About this Event
Mike will be in conversation with fellow Bay Area author Yangsze Choo.
This event will feature a conversation between these two writers, a reading from the novel, and an audience Q&A so you can have your burning questions answered.
More about the book: In this eerie supernatural horror novel, two cousins must decide the fate of their childhood home—but the building has other plans.
When Rosella Li and her estranged cousin, Gabe, inherit the last crumbling Victorian in a downtown San Jose block, developers hope to finish their gentrification push. Rosella is happy to see it go—her father, Ming, always cared more for the building and its tenants than her—but Gabe wants to cling on, mourning both his childhood home and the man who quietly raised him.
Despite their squabbling, the choice may not be theirs; 43 Santo Domingo Street won’t be relinquished so easily. Indeed, when the cousins arrive to sign it away, they unearth boxes buried in its walls, revealing the desperate history Ming hid for decades, including what really happened to Rosella’s mother. Then, as bulldozers circle, a malevolence makes itself known.
Soon, the lies that spanned family and cultures finally surface and, with them, spirits hellbent on one thing: No one leaves Santo Domingo Street.
New York Times–bestselling author Mike Chen’s The Haunting of Santo Domingo Street is a chilling exploration of the consequences of erasing the past that will have readers grappling with the cost of not only progress . . . but also forgetting.
“Poignant and timely yet terrifying, The Haunting of Santo Domingo Street is that rare haunted house story that reaches beyond brick and mortar, beyond heart and soul, to explore the echoes of trauma baked into the immigrant experience and the ways adults continue to be trapped by the pain of childhood.” —Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Violence and Bloom
“The most terrifying type of haunting is one a family inflicts on itself. Mike Chen’s ghost story is crafted with buried records and a melody a daughter has been singing her entire life. A tender but devastating story about the specters we inherit. Beautiful, luminous, and deeply heartbreaking.” —Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Something Followed Us Home
“An extraordinary tale of a haunted family in a haunted building and their struggles to make peace with their past while making space for themselves in a country that wasn’t always welcoming. This isn’t just another ghost story; it’s a story of immigrants who’ve seen their neighborhood stripped for parts by gentrification, and before the last building comes down for good, its grieving owners must decide what to carry away—and what to leave behind.” —Cherie Priest, award-winning author of The Drowning House
“Delivers all the uncanniness of a classic haunted house story while layering family tension, generational trauma, and emotional insight. Mike Chen shines as he unpacks fraught relationships and unspools a ghostly mystery.” —Rowenna Miller, author of The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill
Mike Chen is the New York Times–bestselling author of the genre-defying novels Here and Now and Then, Light Years from Home, and A Quantum Love Story, among others. He has also published stories set in the worlds of Star Wars, Marvel, Star Trek, and Critical Role, and contributed to the award-winning middle-grade anthology You Are Here: Connecting Flights. His original work has been nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award, a Compton Crook Award, the British Science Fantasy Association Award for Best Novel, and a CALIBA Golden Poppy Award.
Chen has been featured on NPR and in USA Today, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Scientific American. He has also written about geek culture for websites such as Nerdist, the Mary Sue, and StarTrek.com, and in a previous life, he covered the NHL. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, daughter, and many rescue animals.
Yangsze Choo is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghost Bride (now a Netflix Original series) and The Night Tiger, a Reese’s Book Club Pick, and a Big Jubilee Read selection for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. She lives in California with her family and loves to eat and read (often at the same time). The Fox Wife and all previous novels would not have been possible without large quantities of dark chocolate.
Event venue & nearby stays
Books Inc. Palo Alto, 74 Town & Country Village, Palo Alto, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.