Dr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

Thread! 🧵📚 In October, I'll be making a daily #Halloween Countdown post on the theme of #DarkAcademia, with a separate book recommendation and atmospheric, eerie quote each day.

This will be "Part 2," in a way, adding to my Halloween Countdown of 2021. But I wasn't on Mastodon on 2021, so I'm sharing those countdown posts now to get you in the mood! My October posts this year will feature all new recommendations and quotes representing different works than those in this thread. I hope you enjoy this!

CW: Death, ghosts, and other dark subjects

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

1/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#Hangsaman by #ShirleyJackson (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…

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

2/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#Conversion by #KatherineHowe (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.

Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/l8eoGjkOX-A

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

3/32

Conversion by Katherine Howe book trailer

YouTube
Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–

#DarkAcademia work:
#AceOfSpades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (2021)

Quote:
I feel like I’m reliving the same nightmare over and over, and it will never stop.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

4/32

Sep 16, 2023 at 9:42pmWeb
Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#PicnicAtHangingRock by #JoanLindsay (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.”

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

5/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#GreyLandDuology by @TheCallYA (2016-2018)

Quote from #TheCall (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.”

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

6/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#TheSecretHistory by #DonnaTartt (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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

7/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#NinthHouse by #LeighBardugo (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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

8/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#ConjureWife by #FritzLeiber (1943)

Quote:
Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse.

Film Adaptations: Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (AKA Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches’ Brew (AKA Which Witch is Which?) (1980)

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

9/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#GhostWall by #SarahMoss (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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

10/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#ThisIsNotATest by #CourtneySummers (2012)

Quote:
Sometimes you catch something specific like the screams & 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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

11/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#Legendborn by #TracyDeonn (2020)

Quote:
That memorial over at the Arboretum is the pretty acknowledgement, the polite one. But the blood? The blood’s buried here.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

12/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#WilderGirls by #RoryPower (2019)

Quote:
We don’t get to choose what hurts us.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

13/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#CatherineHouse by #ElisabethThomas (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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

14/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#ALessonInVengeance by #VictoriaLee (2021)

Quote:
“Didn’t they say all the witches died here at Godwin House?”

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

15/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#TrulyDevious Series by @maureenjohnson (2018-present)

Quote from TRULY DEVIOUS (2018):
Schools may be famous for many things: academics, graduates, sports teams.
They are not supposed to be famous for murders.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

16/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#NeverLetMeGo by #KazuoIshiguro (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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

17/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#InMyDreamsIHoldAKnife by #AshleyWinstead (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.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

18/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#IfWeWereVillains by #MLRio (2017)

Quote:
You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

19/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#HowWeFallApart by #KatieZhao (2021)

Quote:
A kid at our school died, and my parents’ biggest concern is my calc grade. Smh —Anon

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

20/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#VitaNostra by #MarinaDyachenko and #SergeyDyachenko, translated by #JuliaMeitovHersey (1st edition 2007, English edition 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.”

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

21/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#PlainBadHeroines by #EmilyMDanforth (2020)

Quote:
You’re much too young to haunt your own life.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

22/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#WakingTheMoon by #ElizabethHand (1994)

Quote:
They never found her. Nothing at all: no clothes, no jewelry, no bones or teeth or locks of auburn hair.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

23/32

Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023

#DarkAcademia work:
#DarkThingsIAdore by #KatieLattari (2021)

Quote:
Someone knows what I did. And someone knows that I’m back.

#Gothic #Books #31DABooks

24/32

Show threadVirginicusSep 16, 2023
@drahsturgis Never thought of Fritz Leiber writing #DarkAcademia before. 🤔
Show threadDr. Amy H. Sturgis đź“–Sep 16, 2023
@Virginicus I find it fascinating to look backward, now that we have a clearer definition of Dark Academia, and find older works that both fit the bill and paved the way for what we see now.
Also, I love me some Fritz Leiber.
Show threadINTERROGASTNov 20, 2023
@drahsturgis I don't know that it runs down the middle so much as the center of a life.