Jump to content
Post-Update: Forum Issues Read more... ×
BPAL Madness!
Post-Update: Forum Issues
  • entries
    379
  • comments
    6
  • views
    28,241

About this blog

Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

Entries in this blog

 

Halloween 2020, Day 14

For today I have some great lists of Halloween-appropriate reading for younger readers as well as scary-story lovers of all ages. First, from Angie Manfredi: “Shivers & Shudders: Scary Middle Grade Books.”
Second, from the Spooky KidLit site (“Celebrating the kids’ books that go bump in the night.”), two lists: “Celebrating Black Authors, Part 1″ and “Celebrating Black Authors, Part 2.” One of the stellar books recommended in two of the lists above is The Forgotten Girl by India Hill Brown (2019), and here’s a haunting little taste: You can read a longer excerpt from The Forgotten Girl here.  And here’s some great news! The Forgotten Girl is one of four books being adapted for television: “Scholastic Entertainment to Develop ‘JumpScare’ Kids Animated Horror Series With ‘Ben 10’ Team.”
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2020, Day 5

One of the coolest new-to-me discoveries of this year is  The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo (1819), which Andrew Barger (in The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849: A Classic Vampire Anthology) credits as quite possibly “the first black vampire story, the first comedic vampire story, the first story to include a mulatto vampire, the first vampire story by an American author, and perhaps the first anti-slavery short story.”  Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life has a “Just Teach One” page devoted to The Black Vampyre, including the complete text with introduction and notes prepared by Duncan Faherty (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center) and Ed White (Tulane University), and several illuminating essays written by teachers who have included this text in their classes. You can read or download The Black Vampyre and these additional resources for free here. Here is a spine-tinging excerpt from The Black Vampyre:
View the full article
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2020, Day 4

Halloween 2020, Day 4 – from The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf (2020) This year I fell in love with the middle-grade novel The Girl and the Ghost, which is based on Malaysian folktales about the pelesit, a shape-shifting spirit bound to serve a single master. In the novel, young Suraya inherits such a ghost from her witch grandmother and learns that this pelesit is loyal – and jealous. Hanna Alkaf offers genuine chills as well as laughs, but most importantly she delivers a thought-provoking, heart-warming, life-affirming story of loss, grief, friendship, and family. The characters feel so real!  Don’t let the middle-grade classification of this story fool you; The Girl and the Ghost has much to offer readers of all ages, including plenty of ghosts, graveyards, and spookiness. You can read a longer excerpt from The Girl and the Ghost here or listen to sample from the audiobook here.     View the full article  
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

STAR TREK: ESSAYS EXPLORING THE FINAL FRONTIER is here!

I’m so excited to share this with the universe! This anthology includes contributions from Emily Strand, Una McCormack, Daniel Unruh, Edward Guimont, Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, Kristina Šekrst, Javier Francisco, Erin Bell, Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad, Andrew Higgins, John Jackson Miller, and me. The cover art is by Emily Austin. More information, including the full Table of Contents, is at the link below. The book can be requested via libraries as a hardcover or ebook, and the coupon code CFC10822213C4 provides a 24% “new release!” discount at the Vernon Press website: https://vernonpress.com/book/1672 ALT
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2020, Day 6

(Art is “The Innocent Abandoned” by ExDolore.)
For today’s spooky reading recommendation list, check out “Five Haunted House Books Written By Women” by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson for Tor.com.  Here is an eerie snippet from one of the novels in the list, The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike (U.S. edition 2016). A longer excerpt is available online from Macmillan here.
View the full article
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Help launch Hangsaman!

My “Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson: Exploring a Gothic Campus Mystery” one-month module with SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online via Signum University is currently “on the launchpad” for potential launch in the autumn of 2025. Here is the official description: “Shirley Jackson is rightly celebrated as a master of Gothic storytelling thanks to her most well-known novels such as The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). In recent years, however, her earlier novel Hangsaman (1951) has received new attention and critical appreciation from fans and scholars alike.

"Far ahead of its time when it was published, Jackson’s deeply personal Hangsaman is many things: a psychological study of a young woman’s coming of age; a haunting Gothic mystery; a pointed critique of gender roles, family dynamics, and higher education; a meditation on trauma and mental illness; and an ancestor of today’s dark academia storytelling. Shirley Jackson drew inspiration from a variety of sources to craft this remarkable campus novel, from folk ballads and the Tarot, myth and ritual, to a real college campus and an unsolved New England cold case of a missing sophomore student.

