Clara’s Verdict
Dark academia romance has become almost its own microgenre at this point — gothic campuses, candlelit libraries, the particular frisson of forbidden or complicated attraction in enclosed spaces where the normal rules seem suspended. At its best, the subgenre channels a genuine atmosphere of intense, compressed feeling that suits audio particularly well. Nothing to Fear by Jenn Plummer is Book 1 in the Wicked Games series, set at the atmospheric Corvus College, where ravens flock, the grounds themselves seem to hold secrets, and the campus wears its Gothic architecture as more than mere decoration. It’s an MM romance, and it arrives with a substantial and vocal pre-existing readership despite its March 2026 audiobook release date.
I came to it as someone outside the MM romance genre and found it a more substantial listen than I had anticipated from the category and setup alone.
Corvus College and the Architecture of a Hidden Self
Five hours and forty-seven minutes, published by Wild Lupine Books LLC and narrated by Harley Chase. The premise is the familiar enemies-to-lovers architecture, but Plummer has invested it with specific setting and character detail that gives it texture well beyond trope-fulfilment alone. Silas Blackwood is a rugby player and the university president’s son — closeted, performing a version of himself that he finds exhausting, held in place by obligation and the fear of what revelation might cost him. Asher Ambrose is the bookish nerd Silas is forced to tutor under when his failing grades threaten his future, and — in a structural wrinkle that Plummer handles with considerable elegance — the masked stranger Silas has been encountering at Corvus’s Halloween Fright Night events without ever knowing his identity.
The mask conceit gives the novel its most interesting structural feature: the relationship operates simultaneously on three entirely different registers — the antagonism of the daylight tutor-tutee dynamic, the growing tentative friendship that develops in the concealed archives by candlelight, and the erotic charge of the anonymous encounters in the dark. These three threads converge carefully and without the manufactured misunderstanding or engineered third-act crisis that so many romance novels deploy as structural crutches when they run out of genuine tension. Reviewers flag the absence of a third-act breakup as a specific and notable pleasure. In a genre where false obstacles have become almost contractual requirements, Plummer’s decision to trust the relationship rather than sabotage it for the sake of pages is noted with genuine relief by multiple readers.
The novel can be read as a standalone and Plummer is explicit about this, though it is the first entry in an interconnected series and later entries will presumably develop secondary characters who appear here as peripheral figures. Corvus College as a setting has enough atmosphere and institutional mystery — secret societies, masked events, a campus that seems to hold more than it reveals — to sustain multiple stories within it, and Plummer appears to be building that world carefully rather than exploiting it for a single narrative.
Harley Chase and the Tonal Demands of Intimacy
Harley Chase handles the narration, and the performance suits the Gothic-collegiate atmosphere convincingly. MM romance in audio format makes specific demands of a narrator: the intimacy between two male characters needs to be rendered with neither embarrassment nor over-performance, and Chase manages that balance with consistent composure throughout. The spicier scenes are handled with the same care as the emotional ones, which is the right decision — tonal consistency across a novel where the relationship’s emotional authenticity is the entire point is not a small achievement, and Chase earns it.
What Readers Say
Rated 4.2 out of 5 from 445 Audible ratings — a substantial base that reflects a genuinely engaged audience. UK reviewer Mrs Tuckwood described it as her first MM romance and a perfect introduction to the genre, praising both the atmospheric setting and the love story that unfolded between Asher and Silas as simply beautiful. Lucy Spencer gave four stars, highlighted the masked encounters as unexpectedly bold for a romance, and praised the emotional core of Silas’s fear of judgement as the book’s most resonant element. Jojobean_reads wanted more of the secret society subplot — a structural criticism that reflects genuine investment in the world rather than dissatisfaction with what exists. Victoria Picciano’s five-star review described the fate-pulled dynamic between the leads as the book’s particular and irreplaceable strength.
Who Should Listen?
MM romance readers looking for a dark academia setting with genuine Gothic atmosphere and emotional depth rather than trope-fulfilment alone. Listeners new to MM romance who want an accessible entry point that balances spice with emotional substance and doesn’t lean on manufactured conflict to generate tension. Those who enjoy enclosed, atmospheric settings in their fiction — campuses, secret archives, candlelit libraries, Halloween events that become something more — will find Corvus College properly and convincingly realised. Not for listeners who want primarily plot-driven narrative or who prefer their romance straightforward and uncomplicated. Listen on Audible UK
