The Curriculum of Carnage

A university is supposed to be the controlled kind of chaos, four years of growing pains everyone survives. Bentley Little’s University takes that idea and lets it rot from the inside. The premise is straightforward: a university campus becomes a sentient, psychotic entity that gains power from the negative thoughts and emotions of its students and faculty, amplifying their worst impulses until the entire school descends into chaos.

Stepping onto Campus

I’ve read some of Bentley Little’s short stories via Cemetery Dance before and was excited to finally get a full-length novel of his under my belt. I realized during my read that the book was published in 1995. In an age before everyone had a camera in their pocket, it’s a little easier to accept how a crisis could escalate on a campus without the outside world immediately knowing every detail. That context gave me just enough room to go along with a story that asks you to suspend a lot of disbelief.

The Campus is Alive

The core characters you follow are one of the book’s biggest strengths. Little does a good job of building a group of believable, likeable people you can actually root for. The early moments establishing the connection between two of them, Jim and Faith, felt natural and grounded the story. As things get worse, seeing this group find the courage to stand up to the overwhelming hostility of the campus is genuinely rewarding.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the corrupted characters. The university works on everyone’s worst thoughts, but the results are so extreme that they basically become caricatures. The depravity is so over the top that at times it’s almost even laughable, which is the last thing you want in a horror novel. It pulls you right out of the story when the antagonists stop feeling like real, corrupted people and instead become more like cartoons of pure evil.

A Curriculum of Carnage

The book starts off strong, with some genuine moments of dread that build a tense atmosphere. I was completely on board for the first part of the ride, but the novel just can’t sustain it. The story gets bogged down in the middle, more interested in showcasing one deranged scenario after another than in moving the plot forward. It feels like every depraved idea the author had was thrown onto the page, and the constant barrage of shock eventually just desensitizes you. After a while, another horrific event just becomes a box being ticked, not a moment that hits hard.

My paperback copy is nearly 500 pages long, and it badly needed a tighter edit. It’s a classic case where less would have been so much more; if some of those repetitive, shocking scenes had been cut, the ones that remained would have had a much greater impact. The relentless violence and cruelty eventually become exhausting, and you find yourself just wanting to get past it all.

Should You Enroll?

This book is for a very specific kind of reader. If you’re a fan of extreme horror and enjoy pulpy, easily digestible stories packed with depraved scenarios, this might be exactly what you’re looking for. It doesn’t ask much of you intellectually, but it delivers on graphic content.

This is definitely not for anyone who is squeamish. The book is filled with graphic violence and sexual assault. It also contains frequent and explicit racist language, including heavy use of racial slurs, which will be an immediate dealbreaker for many. If you prefer nuanced, atmospheric horror, or if you simply don’t like unnecessarily long books, you should steer clear of this one.

For me, this is definitely a one-and-done read. There’s nothing to be gained from a second trip to this campus. The story is too gratuitous and exhausting to warrant a return visit.

While University offers a terrifying premise and strong protagonists, its lack of restraint leaves it buried under its own excess.