Scheduled to post 9/25
The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison (2024) – “You are formally invited to a reunion of the Midnight Brunch Club…” Decades after the tragic death of a member of their group, a set of college friends are reunited in the town where it all began. Through the use of a mysterious concoction that the locals call “sog”, they delve into their memories of that time. They hope to finally put to rest the questions around the death, but soon discover that those are not the only secrets revealed.
Why I Liked It – The story winds itself tighter and tighter as each member begins to focus on their own issues surrounding their lives at the time of the mysterious death.
I enjoyed this book a lot. The central concept of returning to a place that was central to your life years before to face an unanswered question is one that grabs me. It’s nostalgia mixed with a mystery and that’s a combination that works well.
Jennet Stark was one of the members of the Midnight Brunch Club at a small college in Vermont in the late 1980’s. The group came together through the college literary magazine. There was Auraleigh, with the personality that drew every eye in any room she entered, Paul, her intellectual boyfriend and editor of the magazine. Sonia, the quiet, shy write who was just happy to be included. Byron, a multi-millionaire now, whose family disintegrated around him while he made his millions. His great love had been Jennet back in the day. Each of them has memories, questions, and fears about the night that Jennet died. It was ruled a suicide. None of them ever understood why Jennet did what she did. Twenty-five years later, Auraleigh invites them all back to remember and explore that night.
There was a “myth” among the locals in Dunstan about a concoction that allows you to step through time. Young folks might see glimpses of their future, older folks could see the past. It’s called “sog”, and as with anything that plays with time, it comes with dangers of its own.
The story is told through three avenues, simple story telling, voluntary memories, and involuntary memories, the ones that come from sessions with sog. The last category gives glimpses of what happened before. Things change as the four friends explore if they can guide them. What they find in the end will destroy some of their firmly held feelings about the past and each other. But it may also offer a closure about the events of the death.
I will admit that it took a chapter or two to get into the rhythm of Harrison’s story telling. Leaping back and forth between the reunion, and the college days (through two different lenses) threw me a little. Given my affection for non-linear storytelling, I’m not sure why that was. The relationships between the characters are filled in gradually. Each of the four central people felt like folks I’d known in my own life. Paul, who retires into his intellectual shell, and Auraleigh, the extrovert that is compelled to order and organize everything and everyone around her. Sonia is Auraleigh’s mirror image. Still too shy to ask Paul for an introduction to people in their shared professional sphere at a moment when she desperately needs that boost. And Byron, who has spent his life trying to make up for mistakes he barely realized he made. The past weighs heavily on them all.
I’m going to predict that this book makes it onto my end of year list of the best books I’ve read this year.
Rating - **** Recommended

📚Book Review 📚

- The Midnight Club by @margotfharrison

Do you enjoy thrillers with a little sci-fi thrown in? Locked room thrillers your jam? Are you a fan of whodunnits? Then this one is for you!!!

Twenty-five years ago four friends had quite the college reunion. They took a new drug that could allow you to time travel while your body was intact. Things go wrong and one of them is found dead.

Now, twenty-five years later, they have been invited to return for another reunion to honor their friend’s memory. However, someone has an ulterior motive, to take the drug to relive the past. Can they find out just who killed their friend and why?

I loved the sci-fi elements of the story, as I’ve been on a sci-fi thriller kick lately! Imagine a drug that could let you see into the future or the past. Crazy right?!

This is perfect for fans of —
- Sci-fi thrillers
- Locked room mysteries/thrillers
- Fans of whodunnits
- Fans of magical realism

I loved and ate this sucker up! Thank you so much to @graydonhousebooks @htpbooks @htp_hive and @margotfharrison for the gorgeous copy! Thank you to @netgalley for the digital arc copy!

Publication Date September 24, 2024
4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Posted review
https://www.instagram.com/p/C_iPpiAx2Zd/?igsh=dmwwZmZrcnRsOThy

I received an ARC of this book through NetGalley. A big thank you for the opportunity!

“Fours friends. A campus reunion. A dark new way to relieve the past.”

That got you hooked right?

The Midnight Club is perfect for fall with its dark academia aesthetic and mystery atmosphere. It features complex characters and even more complicated relationships between them. We explore their past and their present, which creates a very elaborate plotline. You get hooked by the originality of the story, and the need to know what will happen—or should I say what happened—is addicting.

