Celebrate Horror and Test Drive Some New Authors

 Last year, as the pandemic shut downs were in full force, Horror reviewer and advocate Sadie Hartmann was looking for a way to pick up her own spirits as she spent her birthday in quarantine. She had spent the 2 months previous to her birthday reading to distract herself from her own anxiety and wanted to combine her love of horror, thankfulness for the comfort those books brought her, and an online celebration into one event. And thus we all got-- Celebrate Horror 2020-- a series of videos featuring authors reading from their own works 

Sadie has an excellent article about how Celebrate Horror 2020 was born and how she expanded it in 2021 here on LitReactor.

This year for 2021, she did not limit herself to authors she had read before; in fact, she didn't even limit herself to Horror only. There are authors that span the entirety of the genre and even into horror adjacent genres as well as authors that span the full breadth of personal identity. The entire event expanded in every way. And it is still free!

I am here today to encourage all of you library workers to check out this year's event which began early this morning and is available on demand now and into the future on the Night Worms YouTube Channel.

But I would like to extend a special invitation those of you who are a bit scared of horror yourselves.

This online series of author readings is a great collection development tool. You can read a review of works by the author and then listen to them read from their own work to get a sense of how they write. IT is also a safe way for those who think horror is too scary but want to be able to suggest it to patrons, to give it a try.

You can even take it one step further and add a link to the specific videos of the authors reading to their author record in your catalogs. That would be awesome because then your patrons could try them out too. 

I hope many of my readers give the Celebrate Horror 2021 a try over this holiday weekend, but also going forward since the videos don't have an expiration date.

Below is the list of authors appearing; graphics from the LitReactor article.