Fright Night

An Evening of Terrifying Tales

Local authors Alex Jennings, Ariadne Blayde, and Marita Woywod Crandle read their most macabre manuscripts at this special Halloween event. Costumes encouraged. Light refreshments served.

Dress up in your in your most ghoulish garb and get into the Halloween spirit at this spooky storytelling event featuring three local authors and two-sentence horror stories written by Library patrons. Submit your two-sentence story via Biblioboard.

Enjoy creepy curiosities including the following:

• Readings of terrifying tales by Alex Jennings, Ariadne Blayde, and Marita Woywod Crandle
• Raffle with a chance to win a deck of Tarot cards
• Devilish delicacies
• Book sale and signing with the authors

Alex Jennings is a writer, editor, teacher, and poet. He is the Program Director of DreamFoundry’s Con or Bust and pens a regular speculative poetry review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “Chapter and Verse.” His writing has appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Electric Velocipede, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, New Suns, and Current Affairs, among others. His debut novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves, is set in a fantastical version of New Orleans in which a battle for the city's soul brews between two young mages, a vengeful wraith, and one powerful song.

Ariadne Blayde is a playwright and fiction writer. Her play “The Other Room” won the VSA Playwright Discovery Award and has been produced hundreds of times around the world. Her plays have been shortlisted by Lark Playwright’s Week, The Tennessee Williams Festival, and more, and her fiction has been published in Parhelion Literary Magazine, the Fountain Magazine, and various anthologies. Ash Tuesday, her debut novel, weaves French Quarter folklore with with lives of the eccentric tour guides who tell those stories for a living. Ariadne moonlights as a ghost tour guide and jazz singer in New Orleans.

Marita Woywod Crandle has been writing and storytelling since she was a little girl. She has always had a fancy for the magical side of life, making New Orleans a perfect match for this German transplant. Her books include New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend, Johnny White’s Sports Bar, and Josie Arlington’s Storyville: The Life and Times of a New Orleans Madam. Her newest book, Mosquito – Southern Vampires, which was originally released one chapter at a time as a Penny Dreadful, is a melting pot of the supernatural.

Sponsored by the Friends of the New Orleans Public Library.

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