A Campus on Fire
Patrick O’Dowd
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Genre: Literary Fiction, Campus Thriller
When a shocking death rocks the exclusive writing program at a prestigious university, student journalist Tess Azar sets out to uncover the truth. The program, cloaked in whispers of cult-like behavior and elite secrecy, becomes the focal point of a dangerous investigation. Meanwhile, the rise of an extreme right-wing student group throws the campus into further turmoil, placing Tess in the crosshairs of a politically charged battle she never intended to join.
A Campus on Fire is a timely and unsettling novel that exposes the fractures in academia, the complexities of ambition, and the murky line between truth and manipulation. Simmering with tension and provocative insight, Patrick O’Dowd’s debut captures the chaos of a post-truth society and the price of speaking out in a divided world.
Excerpt
1
Tess Azar’s notes on Rose Dearborn:
Tall. Sharp green eyes. A small, pointed nose. Pale. Red hair, worn down, falls just below her shoulders, framing her compact face. Her posture is pristine, and she appears to be flexing, though that may be her natural state. Her hands are folded, left over right. She sports an unblemished French manicure and light pink lipstick that you’d never notice unless you were looking for it. She has two earrings on her left ear, both in the lobe, and one on her right. They’re all diamonds, and I’m sure they’re real. She wears a light blue Oxford shirt. It looks like it was designed for her frame—towering and athletic, without succumbing to bulk. Over the shirt, she wears a light jacket, tan and slim fitted, with bronze buttons. It looks like it was born to be a man’s jacket but changed its mind when it met her.
She had me from the start. It was her wave. It showed the world she came from, the sophistication, the poise, the casual superiority. It was a wave that had been passed down, refined, choreographed. A stiff hand, a pirouette, a fold. It was elegant in its learned simplicity.
She paired it with a vacant, performative smile. It wasn’t for me. It was for the watchers. It told the world that she wasn’t, despite appearances, one of those people. She was, in fact, a normal person, perhaps even a kind one.
I nodded my acknowledgment and matched her smile. Mine was professional, a journalist’s smile, continuing the performance we were engaged in.
We were meeting at an outdoor café on campus. One of those places where students bring their laptops and pretend to work. It’s not a place to work, not true work. It’s a place to be seen to be working.
She stood as I sat, a prosaic gesture that nonetheless endeared her to me.
I felt the cool spring breeze and heard birds singing in a tree nearby. A woman shouted in the distance, and I didn’t even turn to look. I assumed it was playful. I used to be able to assume that.
“Tess,” she said, not a question but a statement of fact. “And you’re Rose?”
“Yes.” She smiled and took a sip of her coffee. She placed it down, and I noticed it was uncovered, no lid in sight.
I looked at my own cup, a lipstick-stained plastic lid of shame sitting atop it. I felt her eyes on it, felt the judgment. I shouldn’t have had a lid. I should’ve told them I didn’t want one. Lids were plastic, single-use plastic. They were death. They were climate change. They were a stain upon you as a person.
I tore it off, and the steam burned my hand. I didn’t flinch, too afraid it would be another strike against me. Rose looked like the type of person who never flinched, who never got sick or hurt. She looked like she went to the cape on the weekends and played tackle football with her brothers and more than held her own.
I pulled out my notebook, almost knocking over my coffee as I did so. The cup rattled, but I grabbed it before it tipped and smiled an apology. I opened to a fresh page, and, as I always did when beginning an interview, I took down a description.
“Are you writing a novel?” Her voice was cold and clipped, formal and challenging.
I blushed, and my skin turned a few shades darker. I’m sure she noticed. Rose looked like she never blushed. Or at least never out of embarrassment. I imagined she did on occasion, but with a purpose.
I hid in my notebook. “No, I, uh, well…”
I hated myself. It was odd for me. I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t a stammering, stumbling fool. I wasn’t often awed. I was the one in a relationship who was distant. I was the one who was unaffected by the end of the affair, the one who needed to be wooed.
But there was something about her, an aura, a magic. Some- thing that changed me, disrupted me. I both hated and loved it. Longed to be free of this pull and to never leave it. One could chalk it up to the difference in age—Rose was twenty-one to my nineteen, but it was more than that. She had something. Something I wanted.
I twirled my pen around a finger and clicked it. It was a nervous habit, one that would take years to tame. Rose watched, a cryptic smile in her eyes. I placed my phone on the table and set it to record. “Do you mind?”
She shook her head, but I could feel her quiet disapproval. “I just like to get the setting down,” I said and motioned to
my notebook. I calmed myself by sipping the spring air, a slight scent of grass being cut somewhere in the distance. ““I was taught that if you have the time, you should overwrite, even in journalism. Easier to cut later. ‘Never trust your memory’ is what my professor says.”
This wasn’t true. My professors would be appalled by my long, florid notes. They advocated direct, blunt ones. But I wasn’t writing for them. Not anymore. I’d already developed my own strategies, my own style, and my notes were part of that.
She met my eyes, an intrigued look cresting across her face. I’ll never forget that look and the feeling that accompanied it, tracing up my spine and nesting in my skull. I felt my embarrassment disappear. I remembered who I was. I remembered that I was someone, and she knew it.
“Well.” She drank her coffee. I followed her lead. Mine was still too hot, and it scalded my throat. “I guess whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”
And there it was. The reason she’d come. It was a hint, a slight lead, but we both knew where she was taking the conversation. I may have my objective, my questions, my story, but she didn’t care. She wanted to discuss it. She met me so she could discuss it.
“I still have a lot to learn —”
“But to have an article receive national attention as a sophomore.” She cut me off with the ease of someone used to doing it. “My guess is it won’t be long before the job offers start coming.”
They already had, but she didn’t need to know that. Not yet. You need to save things. You need to build a relationship with patient precision if you want it to last.
I nodded and went back to my notebook. I should’ve steered the conversation, transitioned from my success to the work- shop. But I couldn’t, I wanted to press on, I wanted to talk more about my article. I wanted to astonish her and luxuriate in that astonishment.
That’s all it took. A little acclaim, a little attention, and, as I’m sure she’d planned, I’d forgotten my questions, my story.
“Now.” She unstacked her hands and moved one toward mine. “I’m not a journalist, just a fiction writer, but I felt your piece transcended the subject and demonstrated an uncanny ability to be informative, engaging, and unique. I couldn’t put it down, and more to the point, I found myself rereading it even after knowing the story, which I feel is a true test of great writing. Your work doesn’t read like journalism. It reads like fiction, good fiction.”
I felt the familiar warmth of praise pulse through me.
Her assessment was pretentious and vapid, it said nothing. It raised my own work by comparing it to the vaunted heights of fiction and, in doing so, denigrated journalism, but I didn’t care. “Thank you.” I tried to temper my grin. “I appreciate that.
It was a good article, and I was pleased with the exposure it received. That’s an important issue that I think will continue to pervade our society.”
I was trying to match her. Her intellectual snobbery, her placid distance, her broad generalities.
“So.” She leaned forward, and I found my eye tracing down to the opening of her shirt. I caught a glimpse of lace and looked away, landing on her forearm. It was exposed, and
I could just make out a pale purple bruise. She noticed and dropped her arm beneath the table. “I have to ask. How did you get the interview? How did you get him to agree to that? To say all that?”
I nodded and leaned back. This was what they always asked. This was what made the article. This was why it garnered national attention, why everyone was talking about it, why I was someone.
Hearing her ask the same, tired question settled me.
I ran a finger along the seam of my pants and looked around, debating whether to do it, whether to take the leap. I felt the brief flutter of nervous excitement that we all come to know at some point.
I paused and felt my heart rattle. It felt wrong. She should be the one to ask me out, not the other way. I didn’t even know if she was gay. But somehow, I did. I could tell. I could feel an opening. This was my chance. She was curious, everyone was. I had a story, I had cache, I was someone, if only for a moment. So, I leapt. “How about this? You have dinner with me tomorrow night, and I’ll tell you how I got the interview. Deal?”
The question hung in the air as it always does, time elongating—heavy and thick with anxiety but exhilarating. All the world is packed into that pause between the question and the answer.
“What, like a date?” She tilted her head, a smile leaking out of the side of her mouth, a slight hue dampening her cheeks.
I nodded.
Someone shouted at a table not far from us, and chairs scraped against the ground.
“All right,” she said, her smile spreading. “Deal.”
And just like that, the anxiety exploded into a million shards of light. I was ebullient. I was phosphorescent. I was invincible. After that, I tried to stay present, tried to listen to what she said, to not think about the future that was already being crafted in my mind.
