Have wanted to read this for some time now, and with much (albeit ambivalent) anticipation; as it turns out, I do like it - sure it's pretentious, but I think that Special Topics just about pulls off its central conceit (that is, its structuring in overtly literary terms, chapters named after famous works of literature &c), a success which owes something to the multi-faceted way in which Pessl develops that notion, something again to her ability to evoke a mood and a difficult-to-describe sense of depth, and perhaps still more to her commitment to not allowing those structuring ideas to obscure Character and Story within the novel.
Storywise, the most obvious reference point is The Secret History, from the introductory self-conscious musing on the narrator's own Life Story through the central motif of the eccentric group of college students orbiting around a charismatic lecturer via a death that is flagged in the opening pages and plenty of other parallels, and I'll make the comparison: Special Topics is not as good. But it's still an engaging, serious-minded and impressively conceived and executed, and surprisingly subtle thing of a novel and, I reckon, pretty much deserving of the raves.
