HORRORPALOOZA at AFTER-WORDS BOOKSTORE!

Halloween is coming and the spooky season is here! Get in the mood by joining four of Chicago’s creepiest authors. Thrill to James Kennedy’s Lynchian weirdness in his small-town horror novel "Bride of the Tornado"—Shiver at Cynthia Pelayo’s occult Chicago underworld in "The Shoemaker’s Magician"—Learn true Chicago paranormal lore from our city’s foremost ghost historian Adam Selzer—And get lost in the lush and decadent magic of 18th-century Venice in Julia Fine’s "Maddalena and the Dark"! The evening will also feature weird short horror movies and sinister refreshments. A perfect way to spend your pre-Halloween Sunday! JULIA FINE is the author of "The Upstairs House," winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, and "What Should Be Wild," which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior First Novel. Her third novel, "Maddalena and the Dark," came out from Flatiron in June 2023 and was named a Best Book of the Summer by the Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, and more. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her family. https://www.julia-fine.com ADAM SELZER is an author, historian, and tour guide who writes about dead people, graveyards, and stuff. He used to write YA novels; now he mostly does nonfiction. His latest is "Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols and Secrets," and his most popular is "HH Holmes: The True Story of the White City Devil." He reads a lot of old ladies’ diaries and pamphlets in which our founding weirdoes challenge each other to duels. https://adamchicago.com/ CYNTHIA PELAYO is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. Pelayo writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of "Loteria," "Santa Muerte," "The Missing," "Poems of My Night," "Into the Forest and All the Way Through," "Children of Chicago," "Crime Scene," and "The Shoemaker’s Magician," as well as dozens of standalone short stories and poems. https://cinapelayo.com JAMES KENNEDY is the author of the new horror thriller "Bride of the Tornado." His previous books include the sci-fi novel "Dare To Know," which was named by the Times Saturday Review as their Best Sci-Fi Book of 2021, and the YA fantasy "The Order of Odd-Fish." James is also the founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds. He also hosts the Secrets of Story podcast with Matt Bird. https://jameskennedy.com

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