But it was no use, I was gone. My mind was adrift. There were winters skiing and summers sailing. There were literary arguments and good coffee. There was an initial frigid period with her family. A tense scene with her grandfather where he reverted to his old prejudices, dismissing the whole of me based on the half that was Lebanese, but I won him over by talking history and baseball. I became one of them. And later, there were galas and houses full of antiques and rich wood.
“I guess you’re not here to talk about your article, are you?” She shifted back. “You’re here to talk about Jack.” Her face fell, her hands fidgeted in her lap. The color left her cheeks. The radiance of our previous conversation still lingered, but it was just a residual taste. We’d moved on.
I nodded but said nothing. Being a journalist is a lot like being a therapist. You need to draw them out. You need to make them comfortable and then let them talk.
“Terrible, just horrible.” She looked like a different person, like an actor trying to play Rose in a marginal play. “Such a waste.”
I let the silence linger, hoping she’d continue. When she didn’t, I eased into it. “Did you know him well?”
She nodded, and took her forefinger and thumb and pinched the bridge of her nose as if that could stop the tears and the pain. “Yes, of course. We all… I mean, you know about it, right? About the workshop? Dr. Lobo?”
I did. Everyone knew about the workshop. It was a creative writing group on campus, not an official workshop, whatever that means, just a group of students whom an acclaimed professor had taken an interest in.
Dr. Lobo’s workshop. Sylvia’s kids. The Creative Writing Cult.
Sylvia Lobo’s second novel, A Wake of Vultures, was an instant classic. She was teaching here as an associate professor when she wrote it, and after its publication, she became an instant celebrity. Now she teaches creative writing and gives few lectures. I took one during my first semester. Someone had dropped right when I was registering, otherwise, I’d have never gotten in. It was on the erosion of the past in literature. Novels set during times of change with characters who are stuck in the past and grappling with the future. It was an eighty-person class, and I don’t think I said more than three words all year.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know about Dr. Lobo.”
“Have you read any of her work?” The energy that had left us returned.
“I’ve read A Wake of Vultures and Jezebel.”
Rose tried to hide her excitement and nodded to herself. I could tell I’d passed a test. “I’ll give you Chariot Races and Bubblegum. If you like those, we can go from there. If not…”
More tests. But that was all right. For her, I would take them.
“You’re all very close, right?”
“Yes, Sylvia’s big on that. We’re all working toward the same goals and have the same interests, and it’s essential that we spend time together. She says it makes for better writing. Look at Paris in the twenties. Do you think it was an accident so many great writers were there at the same time?”
I took my time and wrote this down verbatim. It sounded rehearsed.
“Some people even…” She laughed. “…say we’re a bit of a cult.”
Her laughter stopped, and I made sure not to smile. This wasn’t a joke. This was a repudiation of a nasty piece of gossip. I’d have to be careful with that. I’d have to watch that I never hinted at the cultish atmosphere of the workshop.
People had good reason to call them a cult. They took all the same classes, not just Sylvia’s, but everything—history, science, even phys ed. They got coffee together at the same time every day. The same table, the same café, the same black coffee, the same far-off look while they drank. They ate lunch together. They ate the same things for lunch. They ate with purpose. Refined but rapid. They walked the same, hurried steps announcing their presence, clearing a path. They talked the same. The same talking points, the same articles referenced, the same political issues discussed, same positions held with fervor. They used the same words. They spoke at the same frantic pace. Their hands moved with their every word, painting a mute portrait of their argument. They used the same pens, same notebooks, read the same books, watched the same movies, chewed the same gum, smoked the same colorful French cigarettes, not because they were addicted, but because it stoked conversation and helped with the writing process.
They were the same. They were like her.
That was how she drank her coffee, how she ate, how she walked, how she spoke, how she thought.
They idolized her. They forced her works into their conversations. They cited her. Not just her published comments and writing but personal ones from conversations they’d had with her. They attributed immense weight to these citations as if mentioning her name ended all debate. If Sylvia said it, it wasn’t to be questioned. It was fact.
The cultish atmosphere of the program was why I decided to write the story. Why I was sitting there, interviewing Rose. Jack’s suicide was a part, but not the whole. I hoped to expand it, turn it into a piece on Sylvia and the workshop. Get a glimpse behind the curtain. See what was fact and what was fiction.
Rose stared at me after the cult comment. Judging me, reading my reaction. I met her stare and held it. “Well, these days, I think gossip is the sincerest form of flattery. As for Jack, I’m sorry for your loss.”
