Friday Oct 24, 2025
6:00 pm - 10:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Event.
Come celebrate Halloween a week early in a first of its kind horror extravaganza with TWELVE of your favorite horror authors at Powerhouse Arena! Friday, October 24, 6-10 pm. No talks or readings, just a celebration of this spooky wonderful community and a party for the ages!
Tickets include:
Two books of your choosing from the provided list*
Two TikiChick cocktails or mocktails
Entry into author-judged costume contest (bonus points for dressing as your favorite book characters!)
Raffles, games, and prizes
Custom event merch
Opportunities for signing and photos with participating authors
Snacks, surprises, and more!
*Powerhouse will have more books on hand for purchase during the event, but preorder your favs in order to ensure their availability!
About the Books and Authors.
How to Fake a Haunting
A desperate woman’s plot to frighten her husband out of her life takes a nightmarish turn in a chilling novel of modern horror by a Bram Stoker Award–winning author.
Christa Carmen is the author of Beneath the Poet’s House; The Daughters of Block Island, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist; Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, an Indie Horror Book Award winner; and numerous short stories, including the Bram Stoker Award–nominated “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell.” She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine. Christa lives in Rhode Island with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. When she’s not writing, Christa keeps chickens and uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear. For more information, visit www.christacarmen.com.
When the Wolf Comes Home
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy’s increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them—the boy can turn his every fear into reality.
Nat Cassidy, author of the acclaimed horror Mary, returns with When the Wolf Comes Home, an unabashed, adrenaline-fueled pop horror thriller where the darkest fears can become reality.
Play NiceClio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so glamorous secret: she grew up in a haunted house. Well, not haunted. Possessed. After Clio’s parents’ messy divorce, her mother, Alex, moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon. Or so Alex claimed. That’s not what Clio’s sisters remember or what the courts determined when they stripped her of custody after she went off the deep end. But Alex was insistent; she even wrote a book about her experience in the house.
After Alex’s sudden death, the supposedly possessed house passes to Clio and her sisters. Where her sisters see childhood trauma, Clio sees an opportunity for house flipping content. Only, as the home makeover process begins, Clio discovers there might be some truth to her mother’s claims. As memories resurface and Clio finally reads her mother’s book, a sinister presence in the house manifests, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.
Rachel Harrison is the USA Today bestselling author of Play Nice, So Thirsty, Black Sheep, Such Sharp Teeth, Cackle, and The Return, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in her debut collection Bad Dolls. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and their cat/overlord.
Just Like MotherSpine-chilling and sharp, Anne Heltzel’s Just Like Mother is a modern gothic from a fresh new voice in horror, and “will disturb readers to their core.” (Library Journal) A GoodReads Choice Award Finalist for Best Horror, and named one of the Best Books of 2022 by LitReactor!
The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything—and everyone—at a safe distance.
When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she’s ever had. Soon she’s spending more time at Andrea’s remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn’t even mind that her cousin’s wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry—baby fever comes with the territory.
The more Maeve immerses herself in Andrea’s world, the more disconnected she feels from her life back in the city; and the cousins’ increasing attachment triggers memories Maeve has fought hard to bury. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come…
ANNE HELTZEL is a New York-based novelist and book editor. In addition to writing horror, she has penned several milder titles for children and young adults. Just Like Mother is her adult debut.
Horror for Weenies by Emily C. Hughes
A smart, funny crash course in 25 iconic horror movies, from Psycho to Hereditary, for people who love getting the reference but hate being scared.
You don’t have to miss out just because you don’t like to be frightened! Stop trying to read nonsensical Wikipedia plot summaries (we know you’re doing it), and let an expert tell you everything you need to know about the most influential horror films of the past 60 years—without a single jump scare or a drop of gore.
With a rundown of the history and significance of horror cinema, explanations of common tropes, and detailed entries on 25 important movies ranging from Night of the Living Dead to The Blair Witch Project to Get Out, Horror for Weenies will turn even the scarediest of cats into a confident connoisseur.
Each entry includes:
- A detailed plot summary, with enough jokes that it won’t freak you out
- Smart, illuminating analysis of the film’s themes and cultural significance
- Descriptions of iconic scenes you definitely do not want to look at
- Talking points for impressing even the biggest scary-movie buffs
Horror for Weenies is the first installment in the Outsider’s Guide series, which offers highly readable crash courses in major cultural phenomena, so you can catch the references and understand the big deal. Never get left out of a conversation again!
The Library at Hellebore
A deeply dark academia novel from USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw, perfect for fans of A Deadly Education and An Education in Malice who are hungry for something more diabolical.
The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers.
Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled.
But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together.
If they don’t, this school will eat them alive…
CASSANDRA KHAW is the USA Today bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Library at Hellebore, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, The Salt Grows Heavy, Breakable Things, and coauthor of The Dead Take the A Train with Richard Kadrey. They are an award-winning game writer.
American Rapture
Named one of the Best Horror Books of 2024 (Esquire, Vulture, Paste, ScreenRant, and Literary Hub) • A GoodReads and Publishers Weekly Editors’ Pick • An Indie Next Pick • A Splatterpunk Award Finalist!
A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust.
Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin…
The end times are coming.
