Guests
Guests for the 2026 Festival will be announced over the next few months. Check back for updates!
Applications for Author Reading spots, Panel Pitches, and Presentations are now open. Please submit your application now!
Featured Guests
Philip Fracassi is the USA Today bestselling, Stoker and British Fantasy-nominated author of the novels Don’t Let Them Get You Down, A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, Boys in the Valley, The Third Rule of Time Travel, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, and Sarafina. Other work includes the story collections No One Is Safe!, Beneath a Pale Sky (named “Best Collection of the Year” by Rue Morgue Magazine and a finalist for the Bram Stoker award), and Behold the Void (named “Best Collection of the Year” by This Is Horror).
He is also the author of several novellas, including "Sacculina", "Shiloh", "Commodore", and "D7". His short stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Interzone, Southwest Review, and others. Philip’s books have been translated into multiple languages and have been favorably reviewed in The New York Times, LOCUS Magazine, Rue Morgue and many other magazines, blogs, and review sites. The New York Times called his work “terrifically scary.” As a screenwriter, his feature films have been distributed by Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Television, with several projects in various stages of development.
His short story, “Altar”, has been adapted by film studio A24 for a feature film, and his story, “Fail Safe” is being adapted for a feature film by Sony Pictures, with Oscar winner Brie Larson set to star. He is also the author of a children’s book, The Boy with the Blue Rose Heart, and a book of poetry, Tomorrow’s Gone. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@philipfracassi).
Over the course of a 26-year career spanning Emmy Award-winning television, cult genre cinema, and Cannes-calibre historical horror, Casey Walker has consistently done things his own way — and consistently come out ahead. His is a filmography defined not by the path of least resistance but by the conviction that the stories worth telling are the ones worth fighting for. He began his filmmaking career with the legendary Frank Oz, working on the Robert De Niro thriller The Score. His many credits include directing Emmy Award-winning children’s series Zoboomafoo, award-winning short film "The Morning After", episodes of Hulu’s The Hardy Boys and Overlord and the Underwoods, producing indie horror phenomenonsThe Void and supernatural thriller Pyewacket, and serving as the sole Executive Producer on In a Violent Nature.
For fifteen years, Walker refused to abandon Ithaqua. A $10 million historical horror set in the winter of 1821 at the fur trade outpost that now bears the name Thunder Bay, where he grew up. The film is shot in English, French, and Ojibwe/Cree, produced in active partnership with the Fort William First Nation on their ancestral lands, and is the first title to relaunch the legendary Hammer Films label under Executive Producer John Gore, multi-award-winning Broadway producer and billionaire. While awaiting Ithaqua’s post-production, Walker directed Home Bodies, produced alongside Karen Harnish (Sleeping Giant, Infinity Pool). Walker resides in the Muskoka region of Ontario with his wife, two dogs, and an impressive collection of broken motorcycles.
Guests
In 1998 Scott Glancy left a perfectly functional career as an attorney to join up with the role-playing game publisher Pagan Publishing, the nerd equivalent of running away to join the Foreign Legion. Today Scott is the man in charge of Pagan Publishing (much in the same sense that the last surviving legionnaire can be said to be in command of Fort Zinderhoff). Pagan’s most recent project is “Horrors of War,” an anthology of scenarios set during the Great War for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. Scott is a contributing author on the award-winning Delta Green series of Call of Cthulhu rpg supplements and has had Lovecraftian fiction published in several short story collections including the recent "Book of Cthulhu II," "Shotguns v. Cthulhu," and the upcoming “Swords v. Cthulhu.” You can hear his recorded games sessions on Role-Playing Public Radio, and listen to him bloviate on the Unspeakable Podcast and Podcast at Ground Zero.
Cody Goodfellow has written ten novels and five collections of short stories, and has won three Wonderland Book Awards. His comics work has been featured in Mystery Meat, Creepy, Slow Death Zero and Skin Crawl. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous short films, TV shows, music videos by Anthrax and Beck, and a Days Inn commercial. He wrote, co-produced and scored the Lovecraftian hygiene films "Baby Got Bass" and "Stay At Home Dad," which can be viewed on YouTube.
Kenneth Hite has designed, written, or co-authored 100+ roleplaying works, including Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London, The Dracula Dossier, the Delta Green RPG, Night’s Black Agents, The Fall of Delta Green, and Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. His other works include the two-volume Tour de Lovecraft, Cthulhu 101, The Cthulhu Wars for Osprey, the “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales, an annotated edition of Chambers’ The King in Yellow, and four Lovecraftian children’s books. Half of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast and an Artistic Associate at Chicago’s WildClaw Theatre, he lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and his non-Lovecraftian wife, Sheila.
Sean is a producer, actor, director and writer with the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society which he runs with his nefarious colleague, Andrew Leman. He was intimately involved in the creation of the motion pictures The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, nineteen episodes of Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, and many other Lovecraftian projects. With his work at the HPLHS, he's created many other Lovecraftian entertainments. Sean also produces and directs live theatre in Los Angeles. He plays ice hockey and has four chinchillas.
Dominique Lamssies is a writer local to Portland, Oregon and is the head necromancer at The House Of Silent Graves, where she makes monsters for people to hug. She strives constantly to have every story she writes involve some form of dead person and sound like it was written a hundred years ago. Her work has been featured in The Horror Zine, Non Binary Review, and Women in Horror Annual. She hopes to someday write a story worthy of having Peter Cushing star in the movie version, were he still with us. She always wants to talk about weird movies and hopes Ed Wood blesses your day.
Evan J. Peterson is a novelist, game writer, monsterologist, and poet. His first novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, won the Small Spec Book Award for fantasy fiction. His newest RPG is Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION (Choice of Games). Other works include Drag Star!, the world’s first drag performer RPG; METAFLESH: Poems In the Voices of the Monster; and The Road to Innsmouth: Arkham Horror. His writing has appeared in Weird Tales, PseudoPod, Queers Destroy Horror, and Nightmare Magazine. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
Mike Dalager is a hybrid mish-mash of talents and nationalities, born and raised at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A childhood spent half on land and half at sea in the Pacific Ocean raises questions of possible cohabitation with Deep Ones. This link to the sea continues today, as he serves the Nation as a member of the Coast Guard Reserve. For the past ten years, Mike has collaborated and contributed to the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's mission of creating solid Lovecraftian content, appearing in The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, and producing conceptual Mythos music as Ogham Waite in "Live at the Gilman House Lounge", and as Executive Producer of "Dreams in the Witch House: A Lovecraftian Rock Opera."