Yale, 1986. Julian Caldwell arrives as a scholarship student, eager, out of place, and desperate to belong. He is quickly drawn into the orbit of an enigmatic circle of students: Saturn, the radiant and ruthless center; Sebastian, cruel and magnetic; Vivienne, brilliant and brittle; Dorian, detached and cutting; and Jasper, devout and unraveling. Their lives are bound together by beauty, intellect, and a dangerous appetite for ritual. What begins as philosophy and performance-the recitation of Euripides by candlelight, the reenactment of myths in abandoned halls-slowly curdles into something darker. Blood oaths are sworn. Animals appear arranged like sacrifices in the snow. A fellow student dies in what the campus calls an accident, though Julian knows better. In the flicker of firelight and the pull of Saturn's golden gaze, he feels the veil between myth and life thinning-and realizes the group has stepped across it. Haunted by visions, complicit in silences, Julian becomes both chronicler and participant in their descent. Each member of the group carries a secret weight: Sebastian's hunger for domination, Vivienne's fear of decay, Dorian's obsession with narrative, Jasper's desperate faith, and Saturn's unshakable belief that beauty demands blood. Their rivalries and devotions collapse into violence, binding them inextricably to the rituals they began as a game. As winter deepens, Yale becomes a stage for their unraveling. The Black Procession through snow, the House of Glass with its warped reflections, the Feast of Saint Agnes-all blur the lines between theater and sacrament, until the group cannot tell where performance ends and damnation begins. Julian's journal entries chart their decline, but even he cannot escape what has been summoned. By the time the final chapter-The Flood-arrives, the circle has devoured itself. Their pursuit of beauty, their worship of blood, has left the chapel steps and library halls littered with ruin. Julian survives, but survival itself is its own curse. He has been transformed, hollowed, marked forever by what he has witnessed-and by what he has done. An Education in Blood is a dark academia gothic of obsession, ritual, and tragedy, where Greek drama and Shakespearean echoes collide with the hunger of youth. It asks: what are we willing to sacrifice for beauty? And once the gods answer, who among us can endure the reckoning?

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