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Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 31

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃 I hope you’ve enjoyed this year’s countdown, and I hope you have a fabulous Halloween! Dark Academia novel: When All the Girls Are Sleeping by Emily Arsenault (2021) Quote: Most of the girls had simply heard the same things about the Winter Girl over their years at Windham that I had: that her name might be Sarah. That she haunted in January or February. That she knocked on doors or could be seen in a white nightgown in the hallway if you got up and ventured to the bathroom after midnight. That she was to blame for the various weird noises in the building on winter nights. That she had been spurned by a young man and killed herself in her room. One girl said something I hadn’t heard before, though: Some girls say that she’s looking for her replacement. That she’s tired of being a ghost, that she’ll strangle or smother you in your bed if you’re not careful. And then you’re the ghost.   ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 30

Dark Academia novel: Don’t Forget the Girl by Rebecca McKanna (2023) From the cover: We never remember the dead girls. We never forget the killers.  Quote: Sometimes it seems like an answer – any answer – to what happened to Abby that night is what Bree needs to move on. … for one second, she sees the moment in exact detail: Abby crying under the statue of the Black Angel in her Hermione Halloween costume, snowflakes collecting on her coppery hair. Chelsea and Bree watching her, not putting their arms around her, letting her walk away. Her footprints in the snow leading down that blacktop path. The last trace of her they ever saw. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 29

Dark Academia novel: Fraternity by Andy Mientus (2022) From the cover: Be careful what you pledge. Quote: How to make a Perfect Storm: 1. Allow terrible, unholy powers to find their way into the hands of children. See that those children only half-translate their conjurations, missing key protective details. 2. Have them perform those conjurations at the very height of autumn, the dying of the year, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest. Make sure they are coming to the work not soberly but at an emotional breaking point, dripping blood, hungry for violence. Aim their violence at another child. 3. Pray for those children. Terrible consequences await them. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 28

Dark Academia novel: All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth (2018) Quote: There was a story on campus about a student who had died many years ago—so long ago that no one remembered anymore what his name was or how he had died exactly, but there were reports every now and again of a sighting of his ghost. Some said he’d hanged himself in the showers of the senior boys’ dormitory over a broken heart; others said he’d overdosed on pills and fallen into an eternal slumber in his dorm bed over a failing exam grade. It was bad luck if you saw him, a harbinger of terrible things to come. Bryce Langston had reported seeing the ghost on his way home from the library one night. The next morning, he got a rejection letter from Harvard. Everyone had thought he would be a shoo-in, and he hadn’t even gotten on the waiting list. The next year, Amanda King supposedly saw the ghost right before she got in a fatal car accident. I always thought about the ghost when I was walking around campus at night by myself. I imagined seeing a white smear in the corner of my vision, but every time I turned my head, there was nothing there.
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 27

Dark Academia novel: The Other Lives of Miss Emily White by A. J. Elwood (2023) Quote: It’s a ghost… a ghost of her. I saw her again, standing in the entrance hall, dripping to the parquet; her hair a damp rope, her face pale, her eyes cast into darkness. I pushed my blanket away as if it were a shroud, smothering and heavy, weighting me into a grave. I felt cold right through. Emily was young and vibrant and alive. She was here. She’d touched my arm. She’d smiled at me and I had lived in that smile, just for a time. She couldn’t simply stop, couldn’t vanish… I peered into the corners of the room, where the shadows lay deepest. I half expected a figure to be standing there, darkness spooling from its heart, like paint spiralling from a brush in a jar of water. I fervently wished it away.      ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 26

Dark Academia novel: A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid (2023) Quote: And Effy had walked right into the center of it, into this sinking house at the edge of the world…. When Effy was able to move her numb legs again, she ran down the stairs and hurled herself out the door, into the blackness of the night, heart pounding like church bells. She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been. ALT
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New “Looking Back on Genre History”

My latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment is the first of a two-part review of the anthology AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. It’s now up on the new episode of the StarShipSofa podcast. ALT ALT StarShipSofa 718 Lincoln Michel | StarShipSofa
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 25

Dark Academia novel: The Sea of Lost Girls by Carol Goodman (2020) Quote: Every year the coast guard holds an assembly about the dangers of crossing the causeway that only seems to increase its appeal. When I get out of the car I can hear the dense pines that stand sentinel over the peninsula creaking in the salt-laced wind… and something else. A sound like a girl crying. I freeze and listen. It could just be the wind in the trees or the mournful sigh of the tide retreating over the rocks below the coastal path, but then, peering through the fog, I catch a glimpse of something white that looks like a girl running… I remember the ghosts who are said to haunt these woods.  ALT
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New Star Wars Podcast Interview!

Many thanks to Meg Dowell of “Now This Is Lit: A Star Wars Books Podcast” for having my co-editor Emily Strand and me on the latest episode to talk about our new scholarly anthology Star Wars: Essays Exploring A Galaxy Far, Far Away! ALT Here is the episode:
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 24

Dark Academia novel: The Ravens by Kass Morgan and Danielle Paige (2020) From the cover: These sorority girls are real witches. Quote: That was when she noticed the single tarot card positioned nearly at the head of her bare mattress, as if placed there by a careful hand. It was the Death card her mother had given her. The skeleton leered up at her with a gruesome smile, and for a moment, it almost looked like the eyes glowed red. Vivi shivered, despite knowing that it was a trick of the light. I told you. Westerly isn’t a safe place, not for people like you… ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 23

