Kamilah Cole is the bestselling author of So Let Them Burn and This Ends in Embers. A graduate of New York University, Kamilah is usually playing Kingdom Hearts for the hundredth time, quoting early SpongeBob SquarePants episodes, or crying her way through Zuko’s redemption arc in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
When I first began to write my Adult debut, An Arcane Inheritance, it was supposed to be a thriller.
I’ve always loved thrillers, especially ones in the mold of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Give me unreliable narrators, a major midway twist, and an explosive ending, and I’ll be up into the wee hours racing to the end. Over the years, I devoured When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole, Society of Liars by Lauren Ling Brown, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me is Dead by Jenny Holland. Ashley Flowers and Tiffany D. Jackson. Vera Kurian and Clémence Michallon. Catherine Dang and Eliza Jane Brazier.
As a fan of the genre, it didn’t take long into my first draft of An Arcane Inheritance for me to realize that what I was writing… was not that.
These days, I pitch this book with so many genres my audience must be confused. “It’s an Adult dark academia romantic fantasy with thriller and horror elements,” I said to a crowd of librarians at New Voices New Rooms in Atlanta, GA. At some point I added the word “slowburn,” to describe both the romance and the unfurling mystery (another genre!). Then, of course, it’s perhaps the most romantic book I’ve ever written, which means I was invited to festivals as a romance author (OK, that’s too many genres now, Kamilah, put some back).
In my mind, An Arcane Inheritance is an ivy league gothic. According to a 2025 article by Central Michigan University Professor of English Eric Baerren, gothic literature features “stories defined by a spooky atmosphere, and including violent acts, elements of the supernatural and a morbid fascination with the past and with death.” He adds that “an atmosphere of dread is thus key to the Gothic.”
As I wrote An Arcane Inheritance, that is what I was building: an atmosphere of dread. The novel follows a 21-year-old first generation Jamaican immigrant named Ellory Morgan, who has just landed a scholarship that enables her to attend the fictional ivy league, Warren University, as a freshman. But as she goes through her school year, she begins to see and hear things that no one else does, leading her to fear that she is being haunted. When she discovers a tattoo on the back of her neck that says REMEMBER, Ellory must team up with the school’s golden boy, Hudson Graves, to figure out what she’s forgotten—and who stands to benefit from her ignorance.
I wanted readers to feel Ellory’s fear that she is losing her mind, her stubborn denial of the existence of magic, and her inexplicable draw to people and places that are supposed to be new to her. I wanted her college experience to feel normal, so it became undeniable and horrific when it suddenly wasn’t. I wanted to build to an explosive ending like the thrillers I adored—but I wanted to do it after a leisurely walk through the macabre.
In the end, it was my editor who encouraged me to let An Arcane Inheritance be whatever it wanted to be, even what it wanted to be was many things. It’s a slowburn and intense rivals-to-lovers romance between two people who can’t stay away from each other, even and especially when they should. It’s a dark academia critiquing the challenges that higher education poses when it comes to people of color with neither the money nor connections to even the playing field. It’s a mystery thriller about a woman determined to solve a decades-old cold case to put the spirits of the lost and forgotten to rest. It’s a supernatural horror full of chilling imagery and near-death experiences.
And, to my surprise, readers responded well to this genre mash-up. Instead of being so many things that it isolated everyone, An Arcane Inheritance ended up having something for every kind of reader. The people who loved it really, really loved it. Fans of the dark academia genre, especially, have seen these classic tropes filtered through the lens of a first-generation Jamaican immigrant so rarely that they were made new through Ellory’s struggles. My writing leveled up in ways I could never have imagined, because I was so determined to tell her story to the best of my ability.
Because the fact of the matter is that I did An Arcane Inheritance a disservice by trying to fit it into the thriller genre at first. There are authors who have done dark academia thrillers far better than I, from If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio to Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, from The Girl You Know by Elle Gonzalez Rose to That Devil, Ambition by Linsey Miller.
But this was not a tale that could unfurl in fast-paced twists and sudden misdirection. This was not my beloved genre of edge-of-the-seat plots and heightened suspense. I loved thrillers enough to know that I had not written one—and maybe I’m incapable of writing one.
An Arcane Inheritance was a story that needed to simmer, to seep beneath the reader’s skin and lay there, waiting, for the perfect time to yank them to that very last line. It’s a dark academia gothic, with all the romance, horror, mystery, and supernatural dread that implies.
When readers step into Warren University, I want them to question everything along with Ellory, to empathize with her on her journey to find the truth, and to turn the final page having found something within this story that resonates with them.
My odds of that feel pretty good. After all, An Arcane Inheritance has yet to meet a genre it didn’t want to be in.
An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole
Ellory Morgan is determined to make a name for herself at Warren University, an ivy league school with a secret society who draws their power from the forbidden magic of BIPOC students. As Ellory’s freshman year continues, a chilling sense of déjà vu haunts her until there is no denying that she has been at Warren University before. She must convince legacy student Hudson Graves to help her uncover the past that someone is determined to hide before it slips away for good.
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