CJ LEEDE is a horror writer, hiker, and Trekkie. She is the author of Maeve Fly and American Rapture. Her debut novel Maeve Fly won the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award and Splatterpunk Award, and earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination. When she is not driving around the country, CJ can be found in LA with her boyfriend and rescue dogs.
The Swarm
From the bizarre and audacious imagination of horror author Andy Marino comes a harrowing tale of the insect that will herald the apocalypse…
It begins with cicadas. It will end with the swarm.
When a bizarre murder case lands on the desk of Detective Vicky Paterson, it’s just the start of her nightmare. On the same day, her young daughter, Sadie, is swarmed by cicadas emerging off-cycle from their seventeen-year pattern. Sadie barely survives, and her condition is critical.
Across town, Will and Alicia, two dysfunctional private investigators, are on the trail of a missing girl and the shadowy cult involved in her disappearance. But after the first wave of insects hit, they are forced to barricade themselves in a motel where they must work together with a group of strangers to outlast the invasion.
Soon the infestation is impossible to contain. Humanity rests on the knife’s edge of extinction. And there is a terrible purpose behind the emergence – one that Vicky, Will, Alicia, and a small group of unlikely allies must unravel if they are to survive.
Andy Marino is the author of It Rides a Pale Horse and The Seven Visitations of Sydney Burgess. He was born in upstate New York, spent half his life in New York City, and now lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and two dogs.
Acquired Taste
They’re feeding on you too.
A father returns from serving in Vietnam with a strange and terrifying addiction; a man removes something horrifying from his fireplace, and becomes desperate to return it; and a right-wing news channel has its hooks in people in more ways than one.
From department store Santas to ghost boyfriends and salamander-worshipping nuns; from the claustrophobia of the Covid-19 pandemic to small-town Chesapeake USA, Clay McLeod Chapman takes universal fears of parenthood, addiction and political divisions and makes them uniquely his own.
Packed full of humanity, humour and above all, relentless creeping dread, Acquired Taste is a timely descent into the mind of one of modern horror’s finest authors.
Clay McLeod Chapman writes novels, comic books, and children’s books, as well as for film and TV. He is the author of many adult horror novels, including The Remaking, Whisper Down the Lane, Ghost Eaters, What Kind of Mother, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, and Acquired Taste. Shiny Happy People is his debut book for young readers.
Galloway’s Gospel
In this shockingly fun wild ride of horrors, Sam Rebelein takes readers back to Renfield County and tells the story of two Rachels—one who mistakenly starts a cult at her local high school and one who tries to dismantle it ten years later.
2009: Rachel Galloway is bored in class. She spends the dreary fall days sketching in her notebook—adorable pigs munching on her boring teachers—and imagining a utopia where all the horrors of Burnskidde High School disappear. But when her classmates start to believe this utopia could be real, Galloway finds herself at the center of an elaborate, and quickly spreading, new religion. Before long, the town is split between believers and nonbelievers. As tensions rise and the rituals become more dangerous, Galloway can’t be sure what’s real and what’s not, or who she can trust.
BURNSKIDDE: CULTWATCH
2019: This is the cryptic message that Renfield County Guard Rachel Durwood receives from her colleague Mark, mere days after he’s disappeared. Mark’s note leads Durwood to the town of Burnskidde, famously sealed off from the rest of the county ten years ago. Now, she discovers a small, insulated community preparing for the rapture and, seemingly, their collective demise. In order to save Burnskidde from itself, she must piece together the fallout from 2009 and avoid being swept up into the monstrous cult herself.
As Rachel Galloway watches her life spiral out of control, Rachel Durwood navigates a world where history, horror, and faith collide. Despite being separated by a decade, Galloway and Durwood may be closer to each other than they realize. But even together, will they be able to stop Burnskidde’s impending doom?
Good Boy by Neil McRobertIT meets The Fisherman in this story of supernatural horror, nostalgia and mystery.
After a boy vanishes on the outskirts of a small Northern town, a woman spies from her window a mysterious man digging a grave in the exact spot of the disappearance.
However, when she confronts him, the man’s true purpose is far more chilling than she could have imagined and the history of the town’s fatal past unfolds. What has been hiding in this small northern town all these years?
Neil McRobert is a writer and host of the landmark podcast Talking Scared. He fled the haunted halls of academia to settle in an old British village, where he writes about scary things. These include his own stories and all manner of journalism on horror topics. He compiled the Best Horror of the Year lists for Esquire and Vulture.
Night’s Edge
Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin takes a bite out of vampire lore in this blood-soaked novel about the darkest secrets we hide and how monstrous we can be to the ones we love most.
Having a mom like Izzy meant Mia had to grow up fast. No extracurriculars, no inviting friends over, and definitely no dating. The most important rule: Tell no one of Izzy’s hunger – the kind only blood can satisfy.
But Mia is in her twenties now and longs for a life of her own. One where she doesn’t have to worry about anyone discovering their terrible secret, or breathing down her neck. When Mia meets rebellious musician Jade she dares to hope she’s found a way to leave her home – and her mom – behind.
It just might be Mia’s only chance of getting out alive.
LIZ KERIN is an author, playwright, screenwriter, and graduate of the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She is also the author of The Phantom Forest (2019). She lives in Southern California.