Jump to content
Post-Update: Forum Issues Read more... ×
BPAL Madness!
Post-Update: Forum Issues
  • entries
    360
  • comments
    6
  • views
    18,651

About this blog

Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

Entries in this blog

 

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 3

Dark Academia novel: Ghosts of Harvard by Francesca Serritella (2020) Quote: It was the place where Eric had eaten his last meal, dreamed his last dream, taken his last breath. The sight of the red brick dormitories, a picture postcard of collegiate perfection to so many, made her heart pound. For her, it wasn’t a college, it was a haunted house. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 4

Dark Academia novel: The Narrow by Kate Alice Marshall (2023) From the cover: They say what the river takes never returns. They are wrong. Quote: The hours crawl by…. For me, it’s nothing. I have waited years…. Then the sun makes its slow way below the horizon. Even in the glow of electric light, I can feel the night’s approach. The dead aren’t meant for daylight. I’m more awake in darkness. Not more alive – it’s a fallacy to suppose I could become less dead. But I am different in the dark. More powerful.  ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Free Online Star Trek and Star Wars Book Events!

Free Online Star Trek and Star Wars Book Events! Everyone is welcome! I’m delighted to announce a weekend of free online events celebrating two anthologies from Vernon Press, Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier and Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away, edited by Emily Strand and Yours Truly. We hope you’ll join us! Register for Sept. 9 event here. Register for Sept. 10 event here. See more about the books here. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 11

Dark Academia novel: Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann (2017) Quote: The two lions crouched on top of their pedestals, frozen in preparation to leap. One was snarling, its stone teeth menacing in the late-afternoon shadows, while the other stared out with disdain at the broad sweep of empty soybean fields that lay just across the state highway, a disdain made all the more pointed because the lion was missing its left eye. The missing eye was their only major flaw. A myth of swift and terrible justice falling on those who harmed the lions had shielded them further disfigurement over the years. Blackburne legend had it that the student who chiseled out the left eye as a class prank in 1947 died that same week, drowning in the Shenandoah Creek when his canoe tipped over. Since then… the lions were left alone. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2023: Dark Academia 2023, Day 14

Dark Academia novel: Don’t Breathe a Word by Jordyn Taylor (2021) Quote: “Yesterday” starts to play again from the beginning, but it’s a hell of a lot eerier as it becomes the backdrop to the story I typed on the next slide: “In 1962, Hardwick sent a small group of students underground to test a nuclear fallout shelter. Six went down, but only five survived…” ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

<p>It’s not every day that you and your b...

It’s not every day that you and your brilliant co-editor Emily Strand submit your completed book to your publisher, but today is that day for me! More information on STAR WARS: ESSAYS EXPLORING A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY, the sibling to our previously-submitted and also-forthcoming academic anthology STAR TREK: ESSAYS EXPLORING THE FINAL FRONTIER, will be coming soon! ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Visit Hill House with me in October 2024!

Just in case you’d like your October to be extra haunted, I’ll be back in SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online with Signum University. Voting is now open for my October module, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Early voters will determine when our live discussions will meet online. I had so much fun with this before, we’re doing it all over again! More information is here.
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 12

Dark Academia novel: Very Bad People by Kit Frick (2022) Quote: Tuesday morning, three classrooms have been ghosted. All over campus, there are whispers. It’s happening again. And I heard they make initiates drink blood. And it’s just a stupid hoax. The teachers talk too. I bet I know who is responsible. And at least they’re not defacing school property. And there are proper channels here at Tipton. Three students have completed their initiation rite. Which leaves seven of us. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 10

Dark Academia novel: My Dearest Darkest by Kayla Cottingham (2022) From the cover: You’ll never guess what’s watching in the dark… Quote: While all towns have their ghosts, Rainwater’s was special. They sank through its submerged sea caves and slithered up its cliffs. They bounced around its caverns and tunnels like electrical pulses in a brain, echoing memories of footsteps and laughter and screams through the ground and into the towering evergreen trees. The peninsula had a habit of keeping things long after they were gone. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 25