"In this module, we will unpack this gem of a Gothic story, following freshman Natalie Waite as she searches for her “essential self” and discussing why Hangsaman feels freshly relevant and important to many readers today.” Here is more information on the Hangsaman module. To help launch this module, please go here, log in, and put this module on your launchpad short-list. Thanks!
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2020, Day 19

(Art is “Halloween 2019″ by jackthetab.)
Sadie Hartmann has a fantastic suggested Halloween reading list here at LitReactor: “Halloween 2020 Reading List.”  Two other books to that deserve to be on any list include the new Weird anthologies from Handheld Press, British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893-1937 edited by James Machin and Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937 edited by Melissa Edmundson. And guess what? Next week, you can take part in the book launch for these two volumes online for free! Weird book launch: Tuesday, 27th October 2020
At 19.30 UK time / 13.30 EST on Tuesday, 27th October, Handheld Press be hosting a Zoom book launch for our two new Weird anthologies, British Weird, edited by James Machin, and Women’s Weird  2, edited by Melissa Edmundson. Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press will be moderating. To sign up to attend this online book launch, go here for details! (Photo by Yours Truly.)
- from “‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’: Uses of the Supernatural in English Fiction” by Mary Butts (1913) in British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893-1937, edited by James Machin
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

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
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

<p>I’m delighted to talk Star Trek at an event ...

I’m delighted to talk Star Trek at an event by Licking County Library on Jan. 18, 2022 at 7pm Eastern. This event is live, online, and free to everyone. My presentation: “Empowered Minds: How Star Trek Changed the World and Why It Still Matters” Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Empowered Minds: How Star Trek Changed the World and Why It Still Matters. After registering, yo
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

Halloween 2020, Day 8

(Artwork is “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” by theycallmedanyo.) For today I have an article/reading recommendation list to share by T. Marie Vandelly for Crime Reads: “Domestic Horror: A Primer.” 
And here are some atmospheric quotes from some of the novels that appear in the list: “It’s bad when the dead talk in dreams,” said Odessa. ― Michael McDowell, The Elementals (1981)
“The origins of the bottle tree were African, Helen had once told her; it was a folk tradition brought to this country by slaves, who, working with whatever materials were at hand, devised a crude method of catching and trapping malevolent spirits, to prevent their passage through human doors.” ― Attica Locke, The Cutting Season (2012)
“In folktales a vampire couldn’t enter your home unless you invited him in. Without your consent the beast could never cross your threshold. Well, what do you think your computer is? Your phone? You live inside those devices so those devices are your homes. But at least a home, a physical building, has a door you can shut, windows you can latch. Technology has no locked doors.”
― Victor LaValle, The Changeling (2017) 
View the full article
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 16: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Quote:  We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 29: Genesis by Bernard Beckett (2006)
Quote: In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. 
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 8: Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1943)  Quote:  Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse. Film Adaptations: Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (A.K.A. Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches’ Brew (A.K.A. Which Witch is Which?) (1980)
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

2024 Wrap-Up: Podcasts

2024 Wrap-Up: Podcasts Thank you to all of the podcasts that invited me on this year! My “Looking Back on Genre History” science fiction segment ran each month on StarShipSofa. I talked to Potterversity about my book chapter “Dark Arts and Secret Histories: Investigating Dark Academia”; to Trash Compactor and New Books Network about my book Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away; and to New Books Network about my book Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier. I also talked about Alexis de Tocqueville with the Vital Remnants podcast and Mary Shelley (twice, once about The Last Man and once about Frankenstein) with The McConnell Center podcast. Links to all of these podcast episodes are here.
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 20: Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko, trans. Julia Meitov Hersey (1st published 2007, in English 2018)
Quote:  “‘If we get to the end of the course… we shall become just like them. And we shall speak their language. Then we’ll take revenge.’”

Sasha shook her head.

“If we get to the end of this course, we won’t want to take revenge anymore. We’ll become just like them.”
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
 

2024 Wrap-Up: Publications

New Publication in 2024:
An essay, “‘Lifting Old Curses’: The mirror dance of The Flowers of Vashnoi and The Mountains of Mourning” in Short But Concentrated #2: a second essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, edited by @unamccormack. New in Paperback in 2024 (previously published in hardback & ebook in 2023):
Two books, Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier and Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away, both co-edited with Emily Strand.
View the full post.
eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

0
×