About this Event
Join us on Friday, October 30th from 6-7pm as we host Joshua Rex & Christa Carmen in conversation to discuss the art of horror writing.
During this event, Joshua will be performing "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven", and afterward, Christa and Joshua will be reading "Annabel Lee" together.
After the performances, they will be in discussion, talking about the art of horror fiction as well as their respective book, The Black Recluse and How to Fake a Haunting.
Signed copies of both books will be available for purchase.
About The Black Recluse:
The Black Recluse is an assemblage of letters, program guides, stories, scripts, historical analyses, legal papers, scholarly chapters, journal entries, and other documents that combine to tell the story of Amelia Whitehearse, a woman who recorded the haunting and horrific experiences of her life in Victorian America in nine pseudo-autobiographical stories collected posthumously as The Hooded Cradle and Other Tales. Narrated in part by Thomas Lockland, Whitehearse’s primary biographer, The Black Recluse follows his path of obsession with the author and details his steady decent into her unsettling pathology. When Lockland learns of a potential tenth story hidden somewhere in Whitehearse’s Gothic Revival house museum that may explain the mystery of her disappearance in 1889, he ventures to her hometown of Chandler in an attempt to answer this and the central question threaded through all of the texts: Was Amelia Whitehearse in fact the daughter of Death?
Praise for Joshua Rex
“I love to read Josh Rex. He’s the poet’s novelist. Dark, funny, mysterious–Josh creates pages that are a joy to get lost in. I would lavish more praise on him if I weren’t so jealous of his writing.”
– NY Times Best-Selling Novelist THOMAS LENNON
“One of the dynamic young luminaries of weird fiction. There are very few writers about whom one can say that they are a pleasure to read regardless of subject-matter, but Joshua Rex is one of them. There is a sheer intelligence to his writing that is highly impressive. He wields a prose style of admirable fluency, elegance, and emotive power, and his weird conceptions are strikingly original and vital.”
– S. T. JOSHI
“A fantastic new talent with a deep appreciation of history, an eye for the telling metaphor and above all a flair for storytelling.”
– SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD-WINNER ALISON LITTLEWOOD
About 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.
Lainey Taylor is being pushed to the brink by her alcoholic husband, Callum. Prone to hallucinations and erratic behavior, it’s only a matter of time before he puts Lainey’s life—and that of their daughter, Beatrix—in jeopardy. A divorce and full custody is out of the question. In Callum’s words: Over my dead body.
Lainey’s sympathetic friend Adelaide has a wild solution. They’ll stage a haunting so convincing it will drive Callum out of Lainey’s life for good. Nothing too over the top: strange smells, noises in the walls, and flies unleashed along the windowsills. It could work. Considering Callum’s alcohol-induced night terrors, he’s already close to broken. With each new scare, Lainey is closer to seeing the haunting through to its bitter, freeing end.
But in a house filled with so much rage, resentment, and fear, is it any wonder that Lainey and Adelaide’s plan goes horribly wrong? As their fake haunting spirals into something no one can control, Lainey discovers that the only way out of this frightening trap is to join forces with Callum, or die trying.
About the authors:
Joshua Rex is an historian of Victorian America and the author of eight books of speculative fiction, including the collection Haunted Victorian America: Ghost Stories, and his latest novel, The Black Recluse. He serves as historian at a presidential library and museum, and as a walking tour educator for the Rhode Island Historical Society. In addition, he is the owner and operator of “H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence – A Walking Tour,” and gives dramatic readings of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Nightscript, Pseudopod, Tales to Terrify, Chthonic Matter, and others. In 2026, he was awarded the Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Award for Weird Fiction at Necronomicon. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, How to Fake a Haunting, and the forthcoming Threshing Rock, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated novelette, "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell," and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australasian Shadows- and Ditmar Awards-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, where she now teaches creative writing.
Event venue & nearby stays
Symposium Books, 240 Westminster Street, Providence, United States
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