Today’s text is “Twinkling Feet’s Hallowe’en” from The Topaz Story Book: Stories and Legends of Autumn, Hallowe’en, and Thanksgiving (5th ed. 1928) compiled by Ada M. and Eleanor L. Skinner. Read it here. Quote: The pixie looked at her for a moment. Then he asked, “Do the children laugh a good deal on Hallowe’en?” “Why, my little man, it’s the time in all the year when they laugh most. To-night there is to be a witch’s party. I shall secretly join the children, and play all sorts of tricks for their amusement.“  ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 7

Another Gothic title very popular with women working in 19th-century mills in Lowell, Massachusetts was The Children of the Abbey (1796) by Regina Maria Roche. Read it here. Quote: The horrors of my mind I cannot describe; I seemed to stand alone in the world, without one friendly hand to prevent my sinking into the grave, which contained the dearest objects of my love. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 28

Today’s text is “Halloween Lore Told” from The Butte Daily Post on 10/31/1931. Read the article here. Quote: “Halloween, the night of black hours, ‘when churchyards yawn and graves give up their dead.’ will be celebrated in traditional style when the sun goes down… legend has it, the lake of hades freezes, and friends skate across to stalk the world unchallenged. Evil will possess the shadows until cock-crow.” ALT Halloween Lore Told
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 20

Today we begin the final part of our countdown this year with texts (that are available online) about Halloween itself! Today’s work is Halloween, A Romaunt, with Lays, Meditative and Devotional (1845) by H.S. Parsons. Read it here. Quote: If souls, once more, to these their haunts on earth, Can come, dear Lady, from the Spirit-land, I ask’d thee,—would it spoil thine hour of mirth, To see some sudden shape before thee stand! And a cold shudder told me, and thine hand Press’d dearer to mine own. But then said I, Oh! if thy friend were dead, and could command Some midnight hour to visit thee; reply, Say, would it grieve thee, Love, if love could never die! ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 21

Today’s text is Myra’s Well: A Tale of All-Hallow-E’en (1883) by George Francis Dawson. Read it here. Quote: It is the night of all nights of the year, When ghosts and warlocks haunt the troubled earth, And disembodied spirits visit us— Spirits of good and evil from the dead, Fresh from the angel hosts and from the damned, And from the vast profound betwixt the two… ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!                                                           Today’s text is “It’s Halloween” from The Philadelphia Inquirer on 10/31/1898. Read the article here. Quote: “Goblins and fairies, good and evil, will be running amuck to-night, if the old Halloween traditions do not fail…. Every one may be both superstitious and sentimental to-night.” ALT It’s Halloween headline: “Goblins and Fairies Will Be Roaming Abroad Tonight”
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

It’s almost October, which means it’s almost time to start my annual re-reading of one of my…

ALT It’s almost October, which means it’s almost time to start my annual re-reading of one of my all-time favorite books, A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. With 31 chapters, one for each day of the month, it is a fantastic mash-up of creepy seasonal goodness wrapped into a compelling story, a kind of literary advent calendar for Halloween.
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 15

Let’s keep this Gothic Halloween-fest going! Today’s text is Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown. Read it here. Quote: The tales of apparitions and enchantments did not possess that power over my belief which could even render them interesting. I saw nothing in them but ignorance and folly, and was a stranger even to that terror which is pleasing. But this incident was different from any that I had ever before known. Here were proofs of a sensible and intelligent existence, which could not be denied. Here was information obtained and imparted by means unquestionably super-human. ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Radium Age

My latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment is now available on Episode 741 of the StarShipSofa podcast. I discuss the Radium Age imprint of reissued science fiction classics from 1900-1935 published by MIT Press. ALT ALT ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 30

Today’s text is “The Goblins" from Asbury Park Press on 10/31/1913. Read the article here. Quote: Who said that elves were banished? That goblins were no more? That sprites and fays had vanished From all their haunts of yore? Not so. They surely flourish As in their golden prime, And Hallowe’en they cherish As their most joyous time. ALT The Goblins artwork depicting trick-or-treaters on Halloween
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
×