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BPAL Madness!
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Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 17: In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead (2021)
Quote: It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost. Until the day they’re not.
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 25: S.T.A.G.S. Series by M.A. Bennett (2017-2021) Quote from S.T.A.G.S. (2017): I think that’s when I realised he was crazy: he was still being chivalrous, waiting until I was quite ready for him to kill me. 
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 27: The Devil Makes Three by Tori Bovalino (2021)
Quote: Demons. Dark magic. The devil. These were the things he searched, muttering under his breath and dead to the world around him as dawn broke; as something grappled at the door of his office and found itself forbidden.
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 28: The Gemma Doyle Trilogy (2003-2007) by Libba Bray
Quote from A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003): What frightens you? What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a wild thing caged? Is it the dark? A fleeting memory of a bedtime story, ghosts and goblins and witches hiding in the shadows? Is it the way the wind picks up just before a storm, the hint of wet in the air that makes you want to scurry home to the safety of your fire? Or is it something deeper, something much more frightening, a monster deep inside that you’ve glimpsed only in pieces, the vast unknown of your own soul where secrets gather with a terrible power, the dark inside?
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 30: The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky (2021)
Quote 1: And when you’re truly scared, there’s nowhere to hide - no private school, no popularity, no trust fund. It’s just you and your most base emotion. Fear is where the truth lies.
Quote 2: But there was something wrong with me. It clawed at my insides, desperate to get out.
Quote 3: If you want this to be over, just make sure she screams.
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

30 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021

October 18: If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio (2017)
Quote 1: But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart — by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.  Quote 2: You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.

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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

15 Years of “Looking Back on Genre History”

I’ve been contributing my “Looking Back on Genre History” segments to the StarShipSofa podcast for 15 years now. All of my past segments are listed (with their topics and links!) on the “Podcasting” page of my website. (Scroll down to the “Looking Back on Genre History” section.) ALTALT
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

<p>These two novels — <i>The Button Field</i> b...

These two novels — The Button Field by Gail Husch (2014) and Killingly by Katharine Beutner (2023) — were inspired by the same real-life unsolved mystery, the disappearance of student Bertha Mellish from Mount Holyoke College in 1897. I found The Button Field to be haunting, and now I’m looking forward to reading Killingly. ALT
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

<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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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

<p>Now that Anna Torv’s great work on <i>The La...

Now that Anna Torv’s great work on The Last of Us is encouraging some folks to (re)discover the brilliant series Fringe, I’m reminded what a delight and joy it was to contribute the essay “In Search of Fringe’s Literary Ancestors” to Kevin R. Grazier’s anthology about the show, Fringe Science: Parallel Universes, White Tulips, and Mad Scientists. ALTALT
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

 

<p>It’s not every day that you and your b...

It’s not every day that you and your brilliant co-editor Emily Strand submit your completed book to your publisher, but today is that day for me! More information on STAR WARS: ESSAYS EXPLORING A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY, the sibling to our previously-submitted and also-forthcoming academic anthology STAR TREK: ESSAYS EXPLORING THE FINAL FRONTIER, will be coming soon! ALT
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

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