Amy H. Sturgis's Blog, page 14

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.

ALT

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.

ALT

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.

ALT

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 27

Dark Academia novel: The Other Lives of Miss Emily White by A. J. Elwood (2023)

Quote:

It’s a ghost… a ghost of her.

I saw her again, standing in the entrance hall, dripping to the parquet; her hair a damp rope, her face pale, her eyes cast into darkness. I pushed my blanket away as if it were a shroud, smothering and heavy, weighting me into a grave. I felt cold right through. Emily was young and vibrant and alive. She was here. She’d touched my arm. She’d smiled at me and I had lived in that smile, just for a time. She couldn’t simply stop, couldn’t vanish…

I peered into the corners of the room, where the shadows lay deepest. I half expected a figure to be standing there, darkness spooling from its heart, like paint spiralling from a brush in a jar of water. I fervently wished it away.     

ALT

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 26

Dark Academia novel: A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid (2023)

Quote:

And Effy had walked right into the center of it, into this sinking house at the edge of the world…. When Effy was able to move her numb legs again, she ran down the stairs and hurled herself out the door, into the blackness of the night, heart pounding like church bells. She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.

ALT

New “Looking Back on Genre History”

My latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment is the first of a two-part review of the anthology AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. It’s now up on the new episode of the StarShipSofa podcast.

ALTALT

StarShipSofa 718 Lincoln Michel | StarShipSofa

Halloween 2023: 31 Days of Dark Academia, October 25

Dark Academia novel: The Sea of Lost Girls by Carol Goodman (2020)

Quote:

Every year the coast guard holds an assembly about the dangers of crossing the causeway that only seems to increase its appeal.

When I get out of the car I can hear the dense pines that stand sentinel over the peninsula creaking in the salt-laced wind… and something else.

A sound like a girl crying.

I freeze and listen. It could just be the wind in the trees or the mournful sigh of the tide retreating over the rocks below the coastal path, but then, peering through the fog, I catch a glimpse of something white that looks like a girl running… I remember the ghosts who are said to haunt these woods. 

ALT

New Star Wars Podcast Interview!

Many thanks to Meg Dowell of “Now This Is Lit: A Star Wars Books Podcast” for having my co-editor Emily Strand and me on the latest episode to talk about our new scholarly anthology Star Wars: Essays Exploring A Galaxy Far, Far Away!

ALT

Here is the episode:

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

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