Nyx in the House of Night

school whose campus becomes Tulsa’s House of Night.
    It’s not difficult to see why the Casts chose Cascia Hall as the setting for their vampyre finishing school. At the heart of the Cascia Hall complex sits the original monastery, which dates back to the school’s founding by the Order of Saint Augustine in 1926. Even the newer constructions follow the same neo-French Norman style of architecture, thus lending an atmosphere of Old World history and gravity to a campus not yet a century old. The founders named the school for Saint Rita of Cascia, Italy, and the imposing Saint Rita of Cascia Chapel occupies a key position on its grounds. In the Casts’ novels, this becomes Nyx’s Temple at the House of Night.
    Cascia Hall’s appearance sets it apart from the rest of Tulsa. First, its castle-like buildings and towers differ from the other noteworthy constructions in the region; in fact, they look positively medieval, as if they predate the rest of the city and state. (Thus Zoey, during her first tour of the grounds in Marked , thinks to herself, “I swear, a moat would have looked more like it belonged there than a sidewalk . . .”) Second, the forty wooded acres of the campus divide it from the residential neighborhood in which it sits. Although entrances to Cascia Hall exist on both South Yorktown Avenue and South Utica Avenue, the South Utica entrance remains closed except during athletic events. The school thus appears to be as exclusive geographically and architecturally as it is academically and financially. To mainstream Tulsans, this isolation lends the place a certain (dare I say Gothic?) mystery. Tucked away, secretive, and utterly distinctive, the campus offers the perfect home for the supernatural or paranormal—in short, for the Casts’ vampyres.
    The Philbrook Museum of Art
    Together the Philbrook Museum of Art and its grounds seem to have emerged directly from a book of classic legends. As a very young child, I accompanied my parents to an outdoor evening showing of Camelot on the Philbrook’s manicured lawn, and I recall that it was difficult to tell where the fictional kingdom of Camelot ended and the real grounds of the Philbrook began.
    Waite Phillips, I think, would’ve been delighted at this. One of three brothers who made their fortunes from Oklahoma oil, Waite Phillips (1883–1964) wanted his seventy-two room home and its twenty-three acre surroundings to seem like a piece of Italian history transplanted to contemporary Tulsa. Completed in 1927, Villa Philbrook is a masterpiece of Italian Renaissance design. Its elaborate gardens mimic those created by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola for the Villa Lante in 1566, following the Mannerist style of the Italian High Renaissance long appreciated for its intellectual sophistication and symmetry rather than its naturalism. The gardens, like the villa itself, reflect conscious craftsmanship and delicate artistry.
    It’s easy to understand why Aphrodite chooses the domed gazebo at the foot of the garden for her Samhain ritual in Marked . After all, there could hardly be a more dramatic setting for a drama queen. Technically, the “gazebo” is a tempietto, a circular Renaissance temple, and it serves as the focal point of interest from the Villa Philbrook’s back terrace. The museum’s garden and paved walks all point directly to the structure, and the small pool before it reflects back the image of its long white columns. As readers discover, Aphrodite’s ritual for the Dark Daughters and Sons goes badly wrong there, and in the aftermath the Philbrook gazebo becomes the setting for Zoey Redbird’s unplanned debut as a future High Priestess. It seems appropriate that Zoey finds herself, in her words, in a setting like “a magical fairy kingdom” when taking her first steps as a leader specially chosen by her Goddess.
    The Casts return repeatedly to the remarkable location of the Philbrook Museum to further the plots of their novels. In Betrayed , for example, police find the mangled body of Union football player Brad Higeons in a stream on the Philbrook grounds. In Chosen , Zoey picks the Philbrook gazebo as the place to reunite with her once dead and now drastically altered best friend, Stevie Rae. Never does the Philbrook appear to be a threatening place in its own right; the only concern any of the characters seem to feel is that of attracting the attention of human security guards after museum hours, and this rates more as an