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About this blog

Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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Join me in SPACE!

I’m delighted to be joining SPACE (Signum Adult Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online with Signum University. My upcoming modules in early 2024 include The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand, and The Last Man by Mary Shelley. I hope to see you in SPACE! Registration is now open for January’s module, The Haunting of Hill House. More information on my offered modules is here. ALT
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eldritchhobbit

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<p>October is almost here! </p><p>I’m currently...

October is almost here! I’m currently working on new academic projects related to Dark Academia (the subgenre, not the aesthetic), so for Halloween month I’ll be posting a different DA title each day with a haunting/atmospheric quote. I hope you’ll enjoy the recs!
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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 26: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005)
Quote: As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.
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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. 
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<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
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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
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Tomorrow It Begins!

Tomorrow is October! This will be the fifteenth year I count down to Halloween with daily “spooky posts.” I hope you’ll join me. Throughout October I will also be rereading one of my all-time favorite books, Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October (1994). It recounts (from the point of view of the dog Snuff) the story of a very eventful October and has 31 chapters, one for every day of the month. In recent years I’ve started treating it as an advent calendar of sorts for Halloween. It’s simply brilliant.  Here are a few atmospheric quotes. “Such times are rare, such times are fleeting, but always bright when caught, measured, hung, and later regarded in times of adversity, there in the kinder halls of memory, against the flapping of the flames.” ― Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October “I felt a strong desire to howl at the moon. It was such a howlable moon. But I restrained myself.” ― Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October
“I took Jack his slippers this evening and lay at his feet before a roaring fire while he smoked his pipe, sipped sherry, and read the newspaper. He read aloud everything involving killings, arsons, mutilations, grave robberies, church desecrations, and unusual thefts. It is very pleasant just being domestic sometimes.” ― Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October
And here’s one of my favorite passages. Snuff is describing Sherlock Holmes, disguised for his investigation as a woman, playing his violin with Romani travelers in their temporary camp:

“He played and he played, and it grew wilder and wilder–

“Abruptly, he halted and took a step, as if suddenly moving out of a dream. He bowed then and returned the instrument to its owner, his movements in that moment entirely masculine. I thought of all the controlled thinking, the masterfully developed deductions, which had served to bring him here, and then this ― this momentary slipping into the wildness he must keep carefully restrained ― and then seeing him come out of it, smiling, becoming the woman again. I saw in this the action of an enormous will, and suddenly I knew him much better than as the pursuing figure of many faces. Suddenly I knew that he had to be learning, as we were learning other aspects, of the scope of our enterprise, that he could well be right behind us at the end, that he was almost, in some way, a player – more a force, really ― in the Game, and I respected him as I have few beings of the many I have known.”   ― Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October 
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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) 
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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 2022: Day 21

Song: “Young Charlotte” Quote: They reached the door, and Charles sprang out and held his hand to her.
“Why sit you like a monument, have you no power to stir?”
He called her once, he called her twice; she answered not a word.
He asked her for her hand again, and yet she never stirred. There are many variations of this song. Read more here. Listen to the performance of Grandpa Jones…
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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

OCT. 7: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019) Quote 1: I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me. Quote 2: All you children playing with fire, looking surprised when the house burns down.
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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 22: Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand (1994) Quote 1: They never found her. Nothing at all: no clothes, no jewelry, no bones or teeth or locks of auburn hair. Quote 2: By the door the two figures remained still. I slitted my eyes, afraid that they would see that I was awake, be moved by the reflection of starlight in my pupils to reach for me with those terrible arms. Still they said nothing, only stood there unmoving, watching, waiting. 
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New “Looking Back on Genre History”

On my latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment on the StarShipSofa podcast (Episode 754), I discuss (in a spoiler-free way!) Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, intellectual history, and genre references. Here is the link! ALT ALT ALT
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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.
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