An Academy for Liars

An Academy for Liars (2024) is a dark academia fantasy novel by Alexis Henderson. It follows Lennon Carter, a young woman who feels aimless after experiencing a personal betrayal. She receives a mysterious call to enroll in Drayton College, a school of magic hidden within Savannah, Georgia, where students learn the art of persuasion. As Lennon learns to harness her power, she grows closer to her mysterious and enigmatic mentor, Dante. Her power and her relationship grow in tandem, but Lennon must soon confront the dark side of her power.

Henderson works in the genre of dark fiction, and she has written two other gothic/horror fantasy novels: A novel about witches called The Year of the Witching (2020), and a vampire novel called House of Hunger (2022). Henderson was raised in Savannah, Georgia, which serves as the setting for Drayton College. She says the city inspired her foray into all things haunted and gothic. Her novels explore the ethics of power and control, which play a significant role in An Academy for Liars. Each of Henderson’s books has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards.

This guide refers to the 2024 Penguin Publishing Group Kindle Edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of substance use, sexual content, suicidal ideation, animal cruelty and death, racism, emotional abuse, mental illness, physical abuse, graphic violence, illness and death, gender discrimination, and child sexual abuse.

Plot Summary

Lennon Carter, an attractive, 24-year-old Black woman, lives in Colorado with her older, controlling fiancé, Wyatt. At their engagement party, she discovers Wyatt cheating on her. Distraught, Lennon drives off and contemplates ending her life in a parking lot. There, she’s interrupted by a ringing phone in a strange phone booth. When she answers, a voice invites her to continue the application process to a mysterious school named Drayton College, giving her an address in Utah where she must appear for an interview.

Lennon drives through the night to get there. An eccentric man named Benedict answers the door, interviewing her through a casual conversation. He has intimate knowledge of her past, particularly about her family’s ostracization in their neighborhood because of their race. Then, he tells her she passed the interview and instructs her to take the elevator to the eighth floor, which Lennon finds odd since the house is only two stories tall.

When Lennon exits the elevator, she realizes that she’s been transported to Drayton’s campus in Savannah, Georgia. She joins other applicants and meets Eileen, the vice-chancellor of Drayton, who informs the group that they must now complete an exam and a practical interview. During the exam, Lennon is required to assign emotions to abstract images. Then, she meets Dr. Dante Lowe, one of the tenured professors at Drayton, for the interview. Dante tells her that she must make him pick up a figurine on his desk through sheer will. Lennon succeeds, but the mental effort causes her to black out.

Lennon wakes in the infirmary, and a student named Sawyer tells her that she had several seizures after her interview. Later, Lennon attends the convocation ceremony, where she learns about Drayton’s history of teaching a special power: persuasion. Some students can manipulate others around them, while others, like the famous alumnus William Irvine, can bend reality itself by opening gates to other places or building gates that conceal Drayton from the rest of the world.

Lennon begins classes and lives in the dorm at Ethos House with her roommate, Blaine. Dante is her academic advisor. Lennon begins a physical relationship with another student, Ian. She struggles in her courses, and she especially dislikes the idea of persuasion, finding it ethically troubling. Dante tries to assuage her concerns by saying that persuasion can be used to achieve good.

At a party at Logos House—Drayton’s dormitory for exemplary students—Lennon takes mushrooms, and while intoxicated, she summons an elevator and takes it to a strange version of Drayton campus in winter. Later, she enters an elevator to return to where she came from. She wakes in the infirmary, and Dante is at her side. She tells him what happened, and Dante tells her that there will be a hearing about the incident.

At the hearing, Eileen wants Lennon expelled. Dante intervenes and calls the chancellor, who overrules Eileen. Later, Dante explains to Lennon that she is a gatekeeper, like William Irvine, and she can create portals between places and times. Lennon takes lessons with Benedict to harness her new powers, though she initially fails. She tries taking more drugs to replicate her earlier success. When she is intoxicated, she feels as if the campus itself is alive and breathing. However, she overdoses and ends up in the infirmary.

Soon after, Lennon is taken to the Logos House initiation, where students compete in duels of persuasion. She is paired with Ian and beats him to a spot. Blaine and Sawyer manage to secure spots at Logos, too.

