In My Dreams I Hold A Knife

Donna Tartt’s contemporary classic The Secret History, published in 1991, initiated a new genre of thrillers set on college campuses, exploring the psychological and emotional tumult of close-knit young adult relationships amid rampant partying and an environment of intellectual ambition.

The popularity of the “campus thriller” is based in part on readers’ nostalgia for emotionally and intellectually intense college experiences. In contemporary pop culture, elite college and prep school experiences have inspired films like The Skulls (2000) and Maurice (1987) and the more commercial Dead Poets Society (1989) and Cruel Intentions (1999). Many readers remember college as a time when—as love interest Coop states in Winstead’s novel—everything feels extreme: Young people are on their own for the first time with little responsibility, spending all their time around other young people, carrying with them an overwhelming sense that their best years are ahead. Combining this nostalgia with a “whodunit” or “whydunit” makes for popular fiction.

Numerous blurbs compare In My Dreams I Hold a Knife to The Secret History and Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits (2021). Like these novels, it interrogates imposter syndrome and characters who are both in and out of prestigious inner circles at their elite colleges. In The Atlantic, author Maya Chun writes that campus novels also often “deal with some of our society’s most pressing questions” (Chung, Maya. “The Allure of the Campus Novel.” The Atlantic, 2022). Winstead’s book interrogates the extreme wealth at many elite universities, the debt the non-wealthy must take on to attend such schools, and the unhealthy habits of the obsessively ambitious. Like other novels of dark academia, the close friendships here are toxic, and Jessica, the main character, is overworked. Other than Jessica’s goal to be an economist, the pursuits of the characters are less academic than in the typical campus novel. More passages are devoted to fraternity parties and sorority rivalries than to Greek literature or philosophy. However, the mystery inherent in the pressure cooker atmosphere of Duquette University falls well within this genre with its dark themes and unsolved murder.