Episode 13.3: ‘The Rabbit Club’ by Christopher J Yates
If you’ve been with us since Season 8, you may recognise the name of this week’s author as we read his novel ‘Black Chalk’ back in 2024. Now Yates is back with another dark academia novel that has had it’s praises shouted from the rooftops.
When Ali McCain, an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles, is accepted at Oxford, it’s a chance to fulfil his dreams. To study English literature in England; to meet true intellectuals; and to glimpse the life he might have lived had his father—British rock star Gel McCain, legendary frontman of the Pale Fires—not abandoned him and his mother when he was a toddler.
But not long after he arrives at the storied campus, Ali is drawn into a dark, disorienting world where events grow more and more curious by the day. Trading on his father’s name, he gains entry into one of Oxford’s oldest and most selective secret societies, the Saracens. As he immerses himself in this rarefied world, he inadvertently sets in motion a series of events that might culminate in disaster.
A mind-bending literary house of mirrors, replete with bookish allusions and Easter eggs ranging from Brideshead Revisited to King Lear, The Rabbit Club is an arresting work of dark academia by the category’s finest writer.
We were interested to explore how a second novel by Christopher J Yates would go for us, and whether it would live up to the dark academia comparisons
In this episode we discuss:
A reflection on an interview with the author where he stated that he doesn’t plot his novels, and how that showed itself in the text and structure
The intertextuality of the novel; how it succeeds and how it fails
The desperate want to be British
You can listen to it here:
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TEXTS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
‘The Rabbit Club’ by Christopher J Yates
‘Black Chalk’ by Christopher J Yates
‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt
‘If We Were Villains’ by ML Rio
‘Brideshead Revisited’ by Evelyn Waugh
‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare
Sylvia Plath
‘Pale Fire’ by Vladimir Nabokov
Virginia Woolf
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
Ted Hughes
‘His Dark Materials’ by Philip Pullman
‘Ninth House’ by Leigh Bardugo
‘Rottenheart’ by Kat Dunn
OTHER MEDIA MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
‘Saltburn’ (2023)
‘The Riot Club’ (2014)
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