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Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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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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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 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.”
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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 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.
ALT
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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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Two Visits to Hill House!

I’ll be starting 2024 with two visits to Hill House! I’m joining SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online with Signum University. My first modules include The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (January) and its authorized sequel, A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (February). Registration is now open for January’s module. Voting is now open for February’s module. Here are more details. I hope to see you in SPACE! ALT ALT
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Halloween 2020, Day 10

(Artwork is “Autumn” by lunarhare.)
Today’s reading recommendation list is “Joke’s on you: Five parodies of the ghost story” by Lewis Hurst for Sublime Horror. In Hurst’s words, “I used to avoid ‘funny’ ghost stories. Humour seemed at odds with the effect I sought from reading about the supernatural. It dispelled the atmosphere, leaving the stories, and the reader, disenchanted. Later on, I learned that horror could be funny, and that funny things can be horrific.”
And here is an excerpt from one of the stories Hurst mentions, “The Open Window” by Saki (1914):   The short story is online (in Saki’s collection Beasts and Super-Beasts) here at Project Gutenberg.  
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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 24: House of Night series by P.C. & Kristin Cast (2007-2014)
Quote from Marked (2007): “Remember, darkness does not always equate to evil, just as light does not always bring good.” NOTE: I contributed the essay “Reimagining ‘Magic City’: How the Casts Mythologize Tulsa” to a book about the House of Night Series, Nyx in the House of Night. You can read more of my posts about the series here.   
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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.
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The Dystopian Tradition

My graduate course on the Dystopian Tradition will be offered again this summer online at Signum University if there’s sufficient interest. I hope the class will make, because it seems more relevant than ever. ALT The Dystopian Tradition - Signum University
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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!
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Halloween 2020, Day 18

(Art is “Zbrush Doodle: Day 1750 - Festive Pumpkin” by UnexpectedToy.)
For today, here is the atmospheric opening of the short story “Haunted!” by Jack Edwards, originally published in The Weekly Tale Teller #83 (December 3, 1910), as found in Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories edited by Mike Ashley (2018):  

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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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