#31DaysofDA

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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.

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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.

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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…

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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 21

Dark Academia novel: The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson (2012)

Quote:

Keep calm and carry on. Also, stay in and hide because the Ripper is coming.

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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.

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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.  

[dramyhsturgis]

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. 

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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.    

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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.

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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.

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Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 2

Dark Academia work: "Presentation of an Intact Specimen" by Premee Mohamed, from Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia edited by Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle (2023)

Quote:

No. This one is mine. This museum is mine. I worked too hard for this, and it belongs to me and if he intends to take anything of mine, I will not show the restraint I did when we were students. No one is watching me now. Only God, so they say; and He will, I think, forgive me this. Surely it is not a sin to remove a sinner from the face of the Earth to prevent future sins. Think of everything Bainbridge has done. Think of the oceans of blood on his hands.

And the tiny, tiny bit that would be on hers.

___

It was madness, it was all madness; but she examined the madness from every angle and it seemed good and sound, like an old tool of forged iron. She saw no weaknesses in it. It was merely the removal of something worthless from the museum — it was curation. She and Godfrey could find a more suitable assistant. It would only benefit the institution.

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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 Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane (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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.

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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.