About

• We have NO membership fees.
• All club activity for The HOWL Society takes place on Discord.
• Each month, club members vote on which horror titles that will be read in the following month.
• Members may be invited to nominate books, on a rotating basis.
• The club reads approximately one book per week. Members obtain their own copies of physical books, ebooks, or audiobooks, according to their preference.
• Physical copies can be purchased through our Bookshop.org affiliate storefront, which pays a 10% commission to The HOWL Society, and gives a matching 10% to independent bookstores. The HOWL Society uses these funds for website maintenance and publishing costs.
• Members are never expected to read every title.
• Each chosen book is apportioned into reading sections and assigned to individual discussion locations on the discord server.
• Discussions for each section typically initiate on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 12:00pm EST.
• During discussion, members must use spoiler tags to discuss plot points and their impressions. This ensures a safe discussion for those who choose to read at their own pace.
• At the end of each discussion, members may be invited to participate in a survey to share a personal blurb which may later appear in the official HOWL Society review.

On April 5th, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, a young woman named Emily—hereafter referred to as “The Sleeping Queen”—posted on /r/HorrorLit, a subforum of Reddit, asking whether anyone wanted to start a “quarantine book club” that would be hosted on Discord. Within 24 hours, the brave Redditors who heeded her call joined the server and voted on the first book: The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. 

The initial conversations were chaotic, spread as they were among dozens of time zones with no clear rules as to pacing or spoilers. The Sleeping Queen, in her wisdom, elected one among the many to be her fellow admin: the Lord Mordi, who came to be known as “THOT Father.” Following the sudden disappearance of The Sleeping Queen, THOT Father rose to power and restructured the server into the organized club now known as “HOWLS,” or the Horror-Obsessed Writing and Literature Society.