And He Shall Appear

From a mesmerizing new literary voice comes a story of obsessive friendship, chilling powers, and untimely death for readers of dark academia classics like If We Were Villains and The Secret History.

An unnamed narrator arrives at Cambridge University in the early aughts determined to reinvent himself. His northern accent marks him as an outsider, but thanks to his musical gifts, he manages to fall in with his wealthy classmate, Bryn Cavendish.

A charismatic party host and talented magician, Bryn enthralls the narrator. But something seems to happen to those who challenge or simply irk Bryn--and they aren’t ever the same again.

The narrator begins to suspect that Bryn may be concealing terrifying gifts under the guise of magic tricks. As the tension between them grows, a harrowing encounter is followed by Bryn’s death.

Alternating between their time as students and the narrator’s return to Cambridge years later, where he fears the ghosts of his past are waiting for him, And He Shall Appear performs an astounding slight-of-hand that throws every version of the story into question.

This propulsive novel about the dark power of privilege will haunt readers like a familiar piece of music with endless iterations.

By day, Kate van der Borgh is a freelance copywriter, and by night, she’s usually composing or playing music. She grew up in Lancashire and went on to study music at Cambridge, so there’s a reasonable amount of her in her narrator--including the fact that she was a pianist and reluctant bassoonist. She has, however, never had reason to suspect that her best friend has occult powers. Her short fiction has been published by The Fiction Desk, and she’s a graduate of Faber’s six-month Writing a Novel course. She is based in London.