Speculative Boston Reading Series: Dark Fiction at Trident Booksellers & Cafe

Speculative Boston is a quarterly event, featuring authors of scifi, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us on October 24th at Trident! Our guest authors will be Errick Nunnally, Bracken Macleod, and Isabel Yap!

Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school was a safer pursuit. He enjoys art, comics, and genre novels. A designer by day, he earned a black belt in Krav Maga and Muay Thai kickboxing by night. His work has appeared in several anthologies and is best described as “dark pulp.” His work can be found in LAMPLIGHT, TRANSCENDENT, WICKED WITCHES, THE FINAL SUMMONS, PROTECTORS 2, the Podcast, NIGHTLIGHT, and the upcoming ChiZine novel, LIGHTNING WEARS A RED CAPE.

 

Bracken MacLeod is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of the novels Mountain Home, Come to Dust, Stranded, and Closing Costs, coming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He’s also published two collections of short fiction, 13 Views of the Suicide Woods and White Knight and Other Pawns. Before devoting himself to full time writing, he worked as a civil and criminal litigator, a university philosophy instructor, and a martial arts teacher. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.

 

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter.

Speculative Boston Reading Series

Speculative Boston is a free quarterly reading series for science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us at Trident Books & Cafe in Boston, when our guests will be Julian K. Jarboe, Christopher Golden, and Theodora Goss. The night includes short readings, a lively discussion and Q&A, and plenty of time for signing books and hanging out.

Julian K. Jarboe lives in Salem, Massachusetts. They are an Associate Editor at PodCastle magazine, a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and most recently a fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, where they also sit on the board. Their writing can be found in The Atlantic, Strange Horizons, The Fairy Tale Review, and anthologized in the LAMBDA award-winning Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction series, among others. They also produce and co-host Mothers & Others, “the podcast about maternal figures and mommy issues.”

Christopher Golden is the New York Times #1 bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ararat, Snowblind, Dead Ringers, Of Saints and Shadows, and many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of two fan favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As an editor, his anthologies include Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, Seize the Night, and The New Dead, among others. He has also written screenplays, video games, radio plays, an online animated series, and much more. He lives in Massachusetts.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the collections In the Forest of Forgetting and Songs for Ophelia; The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format; debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, and its sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Locus awards.

Speculative Boston presents JULIE C. DAY, HILLARY MONAHAN, and PAUL TREMBLAY

Speculative Boston is a free quarterly reading series for science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. Join us on October 25th at Trident Books & Cafe in Boston, when our guests will be Julie C. Day, Hillary Monahan, and Paul Tremblay.

JULIE C. DAY has published over thirty stories in magazines such as Interzone, Podcastle, Black Static, and Split Lip Magazine. Her debut collection Uncommon Miracles is available from PS Publishing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine and a Masters of Science in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts.

HILLARY MONAHAN is the New York Times Bestselling author of the YA horror MARY: The Summoning through Disney-Hyperion and the acclaimed THE AWESOME under her pen name Eva Darrows. A multi-genre author, Hillary writes everything from horror and comedy to SFF and romance, for young adult and adult audiences alike. 2019 sees her twelfth novel in print.

PAUL TREMBLAY is the author of the novels Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and A Head Full of Ghosts. His other novels include The Little Sleep, No Sleep till Wonderland, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, and Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (co-written with Stephen Graham Jones). His fiction and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Supernatural Noir, and numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor the Creatures anthology (with John Langan). Paul is currently on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards as well.

A Night of Chilling Stories with GARETH HINDS and BEN LOORY

Attention all Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark fans: this is an event you’d regret missing.

Brookline Booksmith welcomes artist-adapter GARETH HINDS and author BEN LOORY for a night of their chilling tales.  HINDS will be presenting his graphic novel Poe: Stories and Poems, a Graphic Novel Adaptation, and BEN LOORY will be discussing his story collection Tales of Falling and Flying.  Both HINDS and LOORY have received high praise for their books from critics and from authors such as Ray Bradbury and Ransom Riggs.

Poe: Stories and Poems is a thrilling adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s best-known works such as “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Raven”.

LOORY returns with a second collection of timeless tales, Tales of Falling and Flying, inviting us to enter his worlds of whimsical fantasy, deep empathy, and playful humor in the signature voice that drew readers to his highly praised first collection.

This event is free and open to the public.

Heavy Metal + Thriller = TONY MACMILLAN Reading from The Augmented Fourth

Like rock and metal?  How about thrillers?  Join Porter Square Books as they welcome novelist TONY MCMILLEN for a reading of his newest novel, The Augmented Fourth.

Four individuals trapped in a snowed in hotel.  One of which, our narrator, is the bass player for the legendary, seminal heavy metal band Frivolous Black.  None of the four trapped in the hotel are exactly what they appear to be.  One might not even be human.

This event is not ticketed.

 

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE and THEODORA GOSS on Women in the Horror/Sci Fi Genre

Sci-fi fans, take note!  Brookline Booksmith welcomes NYT bestselling author CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE and novelist THEODORA GOSS for a discussion of females in horror/sci-fi literature.  

In their latest works, Valente and Goss write from women’s perspectives.

VALENTE’s The Refrigerator Monologues explores the a series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who’s ever been “refrigerated”: so that a male superhero’s storyline will progress.

GOSS’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter draws characters from classic sci-fi and horror literature with a twist.  Based on some of literature’s horror and science fiction classics, this is the story of a remarkable group of women who come together to solve the mystery of a series of gruesome murders—and the bigger mystery of their own origins.

This event is not ticketed.

Sci-Fi/Horror authors DAN MOREN and LL SOARES at Porter Square Books

Porter Square Books welcomes journalist, podcast host, and author DAN MOREN in conversation with Bram Stoker Award-winning author L.L. SOARES.

MOREN’s The Caledonian Gambit is a throwback to the classic sci-fi adventures of spies and off-world politics, but filled to the brim with modern sensibilities.  The galaxy is mired in a cold war between two superpowers.  Thrust between this struggle are Simon Kovalic, the Commonwealth’s preeminent spy, and Kyle Rankin, a ‘lowly janitor’ happily scrubbing toilets on Sabaea, a remote and isolated planet.  However, Kyle Rankin is a lie. His real name is Eli Brody, and he fled his home world of Caledonia years ago.  The past that Brody desperately tried to abandon can grant Kovalic access to people and places that are otherwise off limits, even for a professional spy like Kovalic.

SOARES’s Buried in Blue Clay takes place in Blue Clay, Massachusetts— a city of 100,000, with more than its share of mysteries and urban legends (many of which are true).  Reddy Soames left when he was a kid and swore to never go back, but here he is, at the end of his rope, gathering stories for a book about Blue Clay’s legends.  It’s his last chance to get things right. Hek is a charismatic figure who will lift the veil and show Reddy the Blue Clay no one else sees.  Reddy will be drawn into his orbit, and witness things nightmares are made of.

This event is not ticketed.