Even with all the good sides I can find for this book, I don’t think I was the targeted audience. It was a slow-paced story, but the information provided was important and needed. So I do understand why the author made this choice. It's not what I prefer habitually, cause I sadly found it boring because of it. I also struggled with the broken timeline and the back and forth. But I do believe that someone who prefers a darker atmosphere and more complex mysteries would enjoy this book. It just wasn’t made for my taste, but it's sill a brilliant story!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for an Advanced Reader’s Copy in exchange for an honest review.

At first, I thought this was going to be another version of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History – group of college students in small town Vermont in the wake of their friends’ death. Because of this, it took me a bit longer to get into the story, but once I understood how different this narrative was, I was hooked.

Harrison writes a compelling narrative, mostly told from the perspectives of Sonia and Byron, returned to their old college town to visit friends Auraliegh and Paul. After their friend Jennet died twenty-five years before by drowning at the falls near campus, the group lost touch.

Their reunion sparks a debate over the details each person remembers from the night Jennet died, and also a nightly ritual during which they all partake in ‘sog’ – a local drug that when taken when the user is young, allows them to see the future. Now, twenty-five years after the death of their friend, they use sog to recall memories from the past. All of them are interested in learning more about what happened the night Jennet died, figuring out who was at the falls, and whether or not her death was truly an accident.

Personally, I liked the way the narrative switched between the past and present. I was able to follow along pretty easily, and liked the slow unravelling of true, false, and recovered memories. I also very much enjoyed Sonia’s love interest, Hayworth, as a character. My only gripe was that I wish the mystery of Jennet’s death – as it truly happened – would have been revealed a bit more to the reader. By the end of the story, I was invested and hoping for answers. That being said, I think Harrison delivers an impressive college-murder-mystery novel here, and I commend her for working on it for so long!

Thank you NetGalley for the arc! These are my honest opinions.

3.5 stars rounded up. Overall, I really liked the premise of the book and the idea of this substance that makes people relive the past. There was a lot of grammatical errors and would be little confusing at some points but not bad enough to distract totally. I enjoyed the characters they were very realistic. This book kept me intrigued all the ay through wondering what happened with Jennet and if things would get changed. Great read to start off spooky season !

Margot Harrison spent decades working on The Midnight Club. It shows how much love and care she's put behind the story, as well as the care that she's taken to honor her deceased friend.

The Midnight (Brunch) Club is all called back to Vermont, 25 years after the tragic death of their friend Jennet. Blending the past, present and future, this story is one of regret, of chance, of change. It's magical realism, a little science fiction, and overall, a love letter to those groups of friends from your early 20s.

What IF you could see your future? What IF you can see the past? Can you change either?

The Midnight Club takes these ideas and turns them upside down.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Book: The Midnight Club
Author: Margot Harrison
Rating: 3 Out of 5 Stars

I would like to thank the publisher, Graydon House, for sending me an ARC. This is another case where the book just was not for me. It wasn’t a bad book by any means. I just was not the right audience for it. I have seen it compared to Ninth House, which is another title that did not work for me.

In this one, we follow a group of university friends who have a past that haunts them. It has been twenty-five years since their group, called the Midnight Club, last met. They have bonded over a literacy magazine. However, that is not the thing that has made them stay together all this time. Death has been a part of their group. As time has gone on, they have all moved away from each other and built their own lives. That is until they are all invited back to the place where it all began. On the outside, it seems like a reunion of old friends, but that is not the real reason why they have been brought here. Their host wants to uncover what happened all those years ago. Questions and answers will not be enough to uncover the truth. She comes armed with a substance that will make everyone remember what happened twenty-five years ago. The thing is though that one of their group has a secret and will stop at nothing to make sure it stays a secret.

As with so many books, it was this presence that made me want to read this. We have a tight group of friends who have been haunted by the death of one of them. They don’t know what happened and someone wants to find out. All of our characters have moved on with their lives or so it seems. The events of twenty-five years have marked them. The chance to see everyone again has them interested. They think it is going to be a fun reunion, but as they get deeper into the reunion, they come to see that is not the case.

This setup is something that I love in books. I love it whenever we have a tight group of friends with secrets. I love it whenever these secrets and the determination to keep them a secret drive them. Sadly, though, I found it very difficult to form a connection with both the characters and what is going on. It started strong. I will admit that for the first fifty or so percent, I was hooked on this book. However, as it went on, the more I found myself losing interest in what was happening. I found myself putting the book down and not wanting to get back to it right away.

