Horror

The monsters we fear most often live behind closed doors. In this chilling and deeply human conversation, Eirinie Carson, Victor Manibo, and Tamika Thompson reveal how horror seeps into family ties, domestic spaces, and generational legacies, where the home becomes both refuge and ruin. Eirinie Carson’s Bloodfire, Baby reimagines the maternal gothic through the eyes of a new mother unraveling in isolation, haunted by postpartum dread and a centuries-old specter that mirrors her buried fears. In The Villa, Once Beloved, Victor Manibo conjures a decaying ancestral estate in the Philippines, where grief, folklore, and a fractured family collide and the curse of inheritance refuses to stay buried. Tamika Thompson’s The Curse of Hester Gardens brings the haunted house to public housing, reworking the genre into a fierce meditation on systemic violence and maternal sacrifice, where every hallway hums with ghosts, both social and supernatural. Moderated by Allison Mick, whose debut novel Humboldt Cutblends eco-horror with ancestral reckoning, this panel examines how horror exposes what families hide, asking what it means to protect those we love when the true terror lives within the walls we’ve built.

This chilling and visionary conversation brings together three groundbreaking voices in contemporary horror and speculative fiction who use storytelling to interrogate history, identity, and the legacies that refuse to stay buried. Through unsettling narratives and fearless imagination, they reveal how horror becomes a vital tool for reckoning, resistance, and truth-telling.

Tananarive Due, award-winning author and scholar, is a leading force in Black horror and speculative fiction whose work draws on Black history, family, and lived experience to explore generational trauma, injustice, and survival. From the multi-award-winning The Reformatory to classics like The Good House and My Soul to Keep, Due transforms real-world horrors into powerful narratives of memory and reckoning. Stephen Graham Jones, The New York Times bestselling author and professor, reshapes contemporary horror through Indigenous perspectives that challenge colonial myths and genre conventions. In works such as The Buffalo Hunters Hunter, The Only Good Indians, and My Heart Is a Chainsaw, he interrogates violence, belonging, and cultural endurance with relentless innovation and emotional force.

Moderated by Ayize Jama-Everett, novelist and cultural thinker whose own boundary-defying work spans horror, science fiction, philosophy, and spirituality, this conversation will explore how horror functions as cultural critique, creative liberation, and a mirror to the fears societies try to bury. Join us for a compelling discussion on the power of horror to illuminate hidden histories, disrupt dominant narratives, and imagine new ways of surviving and storytelling in a haunted world.

Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland