30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
From Dead Poets Society to Satanic rituals in Fife
When We Were Killers, apparently, fits snugly into a genre which has retrospectively embraced works as diverse as Dead Poets Society and the Harry Potter series.
Intentionally or not, it takes place in 1992, the year of the publication of one of dark academia's foundational texts, Donna Tartt's The Secret History.
When We Were Killers C.F. Barrington (Image: Head of Zeus) It's in that year that a young student named Finn Nethercott starts at St Andrews, not long after the traumatic experience of losing his whole family in a hillwalking accident.
He has enrolled in the School of Divinity, though he has no plans to join the ministry, nor is he particularly religious.
Finn likes old places, like stone circles and hill forts, locating his spirituality "in the natural world and in history".
His esoteric interests lead to his adoption by a student group, the Clan Dal Riata, who explore altered states of mind by enacting rituals on hallucinogenic drugs.
The Clan get together in sacred spaces to mark important dates in religious calendars, with a particular fondness for the Norse tradition, although they claim that all religions wind seamlessly together around a universal truth.
They're led by the aristocratic Magnus and third-year student Madrigal (shortened to Madri), who share a privileged background and appear to be a couple.
Laurie is the Clan's historian, the one who grounds their vision quests in his encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient religions.
But the one who really pulls Finn into their circle is Hope, a striking, raven-haired American woman with eyes of sparkling copper, on whom Finn becomes hopelessly fixated.
Together, they pull Finn deeper into ancient lore, picnicking at faerie lochs and camping at the ancient seat of Dal Riata, losing themselves in progressively wilder hallucinations in their attempts to rediscover the lost drug that induced ecstatic trances in the Viking Berserkers.
Although they welcome Finn into the Clan and permit him to be inked with their shared tattoo, the others remain guarded and aloof.
It's likely that Finn, with his awkwardness and repressed trauma, would be a misfit in any group he tried to join.
But class tensions are clearly at play too, Magnus and Madri happy to let Finn participate, but only on their own terms.
Meanwhile, their activities are not going unnoticed.
Finn suspects he's being followed, and that his room was searched while he was out.
His suspicion that there's a rival group in St Andrews that wants to stamp them out proves to be correct, even if the Clan are reluctant to tell him exactly why.
The most straightforwardly decent person in the story is wholesome Divinity student Anna, who is genuinely concerned about Finn but cruelly sidelined by him as he becomes increasingly unmoored from normal life.
But even if none of the other characters, including Finn, is particularly likeable, Barrington's fantastical and intriguing scenario is steeped in such a mood of impending disaster that we feel compelled to see it through to the end, even if only to see just how badly these people can screw up.
If Finn himself is an uncomfortable reminder of what it's like to be young, stupid, and unable to help making terrible decisions, Barrington's version of St Andrews, accentuating its gothic mystery and splendour, makes the perfect setting for a story about long-established networks of privilege lurking behind a douce exterior.
