Author Event! Joshua Rex in conversation with Christa Carmen

Joshua Rex returns to Symposium Books to discuss his latest horror novel, "The Black Recluse" Join us on Friday, October 30th from 6-7pm as we host Joshua Rex in conversation with Christa Carmen to discuss his latest novel, The Black Recluse. Signed copies of the book will be available. About the book: The Black Recluse is an assemblage of letters, program guides, stories, scripts, historical analyses, legal papers, scholarly chapters, journal entries, and other documents that combine to tell the story of Amelia Whitehearse, a woman who recorded the haunting and horrific experiences of her life in Victorian America in nine pseudo-autobiographical stories collected posthumously as The Hooded Cradle and Other Tales. Narrated in part by Thomas Lockland, Whitehearse’s primary biographer, The Black Recluse follows his path of obsession with the author and details his steady decent into her unsettling pathology. When Lockland learns of a potential tenth story hidden somewhere in Whitehearse’s Gothic Revival house museum that may explain the mystery of her disappearance in 1889, he ventures to her hometown of Chandler in an attempt to answer this and the central question threaded through all of the texts: Was Amelia Whitehearse in fact the daughter of Death? Praise for Joshua Rex “I love to read Josh Rex. He’s the poet’s novelist. Dark, funny, mysterious–Josh creates pages that are a joy to get lost in. I would lavish more praise on him if I weren’t so jealous of his writing.” – NY Times Best-Selling Novelist THOMAS LENNON “One of the dynamic young luminaries of weird fiction. There are very few writers about whom one can say that they are a pleasure to read regardless of subject-matter, but Joshua Rex is one of them. There is a sheer intelligence to his writing that is highly impressive. He wields a prose style of admirable fluency, elegance, and emotive power, and his weird conceptions are strikingly original and vital.” – S. T. JOSHI “A fantastic new talent with a deep appreciation of history, an eye for the telling metaphor and above all a flair for storytelling.” – SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD-WINNER ALISON LITTLEWOOD About the author: Joshua Rex is an historian of Victorian America and the author of eight books of speculative fiction, including the collection Haunted Victorian America: Ghost Stories, and his latest novel, The Black Recluse. He serves as historian at a presidential library and museum, and as a walking tour educator for the Rhode Island Historical Society. In addition, he is the owner and operator of “H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence – A Walking Tour,” and gives dramatic readings of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Nightscript, Pseudopod, Tales to Terrify, Chthonic Matter, and others. In 2026, he was awarded the Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Award for Weird Fiction at Necronomicon. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. About the moderator: Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, How to Fake a Haunting, and the forthcoming Threshing Rock, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated novelette, "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell," and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australasian Shadows- and Ditmar Awards-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, where she now teaches creative writing.