VIRTUAL - March Living Read Book Club with Johnny Compton
Join us every for a ghastly good time, open to all who seek to explore the darkest regions of fiction. Our lead buyer and hopeless horror nerd Keaton curates and conducts this newest addition to our book group offerings—THE LIVING READ! Monsters, ghosts, murderers, and more await all who descend into this literary lair of horrors. And perhaps you’ll even find the authors of these nightmarish works themselves lurking among the shadows!
This month we'll be joined by author Johnny Compton.
This event will be hosted on Zoom. Click here to register.
Click here to view our main Living Read Book Club page!
This month we’ll be reading…

A terrifying Gothic thriller about grief and death and the depths of a father's love, Johnny Compton's The Spite House is a stunning debut by a horror master in the making—The Babadook meets A Head Full of Ghosts in Texas Hill Country.
Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. Having left his wife, his house, his whole life behind in Maryland, he's desperate for money—it's not easy to find steady, safe work when you can't provide references, you can't stay in one place for long, and you're paranoid that your past is creeping back up on you.
When he comes across the strange ad for the Masson House in Degener, Texas, Eric thinks they may have finally caught a lucky break. The Masson property, notorious for being one of the most haunted places in Texas, needs a caretaker of sorts. The owner is looking for proof of paranormal activity. All they need to do is stay in the house and keep a detailed record of everything that happens there. Provided the house’s horrors don’t drive them all mad, like the caretakers before them.
The job calls to Eric, not just because there's a huge payout if they can make it through, but because he wants to explore the secrets of the spite house. If it is indeed haunted, maybe it'll help him understand the uncanny power that clings to his family, driving them from town to town, making them afraid to stop running.
Johnny Compton’s (he/him) short stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, The No Sleep Podcast and many other markets. He is an HWA member and creator and host of the podcast Healthy Fears