She nodded and raised a hand to her chest. “Yes, he was, well, very talented. We came in together, same class. We were both in her freshman seminar on literature’s obsession with the past.”
“I took that class.”
“Really? Not the same one though? I’m sure I’d have noticed you.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. But it must’ve been a different year,
you’re what, a senior?”
“She teaches it every other year. You’re fortunate you got in.”
“I could say the same to you,” I said, unable to avoid the
opening to flirt.
“Hah.” She rolled her head back. She didn’t laugh. She said, hah. Spat it. “No, I sent her my writing from high school, two awful short stories about— Oh god, I don’t even want to say… one was about my high school friends and a teacher of ours, and the other was about a ski instructor. They were dreadful, but she saw something in them, something in me.”
She looked over at the sprouting trees that lined the walk, feigning to hide her satisfied smile. “She reads the work applicants send in, as do her current students, and selections are made. If she picks you, you’re assured a spot in her freshman seminar and the creative writing major and some other class- es. See, where most creative writing programs don’t really get serious until graduate school, she starts right away. Freshmen year. She believes that you need to get to a writer early, before they learn those bad habits and become just a poor imitation of some famous writer. She wants you raw, unadulterated, malleable.”
“I thought you said she teaches that seminar every other year?”
She shook her head as if I was a mistaken child. “Oh no, just that one class on literature and the past. She teaches that in even years. She teaches a different one on female writers and the diaspora in odd years.”
I nodded and smiled and waited.
She rubbed the bruise on her arm, caught herself, and dropped her hands, resuming her practiced pose of mourning. “Yes, I was close to Jack. We were in all the same classes. I was his shadow, as we called it. Like a peer editor, you read everything they write. He was my shadow too. Sylvia thought our work complemented one another’s. He was a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly. It’s a true tragedy. Not just for him and those of us who knew him but for the world. The world lost a great writer.” Another tear, she lifted a napkin to stop it. “I edited his book. The one that we—Sylvia and I—are helping to finish. You know about that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sylvia worked to get it published, not that it was all that difficult, it’s a brilliant novel. But she took it on. She wanted to… She knew it was what he would’ve wanted. And now, at least, that part of him will live on. A tribute of sorts.”
“I hear the money’s going to charity?”
“A suicide prevention charity. And some will go to the creative writing program here as well, help to make it official, and I think some is going other places, but I don’t have the details on that.”
“Any to his family?”
“He didn’t have family. An uncle upstate somewhere, whom he grew up with, but they weren’t close, and I think he passed away. His parents weren’t in the picture.”
“Anyone else you think I should talk to?” I was afraid to push too hard too soon. You can always come back with more questions. You can always have a second interview, provided, of course, you remain on good terms.
“People in the workshop. I can give you some names. Intro- duce you.”
“That’d be great.” I looked down at my notebook, pretending to scan it, knowing what I needed to ask. “Look, Rose, I’m sorry to ask this, but I have to. Do you have any idea why he would’ve done this? I heard he didn’t leave a note.”
A writer not leaving a note. Seemed off.
She shook her head and forced another tear. “He was”— she ran a fingernail around the rim of her now-empty coffee cup—“troubled, like many writers are. It’s true what they say, ‘genius and madness flow from the same source.’ Good work often comes from pain, and I think, not to be unkind, but I think some can court it. Wallow in it. Again, I don’t mean to… I loved Jack, and it’s a tragedy what happened, but he lived in that pain. It’s what his work was about. He’d go into it and be down there and write, and after he finished, he’d come back up. He’d live in joy for a bit. But this time, with the novel, he was down there too long. He couldn’t surface.”
This, too, felt rehearsed. Maybe not quite scripted but planned. She knew I’d ask about it, and she was ready. There’s nothing wrong with that. Meeting with a journalist is stressful, and people like to be prepared.
But still, it felt off.
“Well,” I said, “I think that’s all I’ve got for today. I might have some follow-ups, but I’m sure you’re busy.”
“Yes, I have to decide what I’m wearing for our date.” I blushed and withdrew to my notes.
“I hope we won’t have to muddy that up with this?” she said. “No, I wouldn’t think so.”
We both stood, and I stared at her, straining my eyes, as she retreated into the falling sun.
Excerpted from A Campus on Fire by Patrick O’Dowd © 2025 by Patrick O’Dowd, used with permission by Regal House Publishing.
