Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent is a genre-defining fusion of dark academia, fantasy, and LGBTQ representation that masterfully threads together the gothic intensity of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series with the atmospheric horror and narrative playfulness of Plain Bad Heroines. Set at the storied, secret-ridden Chetwood School, Tesh conjures a tautly intelligent and emotionally rich narrative that centers around Dr. Saffron “Saffy” Walden—Director of Magic and perhaps one of the most compelling, complicated heroines in recent fantasy literature.
A Premise Lit with Fire
Chetwood Academy is not your average boarding school. It’s a place where invocation magic is taught alongside GCSE Chemistry, where boundary wards keep demons at bay, and where a possessed photocopier negotiates for chocolate digestives. At the heart of it is Saffy Walden, a career academic and magician, whose job entails overseeing the arcane curriculum, safeguarding the students, and—most critically—keeping Chetwood from being consumed by the demon lurking beneath its foundations: the ancient and terrifying Old Faithful.
When a routine sixth-form summoning lesson escalates into a catastrophic magical breach, and her most brilliant and troubled student, Nicola Conway, becomes entangled with Old Faithful, Walden finds herself fighting more than just an incursion. She is forced to confront ghosts—both literal and personal—from her own past, all while safeguarding the lives of students who may be more powerful, and more vulnerable, than anyone realizes.
Character Study: Saffy Walden as the Anti-Prophet
Dr. Saffy Walden is a revelation. Queer, middle-aged, chronically overworked, and achingly human, she breaks every fantasy protagonist mold in the best way. Tesh writes her with equal parts exhaustion and conviction, allowing Walden’s competence, weariness, humor, and quiet grief to take center stage. She is sharp, principled, sarcastic, and profoundly alone, living in a boarding school suite next to a room full of Victorian thaumic engines while nursing the wounds of a youthful trauma she’s never allowed to scab.
As a scholar, Saffy is often the smartest person in any room—except when she’s not, and it costs her. Her dynamic with Laura Kenning, the headstrong Marshal assigned to protect Chetwood, adds a charged undercurrent of mutual skepticism and repressed attraction that becomes one of the book’s quietest, slowest-burning delights.
Dark Academia Reimagined
While The Incandescent shares surface-level similarities with other school-based fantasies—ancient libraries, shadowy corridors, powerful students—it smartly avoids the genre’s most tired tropes. This is no escapist haven. Chetwood is a site of rigorous academic labor, magical bureaucracy, and haunting institutional memory. The cost of magic is not metaphorical here; it’s spiritual, psychological, and viscerally physical.
The world-building is layered and precise, filled with delightfully concrete magical mechanics: invocation magic operates through contract and containment, magical exams are a battlefield of anxiety and danger, and demons are not metaphors for teen angst but existential, devouring forces with predatory intelligence. In this context, teenage errors have lethal consequences, and Walden’s responsibility—to teach, protect, and occasionally reprimand—is rendered with unflinching realism.
Sapphic Resonance Without Spectacle
Tesh excels at writing queer characters with nuance and dignity, and she doesn’t rely on romance to prove queerness. Walden’s sexuality is neither the focus of the plot nor an afterthought—it’s an integrated aspect of her identity. Her past relationship with Roz Chan is never overplayed, but it quietly informs Walden’s emotional isolation and her simultaneous attraction and frustration toward Kenning. Their slow orbit around one another is one of the most restrained and grown-up queer romances in fantasy—a tonic for readers exhausted by insta-love and overwrought yearning.
A Commentary on Power and Pedagogy
Underneath the demon-fighting and spellwork, The Incandescent is deeply invested in what it means to teach and to care. The book meditates on the ethics of magic, the fallibility of authority, and the loneliness of leadership. Walden’s role as both an academic and a mother figure is constantly interrogated: What do teachers owe their students? What sacrifices are ethical in the name of institutional legacy? How do you teach a child to be powerful without teaching them they’re invincible?
These questions are asked without easy answers. Nikki Conway, a Black British student with raw magical talent and a traumatic past, is both a symbol of hope and a danger to herself and others. Mathias Wick, a foster child of deep magical potential, is perpetually on the verge of collapsing under the weight of his trauma. Will, the charming and careless aristocrat-in-the-making, reveals unexpected depths when the chips are down.
Strengths of the Novel
- World-Building That Honors Detail: The precision of Tesh’s magical system—steeped in scholarly ritual, institutional decay, and genuine peril—feels real, lived-in, and refreshingly intellectual.
- Emotional Intelligence: Tesh’s characters feel heartbreakingly human in the way they make mistakes, seek forgiveness, and cling to one another in the dark.
- Tone Management: The novel nimbly moves between dry humor (possessed photocopiers on strike), emotional gravity, and near-horror without tonal whiplash.
- Narrative Voice: Walden’s third-person limited perspective is dry, witty, self-aware, and a touch jaded—ideal for a protagonist who is both weary and heroic.
Points of Critique
Despite its brilliance, The Incandescent does stumble in a few places:
- Pacing Lag in Act Two: After the incursion scene, the novel briefly loses momentum in the buildup to the final confrontation. There’s an overreliance on school logistics and bureaucratic exchanges that slightly dilute the narrative tension.
- Peripheral Characters Blur: Some secondary students (like Will’s peers) are less defined, and the middle schoolers never quite achieve narrative significance despite their importance to the stakes.
- Ambiguity Over Resolution: The ending, while emotionally resonant, leaves some open questions—particularly about Walden’s fate and the nature of the final “deal”—which may frustrate readers looking for neat resolution.
Comparisons and Literary Lineage
- Readers of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy will appreciate the brutal pragmatism of magical education and the thread of self-sacrifice that runs through Walden’s arc.
- Fans of Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth will find a similar blend of queer horror, metafictional sensibilities, and academic decay.
- There’s also a whiff of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, particularly in how knowledge, guilt, and elitism interweave.
Verdict: A Modern Fantasy Masterpiece
With The Incandescent, Emily Tesh has done more than write a brilliant novel—she’s issued a challenge to the dark academia genre: to think harder, feel deeper, and write characters who are more than just cynical tropes in tweed. This is a book that rewards patience, trusts its readers, and burns with the incandescent light of scholarship, sacrifice, and slow-burning queer love.
Tesh doesn’t just cast spells—she teaches you how to feel their weight.
