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Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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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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Two Upcoming Dark Academia Presentations

I’m delighted to say I’ll be giving two presentations this autumn on Dark Academia topics at academic conferences. Both events have online options, and I hope to see some of you there! I’ll be giving the talk “A Vanished Student Leaves a Haunted Space: An Unsolved Mystery and the Gothic Imagination on the Dark Academia Campus” at Perilous Realms and Haunted Spaces: New England Moot 2023 sponsored by Signum University in October. I’ll be presenting the paper “Consumed by the Campus: Dark Academia, the Gothic Imagination, and the Missing Student" at the Consuming the Gothic Conference sponsored by Sheffield Gothic in November. ALT 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 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 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 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 10

Dark Academia novel: My Dearest Darkest by Kayla Cottingham (2022) From the cover: You’ll never guess what’s watching in the dark… Quote: While all towns have their ghosts, Rainwater’s was special. They sank through its submerged sea caves and slithered up its cliffs. They bounced around its caverns and tunnels like electrical pulses in a brain, echoing memories of footsteps and laughter and screams through the ground and into the towering evergreen trees. The peninsula had a habit of keeping things long after they were gone. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 11

Dark Academia novel: Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann (2017) Quote: The two lions crouched on top of their pedestals, frozen in preparation to leap. One was snarling, its stone teeth menacing in the late-afternoon shadows, while the other stared out with disdain at the broad sweep of empty soybean fields that lay just across the state highway, a disdain made all the more pointed because the lion was missing its left eye. The missing eye was their only major flaw. A myth of swift and terrible justice falling on those who harmed the lions had shielded them further disfigurement over the years. Blackburne legend had it that the student who chiseled out the left eye as a class prank in 1947 died that same week, drowning in the Shenandoah Creek when his canoe tipped over. Since then… the lions were left alone. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 12

Dark Academia novel: Very Bad People by Kit Frick (2022) Quote: Tuesday morning, three classrooms have been ghosted. All over campus, there are whispers. It’s happening again. And I heard they make initiates drink blood. And it’s just a stupid hoax. The teachers talk too. I bet I know who is responsible. And at least they’re not defacing school property. And there are proper channels here at Tipton. Three students have completed their initiation rite. Which leaves seven of us. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 13

Dark Academia novel: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo (2021) Quote: “This is where it gets interesting. The second son loves this girl so much he decides to step onto an unholy path. Now the story varies, but in the one my mama told me, he makes a deal. He takes his youngest sister, goes to a crossroad on the property past the witching hour, and he waits until some evil comes to him. He looks that evil square in the face and offers it his sister in return for his wife.” … “He kills his sister,” Sam guessed. “Of course he does,” Mr. McCormick said.     ALT
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I hope to see you in SPACE!

I’ve taught at Signum University for years, but in addition to offering my classes, I’m now also joining Signum’s SPACE Program (Signum Adult Portals for Adult Continuing Education). I have modules up for candidacy now that I am very excited about! Each will be one month long, with two one-hour meetings per week (one an interactive lecture by me and one a group discussion facilitated by me). All meetings are online. Everyone’s invited! Here’s the schedule: January 2024: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson February 2024: A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (the first work officially authorized by Shirley Jackson’s estate to respond to The Haunting of Hill House) March 2024: The Last Man by Mary Shelley (a science fiction classic and the most relevant novel one can read while living in “unprecedented times”) Everyone is invited! For more information, please check out this link: Amy H. Sturgis, Upcoming SPACE Modules ALTALTALT
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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 15