It wasn’t an issue with the writing or the plot. However, I will admit that there were times I found the plot to be missing something. The writing was lacking some of the punch that it needed to fully drive the book home. Yet, this usually is not enough to make me want to put the book down. It was the fact that I had a very difficult time feeling a connection.
The characters were okay, but I could not make a connection to them. I had a difficult time remembering who was who and what their role was supposed to be. Again, whenever I cannot make a connection with the characters, it makes me not enjoy the book as much as I should. It’s a shame too, because there are truly some great characters in this one. It felt like they were not given the chance to develop into both their voice and their person. It felt like they had a role to play in the story and that was all they were. They didn’t have the human element that I look for in books.

Overall, this is not a terrible book, but it was not the book for me.

This book comes out on September 24, 2024.

This was a really interesting concept but I found the execution difficult. I struggled to connect to the characters and it felt really drawn out in a way that kept pulling me out of the drama and mystery. This wasn't a good fit for me.

This was really just not for me. The premise intrigued me but maybe I’ve read too many books in the same vein, I didn’t really care about these characters or the plot much.

A huge thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this ARC that was perfect for the start of fall. A lighter mystery thriller shrouded in confusion, secrecy, and four individuals learning for more about themselves through the past than they ever thought possible. Overall this story kept me on my toes and was filled with mystery, sogging (lots of that word), and had a good amount of that dark academia feel. My main critique was not fully understanding the jumps in time and overall feel of what the drug did exactly, especially early on in the story. Perhaps this could also be the authors intention. For me, I would have liked to understand a little more about the details early on. Overall worth the read for a short burst of mystery and small town academia.

The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison, pub 9/24 from Graydon House. A mashup of dark academia, speculative fiction, and the movie Flatliners. Four friends return to their Vermont college after 25 years for a reunion. They are bound by the unique ties made during college years, and a tragic loss of a friend. Would you go back 25 years to uncover the truth of your friend’s death…if it uncovered your truth as well? Save the authors note for after you read the book, but know this was written over several decades. It gives the book an interesting feel, a depth, from optimism of youth, to experience of a life lived. Perfect for fans of The Cloisters by Katy Hays. I highly recommend.

I received an early copy from the publisher.

Sadly this one just was not for me. I was drawn in by the stunning cover art, and thought the dark academia setting would be perfect for the fall. I wasn’t able to connect with any of the characters and really struggled with the back and forth, unclear timeline.

“The longer you kept something hidden, the more it festered inside you.”

“The Midnight Club,” by Margot Harrison

Four friends are back together during a reunion. All still suffering from their friend Jennet death. One of them wants to find out the truth of why Jennet died by reliving the past. All of them have things they are hiding and none of them trusts the others.

Interesting story with possible time travel and butterfly effect issues. It’s a who done it but with mind games and memory problems. It was hard for me to figure out what was really happening and if it was supernatural or a lot of mental illness with what was happening, which was the point, the mystery of it. I liked the complicated and unique story even though it was confusing. 3 out of 5 stars.

Thank you for the ARC, Netgalley.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for allowing me to read and ARC of this book! This book is Margot Harrison's debut adult novel, and the first of her work I have read. It falls in the (sub)genre of Dark Academia, and I found it to be a very suspenseful and twisty thriller.

The Midnight Club is a close-knit group of college friends -- Sonia, Byron, Auraleigh, and Paul -- who are reuniting back in Vermont after 25 years. And its also been 25 years since the death of their friend Jennet by 'suicide' Junior year. The novel alternates telling the story between the past (their college days in the 80s) and the present (where they are adults). It turns out though, that their host has ulterior motives for their mysterious reunion -- to uncover the real truth about Jennets death.

Enter in a secret and extraordinary drug called Sog, which will "help" them to not only remember the past, but relive it. Sog allows them to travel through their memories, and bridge the gap between memory and reality. But of course, each of the 4 friends has secrets they don't want revealed; and will do anything to keep hidden. The more question they ask each other, the more they realize that the things they know and remember about their time at college, including the night of Jennet's death, aren't true.

I found this book both strange and interesting. I like the time travel aspect, but the actual concept of the sogging, and the timeline got a little confusing at times. The jumping between past/present/future made it a bit hard to follow, but worth hanging in for to solve the mystery of Jennet's death. It definitely kept me reading until the end!

I will be recommending this book as a book club pick for September/October. Fans of Dark Academia, and Sci-Fi /Fantasy Thrillers will love this one!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!!!

3.5 rounded up

A twisty new addition to the Dark Academia subgenre, this novel follows a cohort of uni grads who bonded over their literary magazine and a myriad of dark secrets. Meeting again for a reunion that quickly takes a turn for the worst, this novel mixes the melodrama and pretentious characters one expects with a gripping thriller.

