"Picnic at Hanging Rock" by Joan Lindsay

In keeping with tradition, we're reading a spooky classic in October and discussing it on the first Tuesday in November, just a few days after Halloween. Here's a description of the book from Wikipedia: Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1967 novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay. Set in Victoria, Australia, in 1900, it is about a group of female boarding school students who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and local community. *Picnic at Hanging Rock* is widely considered by critics to be one of the greatest Australian novels. Although the events depicted in the novel are apparently entirely fictional, it is framed as though it were a true story, corroborated by ambiguous pseudohistorical references. Its unresolved conclusion has sparked significant public, critical, and scholarly analysis, and the narrative has become a part of Australia's national folklore as a result. Lindsay claimed to have written the novel over two weeks at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, after having successive dreams of the narrated events.