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M. L. Rio has made a name for herself within the space of the dark academia aesthetic. Fans have called her brooding, Donna Tartt-esque debut novel “If We Were Villains” “the only book ever written.” The 2017 novel skyrocketed into BookTok popularity and launched the Shakespearean scholar-turned-author Rio into a niche stardom. Rio has recently followed up “If We Were Villains” with “Graveyard Shift,” a novella following a group of insomniacs unraveling a mystery on a college campus. Rio’s first novella has a charming cast of characters and the author’s signature moody atmosphere, but its mystery elements fall flat, leaving the book feeling as if it could have been expanded into a longer work.
“Graveyard Shift” is short, coming in at a little under 150 pages, which is its largest weakness. Rio has a knack for building intriguing characters, and each member of the novel's cast could have benefitted from more time marinating on the page. All of the main characters struggle with insomnia in various ways and meet up regularly to smoke in a secluded cemetery, creating a graveyard shift through collective sleeplessness and solitude. Each character finds themselves haunted by memories through the night, presented to the reader as backstories that are more intriguing than the mystery they are set to resolve.
Rio packs a lot of characters into the novella’s short space, cycling through five central narrators. These fast changes in perspective never quite allow the reader to latch onto one character fully. Either developing this novella into a full-length book or reducing the cast would allow readers to have more time to get to know their favorite heroes.
Unfortunately, the reader is asked to spend more time with the mystery at the center of the novella than with the characters. The mystery is not mysterious at all, and one can expect to get to the bottom of the plot as soon as it is introduced. It seems that Rio wanted to work with two things — a ghostly puzzle on a college campus and a diverse set of leads. The problem is that neither is developed to its full potential, even if small successes like an apt ending for the main villain do bring some satisfaction to the reader.
“Graveyard Shift” also suffers from its ambitions. It is almost obtusely “about” something. Instead of building its themes into the narrative, Rio states in a lengthy Author’s Note (an incorporation that often seems to harm a novel more than it helps) that the novella is meant to borrow from personal experience, an academic fascination with scientific humanities, Shakespeare, and sci-fi authors ranging from Vonnegut to Crichton. Sadly these influences shine more in this over-explanatory note than in the actual story, as the closest one feels to reading “Cat’s Cradle” during “Graveyard Shift” is when a rat crawls up the leg of one of the main characters.
The purported deep interests of the novel reach the level of absurdity when, at the book’s close, Rio adds a playlist to go alongside the book that includes the Arctic Monkeys, two tracks from The Cure, and the aptly emo-sounding group Suicide. The songs added at the end give off the impression that Rio wants the reader to believe they read something much more edgy and life-changing than they actually did. “Graveyard Shift” is a genre-aligned novel, a mystery story, and it would be better if it accepted its identity as such.
That’s not to say that the book is unsuccessful; on the contrary, it succeeds in being quite entertaining. Rio brings her characteristic beautiful prose to the book, which revels in small details and character quirks. The language makes the characters and their world feel real. As stated above, the main cast brings a lot of life and funny interactions to the plot. The novella is also fun in the formulaic way any mystery work is: The reader revels in watching the characters come to conclusions more than the actual resolution of the story itself. The book only becomes distracting when it takes itself too seriously or juggles too many plotlines.
Rio is sure to please the dark academia cult following that she established with her earlier novel, but “Graveyard Shift” lacks some development and may disappoint new readers. Her writing lays down the bones of an excellent story, but needs another fifty pages to be truly great. Fortunately, since it is mainly a genre story, it doesn’t feel inferior because it doesn’t reach its potential.
—Staff writer Hannah E. Gadway can be reached at hannah.gadway@thecrimson.com.
