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Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 17

Today’s text is the short story “The Invisible Girl” (1833) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Read it here. Quote: “What beacon is it that helps us at our need?” asked Vernon, as the men, now able to manage their oars with greater ease, found breath to answer his question. “A fairy one, I believe,” replied the elder sailor, “yet no less a true: it burns in an old tumble-down tower, built on the top of a rock which looks over the sea. We never saw it before this summer; and now each night it is to be seen,—at least when it is looked for, for we cannot see it from our village;—and it is such an out-of-the-way place that no one has need to go near it, except through a chance like this. Some say it is burnt by witches, some say by smugglers; but this I know, two parties have been to search, and found nothing but the bare walls of the tower. All is deserted by day, and dark by night; for no light was to be seen while we were there, though it burned sprightly enough when we were out at sea.” “I have heard say,” observed the younger sailor, “it is burnt by the ghost of a maiden who lost her sweetheart in these parts; he being wrecked, and his body found at the foot of the tower: she goes by the name among us of the ‘Invisible Girl.’” ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 16

Today’s text is The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo (1819) by Uriah Derek D’Arcy. Read it here. Quote: When reason and sense returned, she [The Lady] found herself in the same place; and it was also the midnight hour. She was laying by the grave of Mr. PERSONNE, and her breast was stained with blood. A wide wound appeared to have been inflicted there, but was now cicatrized. Imagine if you can, her surprise; when, by a certain carniverous craving in her maw, and by putting this and that together, she found she was a—VAMPYRE!!! and gathered from her indistinct reminiscences, of the preceding night, that she had been then sucked; and that it was now her turn to eject the peaceful tenants of the grave!  With this delightful prospect of immortality before her, she began to examine the graves, for subject to satisfy her furious appetite. When she had selected one to her mind, a new marvel arrested her attention. Her first husband got up out his coffin, and with all the grace so natural to his countrymen, made her a low bow in the last fashion, and opened his arms to receive her!  ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 15

Let’s keep this Gothic Halloween-fest going! Today’s text is Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown. Read it here. Quote: The tales of apparitions and enchantments did not possess that power over my belief which could even render them interesting. I saw nothing in them but ignorance and folly, and was a stranger even to that terror which is pleasing. But this incident was different from any that I had ever before known. Here were proofs of a sensible and intelligent existence, which could not be denied. Here was information obtained and imparted by means unquestionably super-human. ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 14

Before we leave the subject of Northanger Abbey completely, let’s include one more work that inspired the novel (and left a lasting mark on the Gothic tradition), The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Read it here. Quote: “Be cautious not to utter a syllable!” whispered the Stranger; “Step not out of the circle, and as you love yourself, dare not to look upon my face!” ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 13

One more of the so-called “horrid novels” referenced in Northanger Abbey is The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath. Read it here. Quote: “Here Silence has fixed her abode, disturbed only at intervals by the howling of the wolf, or the cry of the vulture. In such a situation actions have no witnesses; these woods are no spies.” ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 12

Today’s creepy novel, also mentioned as “horrid” in Northanger Abbey, is The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) written by Carl Friedrich Kahlert (under pseudonym) and translated by Peter Teuthold. Read it here. Quote: “…a dreadful chilliness seized us, we felt the grasp of the icy fangs of horror, being in a burying vault surrounded by rotten coffins. Skulls and mouldered bones rattled beneath our feet, the grisly phantom of death stared in our faces from every side, with a grim, ghastly aspect. In the centre of the vault we beheld a black marble coffin, supported by a pedestal of stone, over it was suspended to the ceiling a lamp spreading a dismal, dying glimmering around.”                                                 ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 11

Some of the Gothic works deemed “horrid” by Jane Austen in 1818’s Northanger Abbey (“are you sure they are all horrid?”) are available online, so let’s shift this countdown to those dark and delicious novels. (One is The Children of the Abbey, already covered on Day 7.) Today’s title is The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Eliza Parsons.  Read it here. Quote: “My Lord came here once or twice, but the ghosts made such a noise he could not stay. Several gentry have slept here at times, but no body would stay a second night, and so we have all to ourselves by day, and the ghosts, or what they be, have got all the rooms by night and then they be quiet enough.”
ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 10

We’ve reached the last post in the portion of this countdown devoted to the creepy Gothic books beloved by the women working in 19th-century mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Today’s entry is the controversial autobiography of Maria Monk (1836). Read it here. Quote: We all believed in ghosts. ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 1

