The Gargoyle Professor Will Ruin You for Normal Men

A Girl, a University, and a Man Who Might Be a Gargoyle

Here’s the setup, and I promise I’m not going to wreck the fun parts. Aveline de Poitiers takes a research position at a crumbling old university in the French countryside, the kind of place with locked wings, whispered rules, and a library that seems to breathe. She’s got her own baggage (a dead mother, a mystery she’s quietly chasing), but honestly the plot mechanics matter less here than the mood. This book is Gothic in the most literal sense: fog, candles, a manor with more secrets than square footage.

Then there’s Professor Anguish. Yes. That is his name, or close enough to it that you’ll roll your eyes the first time you read it and then, somehow, stop noticing by chapter ten. He’s cold, cruel in that specific romance-novel way that means “actually deeply wounded,” and there is Something Wrong With Him that I will not spoil except to say gargoyles come up, and not as a joke.

Look, I know how this sounds. A professor named Anguish who might be a supernatural creature, falling for a student-adjacent researcher within about a week of meeting her. If you read that sentence and felt your eyebrow twitch, your instincts are correct. But RuNyx commits so hard to the atmosphere, so unapologetically, that the premise stops feeling silly and starts feeling like the point.

What Actually Works, and What Genuinely Doesn’t

The prose is the whole show, and I mean that as both compliment and warning. RuNyx writes like she’s dared herself to use every gothic word in the thesaurus at once: shadows, seep, molten, ruin, hollow. It’s a lot. Sometimes it’s too much, sentences stacked on top of each other like she’s afraid the reader will forget where they are if she stops describing the wallpaper. But when it lands, it really lands. There’s a scene in the chapel where Aveline is trying to piece together what she’s seeing in the dark, and the prose slows down just enough to make you feel the cold stone under her hands. That’s not nothing. That’s craft, even if it’s undisciplined craft.

What doesn’t work: the pacing is a mess, and I don’t think that’s a hot take, I think it’s just true. Aveline and the professor go from icy standoffishness to obsessive devotion so fast that the emotional beats don’t have room to earn themselves. I kept flipping back thinking I’d missed a chapter. I hadn’t. The book just decided we were there now. And the plot, the actual mystery Aveline is supposed to be solving, gets shoved into the corner for long stretches while the book focuses on Longing, capital L, at the expense of anything happening.

Here’s the thing though. I read the first hundred pages convinced I’d DNF by the halfway point, bored by how thin the story was. Then somewhere around the masquerade scene, I stopped caring that it was thin. I wasn’t reading it for plot logic. I was reading it the way you watch a candle burn, just to see what the shape does next. I’m genuinely not sure if that’s the book being good or me being tired and susceptible on a rainy afternoon. Possibly both.

I’ll admit my taste might be compromised here. I love an overwrought gothic mood more than I love a tight plot, and this book knows exactly what kind of reader it wants and goes after her without apology. If you’re a reader who needs the mystery to actually resolve in a satisfying way by the end, brace yourself, because this is book one of three and it ends on more question marks than answers.

Gothikana isn’t interested in being believable. It’s interested in being felt, in the flickering-candlelight, is-that-a-monster-or-a-man way that either wrecks you or leaves you cold, and there’s very little in between.

About RuNyx

RuNyx is one of those authors who built an entire readership on Wattpad before traditional publishing caught up, which honestly explains a lot about this book’s DNA: the cliffhanger instincts, the devotion to mood over structure, the sense that she’s writing directly to an audience that wants to feel something fast and doesn’t mind if the seams show. She keeps her real-life details close to the vest, which somehow fits. You get the sense she’d rather you know her gargoyles than her biography.

If the Gargoyle Professor Wrecked You, Read These Next

• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, for more brooding-male-lead-with-a-monstrous-secret energy, just with more plot scaffolding underneath it.
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, if you want the dark academia atmosphere with actual teeth and a mystery that resolves.
• Hopeless by Colleen Hoover, for that same headlong, can’t-stop-reading momentum even when you’re side-eyeing the logic.
• The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, for cold, cruel love interests done with sharper plotting.

You can find Gothikana in print and Kindle editions here on Amazon if you want to see what all the fuss is about for yourself.

For your book club

1. Does the atmosphere in Gothikana carry the story enough to forgive the pacing problems, or did the thin plot bother you too much to enjoy the mood?
2. Professor Anguish’s cruelty is framed as a symptom of his secret and his pain. Where’s the line between “wounded love interest” and just plain unkind?
3. Aveline falls hard and fast. Did you believe it, or did you want more time before the devotion kicked in?
4. The gothic setting (the manor, the chapel, the fog) is almost a character itself. Did the setting do more emotional work for you than the actual romance?
5. Knowing this is book one of three, would you continue the trilogy, or did this installment answer enough questions to feel satisfied on its own?