant calculation of who holds power over whom. Both books use their academic settings not just as backdrop but as fuel: the characters in each are shaped by what they study, and their intellectual pursuits become weapons.

The twist structure keeps you guessing in the same way Blake's revelations about the Alexandrian Society's true purpose do. If you loved The Atlas Six for its group of beautiful, damaged overachievers destroying each other, If We Were Villains delivers the same experience with soliloquies instead of spells.

R.F. Kuang's Babel is set in 1830s Oxford, where the Royal Institute of Translation uses silverworking powered by the gaps between languages to fuel the British Empire.

Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan brought to England to serve the Institute, must choose between loyalty to the institution that raised him and resistance to the empire that silver sustains. Like The Atlas Six, the novel takes a prestigious academic institution and reveals the violence that underpins its power. Both books feature characters who are recruited for their exceptional abilities and then forced to confront the moral cost of participating in systems designed to concentrate power.

Kuang's prose is denser and more political than Blake's, and the historical setting grounds the fantasy in real colonial violence. Where Blake keeps things sleek and contemporary, Kuang builds her world with scholarly depth. Readers who want The Atlas Six's themes of knowledge, power, and institutional corruption pushed further and harder will find Babel an extraordinary match.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant but depressed teenager who discovers that the magical land from his favorite childhood books is real, and that he has been admitted to Brakebills, a secret graduate school for magic. Like The Atlas Six, the novel treats magic as something that costs its practitioners, and the academic setting is marked by competition, intellectual snobbery, and a creeping sense that the people in charge are hiding something.

Grossman's tone is more cynical than Blake's, and Quentin is deliberately unsympathetic in ways that Blake's characters are not, but both books share an interest in what happens when gifted, unhappy people gain access to real power. The magic system at Brakebills is rigorous and demanding, and the social dynamics among students mirror the alliances and betrayals of Blake's six.

Grossman explicitly deconstructs the Narnia and Harry Potter traditions, and his willingness to take magic seriously as a source of both wonder and damage makes the novel a strong companion to The Atlas Six.

Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is set in the Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted that has no teachers, no holidays, and a graduation process that kills most of its students. El Higgins is powerful enough to destroy entire civilizations, and her struggle to survive school while suppressing her destructive abilities drives a novel that is both funny and genuinely tense.

Like The Atlas Six, the book puts a group of young magicians in a competitive environment where alliances are strategic and betrayal is always an option. Novik's school is more overtly dangerous than Blake's Alexandrian Society, with monsters in the hallways rather than boardrooms, but both novels treat their magical institutions as systems that extract talent from individuals and use it for institutional ends.

El is a more sympathetic protagonist than most of Blake's cast, but her moral dilemmas are similar: how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice for survival and power? The pacing is faster and the humor sharper, making this a good choice for readers who want the magical-school-as-crucible setup in a more propulsive package.

Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth drops nine necromancer-cavalier pairs into a decaying space mansion and tells them to solve the mysteries within or die trying. The tone is wildly different from The Atlas Six, Muir writes with manic humor and a voice that reads like a fantasy novel narrated by a punk rocker, but the underlying structure is identical: a group of brilliant, dangerous people competing for limited spots in a secret society, forced to collaborate and betray each other in equal measure.

Like Blake, Muir builds her world through the interactions between her characters, letting their relationships reveal the rules of the system they inhabit. The locked-room mystery element creates the same pressure-cooker atmosphere as Blake's Alexandrian Society, and the magical system is just as complex and demanding.

Gideon herself is a more irreverent protagonist than any of Blake's cast, but the novel shares The Atlas Six's DNA in its ensemble dynamics, its fascination with the cost of magical power, and its willingness to let bad things happen to characters you like.

Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House follows Alex Stern, a young woman with the ability to see ghosts, who is given a full ride to Yale on the condition that she monitor the university's eight secret societies, each of which practices a different form of dark magic. Like The Atlas Six, the novel takes an elite academic institution and reveals the occult machinery beneath its ivy-covered surface.

Both books feature protagonists navigating systems of power they did not create and do not fully understand, and both treat their settings with the same mix of reverence and suspicion. Bardugo's New Haven is darker and grittier than Blake's sleek Alexandrian Society, with more real-world consequences for the magic being practiced, and Alex is a more damaged, less privileged protagonist than any of Blake's six.

The mystery-thriller structure gives Ninth House more narrative drive than Blake's more character-study approach, making it a strong pick for readers who want dark academia with teeth and a protagonist who has nothing left to lose.