Photo by Vibe Studio Wisconsin

I’ve been in love with the paranormal for as long as I can remember. If you’re wondering what a slightly feral, cryptid-obsessed child is up to in third grade, look no further. My earliest memories involve ghost hunting at recess in the church cemeteries (what else does one do at a Catholic school?), telling my third-grade teacher that I wanted to hunt bigfoot for a living, and begging librarians for all the cryptid books I could get my hands on.

There’s only so much make-believe a Midwestern kid can do about the paranormal; books fueled my obsession and taught me all sorts of macabre facts to scare my classmates with. School librarians fostered my love for reading by offering up all sorts of spooky finds: vampires, Mothman, and the Jersey Devil, to name a few. I prided myself as the only ten-year-old with an extensive knowledge about Dracula.

My love for the supernatural only grew in my tween and teen years—I devoured Twilight, Shiver, and Fallen like it was my full-time job. I spent my lunch hours writing stories in the library, imagining monsters and first loves and monstrous first loves. 

Dark academia is the perfect way to imbue magic into a place as mundane as high school. Students can romanticize their daily schedules and aestheticize their class work. Dark academia might be an escape from the real world, but it’s not so far from reality that teens can’t apply the same otherworldly enchantment in their own lives, too.

House of Hearts is my sophomore novel, and it is a mash-up of all the spooky, swoony things I love. There’s ghostly masquerade balls, haunted hedge mazes, and a forbidden romance that threatens to unravel everything. It centers around a scholarship student who enrolls in a private boarding school to follow in the footsteps of her dead best friend, and part of her investigation means infiltrating the secret society her friend was a part of when she mysteriously passed away. As she’s chasing after clues, she finds herself falling down a rabbit hole filled with deadly family curses, vengeful ghosts, and a soulmate who might literally rip out her heart. 

Skyla Arndt has always loved the creepy, crawly side of life. When she was younger, she thought that love might translate to hunting Bigfoot, but luckily for him, writing proved easier. Connect with her at ArndtSkyla.com or @ArndtSkyla on Instagram or Twitter.