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San Antonio Book Festival - Richard Z. Santos
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Book Festival Author

Richard Z. Santos

Richard Z. Santos’s debut novel, Trust Me, was a finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards and was named one of the best debuts of the year by CrimeReads. He is the Executive Director of Austin Bat Cave, an organization that provides creative writing workshops to students in under-resourced areas. He is a former Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle and has judged contests for the Kirkus Prize, the National Endowment for the Arts, and many more. Recent work can be found in Austin Noir, Lone Stars Rising, Texas Monthly, CrimeReads, and more. In a previous career, he taught high school English and Social Studies and before that he worked for some of the nation’s top political campaigns, consulting firms, and labor unions. He is the editor of the collection A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories. 

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Book by Richard Z. Santos

  • A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories by Richard Z. Santos

    A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories

    This riveting collection of horror stories—and four poems—contains a wide range of styles, themes and authors. Creepy creatures roam the pages, including La Llorona and the Chupacabras in fresh takes on Latin American lore, as well as ghosts, zombies and shadow selves. Migrants continue to pass through Rancho Altamira where Esteban’s family has lived for generations, but now there are two types: the living and the dead. A young man returns repeatedly to the scary portal down which his buddy disappeared. A woman is relieved to receive multiple calls from her cousin following Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, but she is stunned to later learn her prima died the first night of the storm! There’s plenty of blood and gore in some stories, while others are mysterious and suspenseful.

    In his introduction, editor Richard Z. Santos writes it is no surprise these stories are brilliant and terrifying, given cartel violence, a history of CIA-backed dictatorships in Latin America, increasingly scary rhetoric from American politicians, decades of institutionalized racism and the demonization of Latinos in the media. “After all,” he says, “we are the faceless horde, invading zombies hellbent on upturning the world and replacing it with something foreign, accented and impossibly different.”

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