Nocticadia
Reeling from her mother's mysterious death, a tenacious first-year student arrives at Dracadia University, an ancient, forbidding school perched on a fog-wrapped island off the coast of Maine—an island rumored to be haunted by the exiled mental patients whose bones are said to whiten its shores. She has come chasing answers about the illness that took her mother, and about the secrets the university seems determined to bury.
Presiding over the midnight lab is Devryck Bramwell, the brilliant, coldly beautiful pathologist the students call Doctor Death. He has no patience for eager first-years, and every reason to keep his distance—but the pull between them is immediate, dangerous, and impossible to ignore. As their forbidden attraction deepens, so does the mystery, dragging them both toward a deadly secret at the heart of Dracadia.
Keri Lake's Nocticadia is a standalone dark academia gothic romance with a slow-burning, high-heat, age-gap central relationship and strong horror and gothic-mystery undercurrents. Atmospheric and morbid, it pairs a moody island campus with a forbidden professor-student romance and a body-count mystery.
A brilliant, forbidding pathologist known on campus as 'Doctor Death,' who runs the midnight lab and becomes the heroine's forbidden love interest.
A first-year student at Dracadia University investigating the mysterious illness that killed her mother, drawn into a forbidden relationship with her pathology professor.
The image-obsessed provost of Dracadia University who prioritizes donor money and prestige over academic integrity, and is entangled in the campus's cover-ups.
Lilia's resident advisor, outwardly friendly but tied to the campus's secret society and driven by her missing roommate's disappearance.
Yes. Keri Lake has described Nocticadia as a standalone dark academia gothic romance with a complete story and no planned sequel.
Nocticadia itself has no sequel. Keri Lake later released Phobia, a short bonus novella set after the events of Nocticadia, but it is a supplementary companion piece rather than a second full-length book.