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Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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Halloween 2020, Day 3

(Artwork is “Jack-o-lanterns” by NocturnalSea.)   
If you’re looking for more Halloween festivities, check out the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2020 Halloween Poetry Reading, which is already underway and will continue updating throughout the month. Images! Audio! Spooky poetry!
And speaking of poetry… - excerpt from “Henry’s Shade” by “Susan,” originally from October 1894, as published in Schabraco and Other Gothic Tales from The Lady’s Monthly Museum 1798-1828, edited by Jennie MacDonald (2020).
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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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Book mood. ?

ALT Book mood. ? These novels were inspired by the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case.
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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!! October 31: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) Quote 1: My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine. Quote 2: But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.


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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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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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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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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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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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