eldritchhobbit

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. View the full post.

October 23: Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari (2021) Quote: Someone knows what I did. And someone knows that I’m back. View the full post.

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. View the full post.

October 21: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth (2020) Quote: You’re much too young to haunt your own life. View the full post.

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.” View the full post.

October 19: How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao (2021) Quote: A kid at our school died, and my parents’ biggest concern is my calc grade. Smh —Anon View the full post.

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. View the full post.

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. View the full post.

October 16: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Quote: We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all. View the full post.

October 15: The Truly Devious Series by Maureen Johnson (2018-2021) Quote from Truly Devious (2018): It was, in short, idyllic and fantastical, and may have remained as such had it not been for that foggy night in April 1936 when Truly Devious struck. Schools may be famous for many things: academics, graduates, sports teams. They are not supposed to be famous for murders. View the full post.

October 14: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee (2021) Quote: “Didn’t they say all the witches died here at Godwin House?” View the full post.

My latest “Looking Back on Genre History segment is up on the newest episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, and it focuses on Dark Academia! You can hear it here. View the full post.

October 13: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas (2020) Quote: You are here. You are in. And doesn’t it feel good? You are in the house and the house is in the woods. You are in the house and the house is in you. View the full post.

October 12: Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019) Quote: We don’t get to choose what hurts us. View the full post.

October 11: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (2020) Quote: That memorial over at the Arboretum is the pretty acknowledgement, the polite one. But the blood? The blood’s buried here. View the full post.

October 10: This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers (2012) Quote 1: We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our own impending death. Quote 2: Sometimes you catch something specific like the screams and cries of people trying to hold on to each other before they’re swallowed into other, bigger noises. This is what it sounds like when the world ends. View the full post.

October 9: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (2018) Quote: Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds. View the full post.

October 8: Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1943) Quote: Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse. Film Adaptations: Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (A.K.A. Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches’ Brew (A.K.A. Which Witch is Which?) (1980) View the full post.

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. View the full post.

October 6: The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992) Quote: Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. View the full post.

October 5: Grey Land Duology by Peadar Ó Guilín (2016-2018) Quote from The Call (2016): “Oh, they mean to do more than kill you, child. They want to twist you. To crumple you up like an old sheet of paper.” View the full post.

31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021 October 4: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967) Quote: The girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent special­ists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. “Like a clock, you know,” the doctor explained. “A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point.” View the full post.

October 3: Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (2021). Quote: I feel like I’m reliving the same nightmare over and over, and it will never stop. View the full post.

October 2: Conversion by Katherine Howe (2014) Quote: Something was eating away at the back of my brain. Girls. Dominant narratives. Sex. Death. Arthur Miller. Ann Putman sitting invisible right in the middle of history. View the full post.

October 1: Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson (1951) Quote: Poor things, she thought - do they have to spend all this energy just to surround me? It seemed pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than a minor fragment of the pattern in which they were involved, to learn and follow through insensitively a tiny step in the great dance which was seen close up as the destruction of Natalie, and far off, as the end of the world. They had all earned their deaths, Natalie thought… View the full post.