Secrets have a way of undoing a group, if given the time and space to fester. Jennet has been dead for a very long time and her old friends have done their best to move on. Some things are better and others far, far worse; lies and memories swirl around the group as they struggle to keep up the appearance of successful adult lives.

What if the past was place you could venture back to?

Happiness may just be a figment of the past... good thing a local drug of choice offers a trip to another time. Embrace the pine. Experience memories of the past or a glimpse of the future. The young look forward with hope and trepidation, while the old long for days gone by.

This novel flips between 2014 when the cast are all fully adults and the late 1980s when they're uni students. Those who prefer a story set within a single time period be warned, a great deal can change over two decades... yet many more things remain the same. I find it exciting to piece together how a character has evolved or even fractured over time. The most seemingly inconsequential action can have such a resounding butterfly effect on the future.

If you are someone curious to tip your toes into Dark Academia and don't wish to read a lengthy backlog of classics to understand what's being discussed, perhaps check this book out? The layers of nuance revolving around class, secrets and loss are still present, if not as fully explored as others in the genre. I'd say this is a fairly decent introduction for fans of modern thrillers, as you get the window dressings of Dark Academia to test if you're interested in further exploration.

This book is decently crafted and engaging, yet a bit too 'thrillery' for my tastes. I would have prefered more focus on academia over general human darkness, if that makes sense? As this was pitched to me as Dark Academia, I'm going to review it as such. This novel is closer in themes and tone to "Sharp Objects" than say "If We Were Villains". Go into this expecting a thriller following uni friends not a deeper dive into the pitfalls of higher education, and you'll have a good time.

If this is somehow adapted in the days to come, I wouldn't be surprised, as the pacing is quite similar to prestige dramas.

I was looking forward to receiving this ARC because the synopsis sounded amazing, but unfortunately, it didn’t meet my expectations. The premise was fantastic — a second chance, past lives, and thriller elements with a unique fantasy twist called "sogging," where you travel to the future and past. However, the execution fell short. The fantasy concepts were poorly explained and often left me feeling lost.

The timeline was another issue: it was so disorganized that I frequently had to flip back to determine if I was in the past, present, or future. The lack of clear indicators made it frustrating to follow.

I was especially eager to unravel Jennet's death — this was the only aspect that kept me engaged. Unfortunately, the resolution was unclear and disappointing.

I decided to DNF this book at 16% through… I rarely don’t finish books, but I was not invested in the plot or the characters. The premise was also very similar to The Hitchcock Hotel, which I didn’t love, so I found myself not looking forward to continue reading another book like it.

I think this could be a good book for someone looking for spooky, fall vibes, but it’s not for me.

Huge thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Books for allowing me to read this early!
Overall, this was an enjoyable story but I wish the world building and characters were a bit more fleshed out. While the plot was strong, I was left wondering more about the specifics of the Sog and how other elements of the story could have been different with just a little bit more detail. This is definitely a good read, but not a great one.

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
Have you ever wanted to return to your past? Not only that have you ever wanted to wait to change it as well? Well, the members of the midnight club certainly have. Now a strange group of friends received an unexpected invitation to travel back to the Vermont town, where everything first began. The friends soon learn the true reason for the gathering, a chance to explore the past and solve the death of their beloved friend. With the help of a secret substance The Midnight Club begins to dive deeper into their past. The farther they go the more they see that they each have secrets that are best left hidden.
The idea of being able to travel to your past is very intriguing. I mean, who hasn’t had a moment in their life where they wish they could change something, or they wish they could relive, and of course who wouldn’t want another chance to get to see a lost loved one. The Midnight Club explorers and dives into these very thoughts. We follow along as The Midnight Club members Sonia, Byron, Paul, and Auraleigh gather for the 25th anniversary of their friend Jennet’s death. The friends are able through the use of a synthetic substance to “slog” into their past or future, allowing them to unravel what truly caused her death. I greatly appreciate the expiration of trauma and grief however the overall execution left me wanting more. The multiple POVs and time jumps were so prevalent and constant that it did not allow for much character development, making it difficult to truly connect to any of the characters which for me is a crucial aspect needed to fully enjoy a book. These jumps also created a disjointed pacing and overall lack of cohesion in the book as well. While I did enjoy the science fiction and mystery aspects of the novel especially the books unique version of travel overall I ended up feeling as if the book fell just a tad short of being anything more then just an okay read.
The Midnight Club comes out September 24th, 2024. Thank you NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing,Graydon books for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Graydon House for the advanced digital copy - all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Unfortunately this book just didn't work for me, I tried multiple times to try and get through it but it's just not holding my interest.