Gothikana by RuNyx

Rating: 3/5, average

There’s a trend going around to look up “book” in the search bar on Tiktok and the one that comes up is supposed to describe you. I did that and got Gothikana by RuNyx.

I was intrigued by the gothic theme and several passionate negative reviews I saw on YouTube.

Gothikana is about Corvina, a twenty-one-year-old girl with schizophrenia who gets invited to a college for students with mental illness and falls in love with her twenty-eight-year-old grad student teacher named Vad.

The college is called Verenmore (an anagram of Nevermore) and is located in a gothic castle on top of a mountain. I wasn’t sure if it was part asylum and would have mental health resources for the students, but apparently not, actually Corvina has limited access to a telephone to call her psychologist. It’s a weird setup, as the school contacts Corvina out of the blue with no application. It also only offers associate’s degrees, although Vad is a grad student, so I don’t know how that works.

The school is very spooky and there’s a Black Ball every year where someone goes missing. Corvina starts to hear more voices (she usually just hears one) that seem to be ghosts.

Gothikana is mostly a romance laced with a little bit of mystery and horror. I did enjoy the romance, but in a fantasy way. I don’t think I would enjoy being in a dominant/submissive relationship like Corvina and Vad’s because that dynamic seems like it could become abusive pretty easily. It’s that passive fantasy of not being in control and having your partner take care of you. There are some pretty graphic and kind of painful sounding sex scenes, so I wouldn’t recommend this for readers under 18.

The mystery is badly written… I didn’t see it coming, but it kind of made me groan with how cheesy the ending was. Some of the horror aspects are good and creepy. I enjoyed the vibe of spookiness.

I liked Corvina okay, she didn’t bug me in any way but she didn’t stand out to me either. Same with Vad. Jade was a little weird… I liked some of her and Corvina’s scenes together, but she was a little strange. I didn’t get why the boys were harassing Corvina so much and why she ended up being friends with them. They just kept calling her “freaky eyes” (she has purple eyes) and that was endearing to Corvina somehow? I think it’s because RuNyx told but didn’t show how Corvina became friends with the boys.

I actually loved some of the cheesy emo lines. Some of them made me laugh out loud:

“The tower began to settle in for the night with some groans and creaks. A cloud of bats flew outside her window on their way to somewhere, nocturnal and creepy.”

“You’re my student and I’m your teacher, but worse, I’m dangerous. Girls I interact with dance with death much sooner than they should. If you value your life, don’t look at me like that. Not with those eyes.”

“I’ve known lust, this is something worse. This is a barbaric need to possess, to eliminate, to own. This is madness.”

The last two are Vad talking to Corvina. He says a lot of silly lines to her. There’s this conflation of the madness of love with Corvina’s actual schizophrenia and the spookiness of Verenmore which is a little weird, but it kind of works in a blueberry pancakes with maple syrup kind of way (if that makes any sense, I don’t know… sorry lol). It kind of falls apart if you take a bite out of it, but it also tastes good for a second. Now I sound insane (hahaha).

So does Gothikana describe me?

… maybe…?

I liked the gothic/emo/spooky vibe and the romance was kind of appealing. I like to think I’m a little deeper and more sensical, though (lol).

I will say this is the one of the few objectively bad books that I’ve legitimately enjoyed, though. Usually “turn your brain off” is a turn off for me, but I think I’m less picky about horror than other genres. As long as a horror book has some creepy stuff in it, I can forgive a lot of bad plot, setting, characters, and other aspects.

Would I recommend people read Gothikana?

I don’t know… I would look at some excerpts and see if the writing style appeals to you and check out some other reviews that get deeper into the romance aspects than I do here.

It’s a not a good book, but it’s fun. 😊