Tomorrow night (Wednesday, October 28) at 6:30 PM, I’ll be joining a flock of spooky folks at Telegraph Hill Books in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Telegraph Hill Books is at 1501 Grant Avenue, San Francisco. Admission is free but please RSVP here.

Here’s the official announcement:

Join us for Spooky Stories Night — a community reading of ghost stories, urban legends, and tales best told after dark, featuring five extraordinary Bay Area horror and speculative fiction authors:

→ Cynthia Gómez
→ Loren Rhoads
→ Sumiko Saulson
→ Kristina Ten
→ Tamika Thompson

RSVP isn’t required, but we’d love to know you’re coming. Bring a friend, bring your curiosity, and settle in for an evening built for community, curiosity, and a little bit of a chill.

Cynthia Gómez is the author of the story collection The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, and a Tin House and VONA alumn whose short fiction has published in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies.

Loren Rhoads is the author of In the Wake of the Templars, a space opera trilogy. She’s co-author (with Brian Thomas) of the As Above, So Below books, a dark urban fantasy duet about a succubus and her angel. Her short stories have appeared in Best New Horror, Strange California, Fright Mare: Women Write Horror, Sins of the Sirens: 14 Tales of Dark Desire, and much more. Unsafe Words is the first full-length collection of her short fiction.

Sumiko Saulson is an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror whose latest novel Happiness and Other Diseases is available on Mocha Memoirs Press. Sumiko is a cartoonist, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer, editor of Black Magic Women, Scry of Lust and 100 Black Women in Horror Fiction, author of Solitude, Warmth, The Moon Cried Blood, Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, Insatiable, Ashes and Coffee, and Things That Go Bump In My Head.

Kristina Ten has written about lovers experiencing erosion, demigods attending desert music festivals, spirits lurking in the backs of bathhouses, and seals granting wishes at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Her stories appear in McSweeney’s, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, came out October 7, 2025 from Stillhouse Press.

Tamika Thompson is author of The Curse of Hester Gardens (Erewhon/Kensington), Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which is the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards WINNER for Horror, and which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying,” as well as author of Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). She served as fiction editor for Foreword INDIES Award-winning anthology, Graffiti. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Interzone, Prairie Schooner, and The New York Times, among others.