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!’”

View the full post.