Hazard Night
Cleeve
College is not for everyone...
When Eve's husband is appointed housemaster at his old boarding school,
Cleeve College, she gives up her life in London to join him. But the isolation
and loss of autonomy threaten both her happiness and her marriage.
The arrival of Fen, an enigmatic artist and wife of the new Classics teacher,
is a welcome distraction. Fen doesn't play by the rules, and she and Eve enter
into a game of escalating dares, disrupting the delicate balance of school
life.
Then, the morning after Hazard Night, a tradition that allows the students to
run wild and play pranks for one day, a body is found. Someone has been
murdered. And it seems everyone has something to hide...
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Author Bio – Laura Vaughan grew up in rural Wales.
She got her first book deal aged twenty-two and spent several years working in
publishing, followed by a behind-the-scenes role at English National Ballet.
She lives in South London with her husband and two children. Hazard Night is
her third novel for adults.
Social Media Links – https://twitter.com/CorvusBooks
https://twitter.com/LVaughanwrites
Please welcome Laura Vaughan who talks about HAZARD NIGHT & Dark Academia.
Dark Academia centres on the rot at the heart of elite
educational institutions. The most famous example is Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET
HISTORY, but you can find elements of the genre in classics such as BRIDESHEAD
REVISITED or GAUDY NIGHT. For film-lovers, SALTBURN uses several of the tropes,
as does THE RIOT CLUB (an adaptation of Laura Wade’s play POSH). It’s the kind
of morality tale that’s concerned with the seduction, then corruption, of
wealth and privilege. There’s a heady dose of youthful arrogance and twisted
desires. What more could a crime writer want?
My first adult novel, THE FAVOUR, was about a
decadent group of art history students in Italy, who end up having to hide
nasty secret. With HAZARD NIGHT, I set the action even more squarely in Dark
Academia-land: an elite boarding school.
It’s transgressive fun to take a peek
at privileged people behaving badly. The pay-off is when they get their
come-uppance. In gilded-youth noir, the reader generally sees events through
the eyes of an outsider who, knowingly or unknowingly, brings about everyone’s
downfall. There are a number of outsiders in HAZARD NIGHT – and all are
potential agents of destruction.
One is Eve, the lonely and frustrated
wife of a housemaster; the other is Alice, is the neglected teenage daughter of
the school chaplain. Both Eve and Alice fall under the spell of glamorous
newcomers. Fenn, the bohemian wife of the new Classics master, befriends Eve
and draws her into an escalating game of dares. Alice is taken under the wing
of the Bette, queen bee of the new female sixth-formers, and finds herself
caught in a love-triangle of far-reaching consequences. Observing all of them from
the shadows is Lindsey, the townie girl who works in the school laundries, and
seems to know more of Cleeve’s secrets than the faculty do.
It’s no coincidence that this group
of outsiders and disruptors is female. Cleeve College is a bastion of male entitlement:
a place “where female rage has little currency”. The story is set in the nineties, a more
innocent time in some ways, when teenagers grew up free from the baleful
influence of social media. Yet it was also a time when casual racism, sexism
and homophobia were often imbedded in classroom life. The whole concept of Dark
Academia is, in any case, rooted in privilege. I wanted to explore the viewpoint
of the boys who rule the roost at Cleeve, but in a way which allowed for
another outside perspective.
Henry Zhang is one of a number of
recent arrivals from Hong Kong, whose parents, worried about the upcoming
handover of the territory to the Chinese, have dispatched their children to the
safety of a British boarding school. He’s handsome and popular, the captain of
the cricket team, but also painfully aware his success is contingent on never
rocking the boat, never being overheard talking Cantonese with the other Asian
kids … and smiling along when he’s called the Yellow Peril. But for all his
carefulness, Henry, like the other outsiders at Cleeve, doesn’t realise how
quite how precarious his position is.
A boarding school campus is its own self-contained
world, which can seem impregnable as well as impenetrable to those who don’t
belong. But it’s a very delicate ecosystem, nonetheless. “Hundreds of disparate
people, the majority of whom are in a hormonal maelstrom of one sort or the
other, cooped up together in a wholly artificial environment and governed by a
mixture of ritual and convention alone! You disrupt something like this at your
peril,” as one character observes.
And
peril is certainly coming, for the discovery of a dead body in the school
grounds is only the beginning…
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