And He Shall Appear is a novel about a young musician's obsessive friendship with a fellow student, a charismatic magician who seems to tread a line between life of the party and dark power. The narrator, who remains unnamed, starts at Cambridge as an outsider, but he quickly discovers Bryn Cavendish, a powerful presence who does magic tricks like his occultist father. As the narrator is drawn into Bryn's world and away from the academic drudgery, he starts to believe that Bryn holds far more power than it first appears, and as the narrator tells the story years later, this power might be still lingering.

This book is immediately going to fall into the 'dark academia' category, and admittedly, for once it actually lives up to that name in some ways, as it is very much focused on a dark side of being a student at Cambridge, and the narrator's obsession with a particular musician lends it more of the 'academia' element that many books labelled dark academia seem to forget. The story is told to us from a present day, in which the narrator is returning to Cambridge for an event, but most of the book is set in the past of his first couple of years at Cambridge as he unfolds a particular story. As with many dark academia books clearly taking inspiration from The Secret History, he is an unreliable narrator, and indeed the book is preoccupied with ideas of the stories we create, leading to an ending in which we come to understand that there's more than one way of telling a story, as with playing a musical piece.

I enjoyed reading this book, with its accurate Oxbridge detail and the undercurrent of dark magic and hauntings that are always meant to be a little mysterious, and the narrator's obvious hiding of certain characters' identities or their exact fates is fairly predictable, but still works pretty effectively to get across how he is potentially rewriting the past. However, at times it felt a bit 'dark academia by numbers' in its choices, and I do find it hilarious that so many books in the sub-genre tend to have a less posh/outsider-type person suddenly finding themselves at a fancy university and throwing off the regular people to find some mesmerising yet dark people (having done the former personally, it didn't turn into any kind of dark academia set up, I have to admit). This book fits that stereotype and doesn't do very much with it, and I do feel like the whole 'outsider tries to make themselves part of the narrative' thing felt too predictable given that I've read other similar books that do a similar thing.

The obsessive friendship element I did enjoy, though I felt that the book's ending was the only place where this was really delved into very much, and there was never really enough space to say much other than 'you can obsessively love someone platonically' and then not really go anywhere with that. There might be something in the idea that these kinds of obsessive friendships are often depicted in fiction in ambiguous ways that could make them queer or not, and in this case it is meant to explicitly not be, and what that might mean for the book, and generally for how male obsessive friendships might be seen as weirder than female ones generally in pop culture and society.

Generally, this is a solid example of a dark academia novel and will appeal to people who like them, with enough accurate detail and sinister-seeming happenings to warrant it that title. For me, I found that it was often too predictable, not really delving into anything that might make it different or stand out in the category, so though I had fun reading it, I wasn't captivated by it like I have been by books like The Secret History or The Lessons.