This might've been ruined for some by the cringier elements of the "dark academia" subculture but Jesus it really is that good. The prose is beyond stunning; it takes rare talent to marry gorgeously decadent language with a genuinely suspenseful, page-turning narrative but Tartt manages it with such fluid grace that it's astounding. This is a profoundly Catholic novel in a deeply felt and intangible way and it's hard to quite explain but it's so very luminous and fatalistic and wonderful. Tartt mogged the tradcath e-girl summit by converting thirty years ago and having the prettiest face. Judy was my fave!
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Yes, and I think the coziness is what makes the horrors of the second half so much more alarming. Like at first they just seem eccentric but gradually you notice a lurking menace within them (see: the bacchanal) as well as a certain nihilism on Julian's end (or at the very least a degree of pagan amorality) and then that whole last third of the book is just a cacophony of horrors as all the chickens come home to roost at once What was taking Greek like, if you don't mind me asking? I can easily imagine that major getting culty irl too