In a subsequent lesson with Benedict, he pushes her too hard, hurting her and burning her hand. Lennon manages to summon an elevator back to campus to escape him. Dante finds her injured and returns to speak to Benedict. After a week, Dante invites Lennon to accompany him on a work trip to Amsterdam. There, a shadowy creature—an abomination—attacks them, and Lennon and Dante manage to escape after Lennon summons an elevator that takes them to Idaho. After recovering, they drive to Benedict’s house but find him dead, seemingly by suicide, having cut his own wrists.

Back at Drayton, Lennon delivers the news of Benedict’s death. Claude, Benedict’s former apprentice and lover, is shattered and accuses Dante of killing Benedict, referencing the “August” incident. When Lennon asks Dante about this, Dante says he threatened to kill Benedict in August after he hurt Lennon during their lessons, but Dante didn’t kill him. Dante and Lennon nearly kiss after this disclosure, but Dante pulls away.

Lennon finishes her semester and goes home for Christmas. She receives notice that she passed her final exams but is being reassigned to a new advisor. She says she’ll drop out unless she gets to keep Dante as her advisor. On Christmas Day, Dante arrives at her house and agrees to stay on as her advisor but insists that their relationship must be professional.

Back at Drayton, Ian targets Lennon, angry that she beat him to a spot at Logos. One day, he tries to persuade her to jump off the chapel roof, which would result in a severe injury. However, she summons an elevator and closes the doors on Ian, killing him by ripping him in half. Lennon is overwhelmed by guilt afterward, and Dante helps her escape campus. He takes her to his beach house, where he trains her to open gates to the past. Their relationship becomes intimate, and Lennon notices that Dante has a tattoo that says “August,” which puzzles her. At the end of summer, Dante takes Lennon to Eileen’s house to show Eileen what Lennon has learned. Lennon discovers that Dante and Eileen have a son together from a former relationship, which shocks her. Eileen agrees to allow Lennon back to campus, but she says Lennon must graduate after one semester and use her power to fix the gates around Drayton.

Lennon is hurt that Dante kept his past with Eileen a secret and asks her sister, Carly, to investigate Dante. Carly discovers that Dante was imprisoned in a juvenile detention center for nearly killing his abusive stepfather. Suspicious, Lennon travels to the past to find Benedict. He reveals that August was another student at Drayton, but his power corrupted him. So, Benedict convinced Dante to kill August. Benedict then says that Lennon is corrupted, too, and tries to kill her. To save herself, Lennon persuades him to cut his own wrists. She returns to the present at Dante’s house and reveals what happened with Benedict. Dante admits to killing August and apologizes for not telling Lennon the truth. He says the abomination they saw is a manifestation of Dante’s guilt.

Back at Drayton, a massive earthquake disrupts the campus. Lennon follows Blaine to the chancellor’s house, which has a hallway full of doors to different places and times. In a bedroom, Lennon finds that William Irvine is barely alive, sustained by various machines. Lennon realizes his life is tied to the gates, and he has been sacrificed to keep the gates open—and she also realizes that she is meant to replace him after he dies. Blaine tells her to run, but Dante finds her. Lennon is imprisoned in a classroom and feels betrayed by Dante. She persuades the lab rats to free her and nearly escapes campus with the help of her friends; Dante, too, ends up betraying Eileen and helping Lennon. William Irvine dies, and Lennon manages to put the gates back up by siphoning Dante’s power, which nearly kills Dante. Blaine pulls Lennon out of the chancellor’s mansion as it crumbles, but Dante remains trapped inside.

With her newfound control of Drayton, Lennon gets rid of Eileen and the other abusive faculty members. She gives Blaine and Sawyer tenure and offers Eileen’s job to her friend Emerson. Though Lennon is now chancellor at Drayton, she feels emotionally hollow and returns to Dante’s house to grieve for him. With time, Lennon realizes she cannot move on until she’s certain Dante is dead. After two trips to the past, Lennon finds Dante in a memory of his childhood. She asks him to come back with her, but she ultimately lets him decide what to do. She opens an elevator to return, and Dante jumps in just before the doors close.