_____ Dark Academia novel: The It Girl by Ruth Ware (2020) Quote: Afterwards, it was the door she would remember. It was open, she kept saying to the police. I should have known something was wrong. She could have retraced every step of the walk back from the Hall: the gravel crunching beneath her feet of the path across Old Quad, under the Cherwell Arch, then the illegal shortcut through the darkness of the Fellows’ Garden, her feet light on the dew-soaked forbidden lawn. Oxford didn’t need KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs; that lawn had been the preserve of dons and fellows for more than two hundred years without needing to remind undergraduates of the fact…. Then up staircase VII, four flights of worn stone steps, right up to the top, where she and April slept, on the left-hand side of the landing, opposite Dr. Myers’s rooms. Dr. Myers’s door was closed, as it always was. But the other door, her door, was open. That was the last thing she remembered. She should have known something was wrong. But she suspected nothing at all.  ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 16

Dark Academia novel: Missing Clarissa by Ripley Jones (2023) Quote: Everyone from Oreville knows the story of Clarissa. Her living ghost haunts the long rain-dark winters alongside the looming specters of Washington’s grim army of infamous serial killers and litany of missing girls…. Clarissa Campbell, who vanished so completely that no one has found a trace of her – not the full investigative force of the Oreville police department, not legions of armchair sleuths and online obsessives, not television news crews or magazine reporters or Clarissa’s friends and family. ALT
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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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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 18

Dark Academia novel: River of Ashes by Alexandrea Weis and Lucas Astor (2022) Quote: He waited for the animal to charge. Instead, it turned and raced into the brush. Smug with his victory, he turned back toward The Abbey. At the iron gate, he raised his head to the night sky. The stars weren’t twinkling, and there was no moon. Perfect. He cut across the field of high grass. Not far from the cells, the lone howl of a dog stopped him in his tracks. Silence. Seconds ticked by, but the only sounds were the chirp of the crickets and the occasional croak of frogs. When the dogs appear, death is near. He chuckled. Maybe the dogs knew what he had planned.  ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 19

Dark Academia novel: The Good Girls by Claire Eliza Bartlett (2020) From the cover: secrets and lies, then somebody dies Quote: The end of my life starts here. A rainy, sodden autumn has turned the river below into a roaring monster. Rocks jut out like jagged teeth, jet black against frothy white. My blood sings as the weathered wood sags behind me—someone has followed me onto the tiny bridge over Anna’s Run…. Legends say Anna’s Run takes one unlucky sacrifice every year. The wind wraps around my neck like a cord. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 20

Dark Academia novel: The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew (2022) Quote: She’d heard of Godbole. Everyone had. It was a highly prestigious yet controversial program, a magnet for those who dabbled in the occult. … And so, on a bluebird day in September, she packed up her things and she went. To conquer the world, and maybe some others. To prove that she could.   She took a breath and she took a step. And the shadows followed. ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 22

Dark Academia novel: Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison (2019) Quote: “So seriously, you never walk the arboretum path alone. Even if it’s not haunted, it’s creepy and not safe. It’s outside the walls.” This last is said with such earnestness I simply nod. “Outside the walls equals not safe alone. Got it.” ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 23

Dark Academia novel: The Raising by Laura Kasischke (2011) Quote: There were goose bumps on her arms now. Wrapping her arms around herself, Mira realized that not only had she shivered, but now she was trembling. She worried that her teeth might begin to chatter. It was truly autumn. The sun had clearly slipped a few notches down on the horizon, and the light on the leaves was amber now, not white, not even golden, as it had been the week before, and a breeze seemed to be pouring through the centuries-old window of Godwin Honors Hall despite the fact they were all closed. That cold breeze seemed to pour in a steady stream down the hallway, bathing her. “I know you’re an expert on death,” the boy said to her, “and dying, and the undead.”     ALT
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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 24

Dark Academia novel: The Ravens by Kass Morgan and Danielle Paige (2020) From the cover: These sorority girls are real witches. Quote: That was when she noticed the single tarot card positioned nearly at the head of her bare mattress, as if placed there by a careful hand. It was the Death card her mother had given her. The skeleton leered up at her with a gruesome smile, and for a moment, it almost looked like the eyes glowed red. Vivi shivered, despite knowing that it was a trick of the light. I told you. Westerly isn’t a safe place, not for people like you… ALT
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