Halloween season is here! Since 2005, I’ve been observing a Halloween countdown on whatever social media I was using at the time with a daily post throughout October. These days I am primarily on Mastodon (so if you’re in the Fediverse, or connected to it via Threads or some other means, please say hi!), but I also post on Tumblr, my Goodreads blog, and Dreamwidth, among other places.  I look forward to sharing October with you! Happy Countdown to Halloween 2024! This year I will focus on Halloween-friendly texts (long and short) available for free online. I will try to lean away from the usual suspects and, I hope, bring you some treats that you will enjoy! This countdown will have several separate parts. The first part is inspired by Bridget M. Marshall’s excellent 2021 work Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature. In her book, Marshall notes that dark and dreadful Gothic novels were very popular with the “mill girls” who worked in 19th-century factories. I’d like to start the countdown by recommending some of the shiver-inducing texts these women reported reading and savoring. ALT Here begins the Day 1 post! One of the most popular titles with women working in factories in Manchester and Lancashire, UK, was Mysteries of London (1844-1845) by G.W.M. Reynolds. Read it here. Quote: “Perhaps there is no other cry in the world, save that of ‘fire!’ more calculated to spread terror and dismay, when falling suddenly and unexpectedly upon the ears of a party of revellers, than that of ‘A corpse! a corpse!’”
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Halloween Countdown 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 1

So it begins! Each day of this dark and beautiful month I’ll be posting a different Dark Academia title with a haunting, atmospheric quote. I hope you’ll enjoy the recommendations! Dark Academia story: “X House” by J.T. Ellison, from In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan (2023) Quote: There was a bog near the bridge, on the other side of the forest. The things that disappeared into that place… Animals. Trees. People. Yes, it was beautiful, but it was dangerous. So many were lost over the years, women who vanished into the woods and never returned. Why someone would build a school in this desolate area was a forever unknown.   ALT
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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 9

Dark Academia novel: The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue (2020) Quote: The cabinet was filled with curious and bizarre items. There was a jar with a dead tarantula in it, a case of butterflies and one with insects, a chain made of teeth; there were stamps, an ivory horn, a photo of a two-headed calf, an old jewelry box, some gemstones, a miniature violin and other jars filled with liquid which was too murky to see what was inside. I chose a skull. It was small, like that of a child. Mr. Lavelle nodded as he handed it to me. And for what was not the first time, I felt like he was a seer and that everything that would come to happen he had already foreseen. I held the skull in my hands. I imagined, for a moment, I could squeeze it and it would shatter. I have not thought about this for many years, but now I wonder if I should not have chosen the skull. That perhaps if I had just picked a gemstone, things would have been different. I would not have become what I did. But then I remember the way I felt as they both, he and Victoria, looked at me, and I think perhaps not. It was all inevitable. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 8

Dark Academia novel: The Broken Girls by Simone St. James (2018) Quote: Written in pencil, the lines of a familiar rhyme looked back up at her: Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again! ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 7

Dark Academia novel: The Cloisters by Katy Hays (2022) Quote: Death always visited me in August. A slow and delicious month we turned into something swift and brutal. The change, quick as a card trick. I should have seen it coming. The way the body would be laid out on the library floor, the way the gardens would be torn apart by the search. The way our jealousy, greed, and ambition were waiting to devour us all, like a snake eating its own tail. The ouroboros.   ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 6

Dark Academia novel: The Honeys by Ryan La Sala (2022) Quote: I don’t fear the dark. I know the dark, and it knows me. Within it, I’m safe from the sun’s lovely illusions. I know what I’ve always known: The monsters worth fearing are the ones that are dangerous enough to hide in daylight. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 5

Dark Academia novel: Promise Boys by Nick Brooks (2023) From the cover: Perfection. Excellence. Discipline. Murder. Quote: Sometimes what’s obvious takes a while to see – the person who pulls a trigger doesn’t just disappear into the dark. They are right here among us once we decide we’re ready to question everything we think we know. They’re always closer than you think. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 4

Dark Academia novel: The Narrow by Kate Alice Marshall (2023) From the cover: They say what the river takes never returns. They are wrong. Quote: The hours crawl by…. For me, it’s nothing. I have waited years…. Then the sun makes its slow way below the horizon. Even in the glow of electric light, I can feel the night’s approach. The dead aren’t meant for daylight. I’m more awake in darkness. Not more alive – it’s a fallacy to suppose I could become less dead. But I am different in the dark. More powerful.  ALT
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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 3

Dark Academia novel: Ghosts of Harvard by Francesca Serritella (2020) Quote: It was the place where Eric had eaten his last meal, dreamed his last dream, taken his last breath. The sight of the red brick dormitories, a picture postcard of collegiate perfection to so many, made her heart pound. For her, it wasn’t a college, it was a haunted house. 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.
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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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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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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