Dark Academia novel: The Raising by Laura Kasischke (2011) Quote: There were goose bumps on her arms now. Wrapping her arms around herself, Mira realized that not only had she shivered, but now she was trembling. She worried that her teeth might begin to chatter. It was truly autumn. The sun had clearly slipped a few notches down on the horizon, and the light on the leaves was amber now, not white, not even golden, as it had been the week before, and a breeze seemed to be pouring through the centuries-old window of Godwin Honors Hall despite the fact they were all closed. That cold breeze seemed to pour in a steady stream down the hallway, bathing her. “I know you’re an expert on death,” the boy said to her, “and dying, and the undead.”     ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 22

Dark Academia novel: Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison (2019) Quote: “So seriously, you never walk the arboretum path alone. Even if it’s not haunted, it’s creepy and not safe. It’s outside the walls.” This last is said with such earnestness I simply nod. “Outside the walls equals not safe alone. Got it.” ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 20

Dark Academia novel: The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew (2022) Quote: She’d heard of Godbole. Everyone had. It was a highly prestigious yet controversial program, a magnet for those who dabbled in the occult. … And so, on a bluebird day in September, she packed up her things and she went. To conquer the world, and maybe some others. To prove that she could.   She took a breath and she took a step. And the shadows followed. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 19

Dark Academia novel: The Good Girls by Claire Eliza Bartlett (2020) From the cover: secrets and lies, then somebody dies Quote: The end of my life starts here. A rainy, sodden autumn has turned the river below into a roaring monster. Rocks jut out like jagged teeth, jet black against frothy white. My blood sings as the weathered wood sags behind me—someone has followed me onto the tiny bridge over Anna’s Run…. Legends say Anna’s Run takes one unlucky sacrifice every year. The wind wraps around my neck like a cord. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 18

Dark Academia novel: River of Ashes by Alexandrea Weis and Lucas Astor (2022) Quote: He waited for the animal to charge. Instead, it turned and raced into the brush. Smug with his victory, he turned back toward The Abbey. At the iron gate, he raised his head to the night sky. The stars weren’t twinkling, and there was no moon. Perfect. He cut across the field of high grass. Not far from the cells, the lone howl of a dog stopped him in his tracks. Silence. Seconds ticked by, but the only sounds were the chirp of the crickets and the occasional croak of frogs. When the dogs appear, death is near. He chuckled. Maybe the dogs knew what he had planned.  ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 17

Dark Academia novel: The Society for Soulless Girls by Laura Steven (2022) Quote: It was open on the very last page I’d looked at: ‘How the Ritual Was Performed’. I wondered which of my fellow philosophy students had stumbled upon it. And why did they leave in such a hurry that they left the volume lying around like a piece of old junk? The page was exactly as I last saw it, with one tiny, significant exception: the droplet of blood in the bottom right corner. A small smudge, as though someone had pricked their finger on a spindle and then tried to turn the page. The sight made me smile. Someone had tried to perform the ritual. I knew it in my bones. There was someone at Carvell as intrigued by the occult as I was. For some reason, this knowledge bolstered me. In a moment, the decision was made. I was going to attempt the ritual too.   ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 16

Dark Academia novel: Missing Clarissa by Ripley Jones (2023) Quote: Everyone from Oreville knows the story of Clarissa. Her living ghost haunts the long rain-dark winters alongside the looming specters of Washington’s grim army of infamous serial killers and litany of missing girls…. Clarissa Campbell, who vanished so completely that no one has found a trace of her – not the full investigative force of the Oreville police department, not legions of armchair sleuths and online obsessives, not television news crews or magazine reporters or Clarissa’s friends and family. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 15

_____ Dark Academia novel: The It Girl by Ruth Ware (2020) Quote: Afterwards, it was the door she would remember. It was open, she kept saying to the police. I should have known something was wrong. She could have retraced every step of the walk back from the Hall: the gravel crunching beneath her feet of the path across Old Quad, under the Cherwell Arch, then the illegal shortcut through the darkness of the Fellows’ Garden, her feet light on the dew-soaked forbidden lawn. Oxford didn’t need KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs; that lawn had been the preserve of dons and fellows for more than two hundred years without needing to remind undergraduates of the fact…. Then up staircase VII, four flights of worn stone steps, right up to the top, where she and April slept, on the left-hand side of the landing, opposite Dr. Myers’s rooms. Dr. Myers’s door was closed, as it always was. But the other door, her door, was open. That was the last thing she remembered. She should have known something was wrong. But she suspected nothing at all.  ALT
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I hope to see you in SPACE!

I’ve taught at Signum University for years, but in addition to offering my classes, I’m now also joining Signum’s SPACE Program (Signum Adult Portals for Adult Continuing Education). I have modules up for candidacy now that I am very excited about! Each will be one month long, with two one-hour meetings per week (one an interactive lecture by me and one a group discussion facilitated by me). All meetings are online. Everyone’s invited! Here’s the schedule: January 2024: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson February 2024: A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (the first work officially authorized by Shirley Jackson’s estate to respond to The Haunting of Hill House) March 2024: The Last Man by Mary Shelley (a science fiction classic and the most relevant novel one can read while living in “unprecedented times”) Everyone is invited! For more information, please check out this link: Amy H. Sturgis, Upcoming SPACE Modules ALTALTALT
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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
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 13

Dark Academia novel: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo (2021) Quote: “This is where it gets interesting. The second son loves this girl so much he decides to step onto an unholy path. Now the story varies, but in the one my mama told me, he makes a deal. He takes his youngest sister, goes to a crossroad on the property past the witching hour, and he waits until some evil comes to him. He looks that evil square in the face and offers it his sister in return for his wife.” … “He kills his sister,” Sam guessed. “Of course he does,” Mr. McCormick said.     ALT
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