"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.