Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'

There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pass for mundane, the better to haunt us after we put them down. Donna Tartt's debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is such a work. On the surface, it is a brilliant, yet completely naturalistic, telling of the lead-up and aftermath of a murder. But The Secret History is also a work of the depths, and readers who go in seeking the Weird will find it lurking on every page. More than a masterpiece of psychological exploration, it is a story about the resurgence of the old god Dionysus, and a chronicle of fate; fate conceived, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks, as a cosmic force. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Donna Tartt, The Secret History Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist Weird Studies, Episode 98 on Exotica M. R. James, English author Weird Studies, Episode 3 on “The White People” E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale John Crowley, Little, Big Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Outrageous Okana” Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game” Gabriel Faure, Nocturne No. 11 Pierre-André Boutang, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch