The campus novel may have its origins in the early 1950s with Mary McCarthy’s satire The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis’s comic caper Lucky Jim, but for many contemporary readers, the genre is best defined by Donna Tartt’s 1992 Gothic murder mystery The Secret History. That book inspired a raft of college-set thrillers, most of them pale imitations, but some inventive variations. Christopher J. Yates’s new novel, which unfolds at Oxford University, is the most recent book to appear in that long shadow cast by Tartt’s bestseller, trying to emerge from it by offering something new.