The astronomical fall began last week with the dawn of the autumnal equinox. But the cloud cover says otherwise, as the parching weather still continues to torment New Yorkers. While the leaves are procrastinating the senescence, fall flavors and genres have already started filling menus and “to be read” (TBR) lists with pumpkin spice and spooky reads.
New York City is home to 122 independent bookstores — the most in the country. In the age of doomscrolling and e-commerce, walking into a neighborhood shop for a new read is a rare but much-needed experience.
This autumn, a new arrival in Williamsburg is bringing chills with it. On Grand Street, Twisted Spine — a horror bookstore “straight from the grave” — opened Sept. 6. It’s billed as the city’s first horror-only bookstore, dreamed up by co-owners Jason Mellow and Lauren Komer.
Mellow is a full-time musician. Komer works as a health specialist for the National Institute on Aging.
The story begins when Komer was pursuing her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Cornell, often spending late nights in the lab running experiments. To pass the time, she picked up a hobby: listening to horror podcasts. That pastime led the doctoral student down a rabbit hole of horror literature, and soon she and her partner, Mellow, were scouring the city for a solid selection of horror books.
“To our surprise, we couldn’t find much, as most bookstores only had a few shelves, or the horror genre was often mixed with suspense and thriller books,” Mellow said. “So at that time, we joked about starting a horror bookstore as a fun thing to do on the side.”
What began as a joke turned into a year of planning and hosting pop-up events across the city last fall. They connected with community groups like the Brooklyn Horror Society, and a few hundred people showed up for their author events — all of which sold out.
“It was a huge success, and we realized from the first day itself that there is a strong hunger for horror books in New Yorkers. It got to the point where we were getting emails from authors and publishing agents requesting to do events, and we explained that we didn’t have a physical space to do it,” Mellow said.
Things snowballed from there, the two said, as the growing demand for horror fiction became clear. Mellow and Komer had originally planned to open a brick-and-mortar shop in four to five years, saving money from their full-time jobs. Crowdfunding wasn’t part of the plan.
But the success of the pop-ups — combined with the economic climate — pushed them to accelerate. They launched a Kickstarter campaign to tackle the financial challenges of opening a new business in New York, from signing a lease to building out the space and covering inventory costs.
Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform launched in 2009, was built to bring creative projects in art, music and games to life with financial support. Unlike traditional investment models, it doesn’t offer equity, interest or returns to backers. Instead, contributors receive rewards, from exclusive merchandise to copies of the product, in exchange for their support.
Since its start, more than $400 million has been raised for publishing projects, making it the fifth-most funded category after games, technology, design and film and video. A similar model helped launch Lofty Pigeon Bookstore in Kensington in September 2023.
Mellow and Komer combined their Kickstarter campaign with other financing, including community loans, personal savings and lines of credit.
“It’s always a bit nerve-racking to ask anyone for money especially, due to the economic concerns these days, so we didn’t know what to expect so, going forward kept our expectations tempered,” Mellow said. “With the help of the Kickstarter community, we were able to surpass our goal of raising $25,000 in a week, collecting a little more than $42,000 dollars to cover the opening costs of the brick-and-mortar launch. The support from the crowdfunding campaign was truly humbling as there were people contributing from all around the country and authors donating books for the initiative. We finished the crowdfunding campaign with a fundraising trivia night that was held in-person at a bar in Brooklyn.”
Independent bookstores have spent the last 25 years fighting the internet age, the rise of e-commerce and the dominance of social media. While bookstores must sell books at publisher-set prices, online retailers can undercut them, creating margins that physical shops can’t match. Still, independent bookstores have seen a resurgence in recent years, particularly since the pandemic.
“What Amazon will never be able to do is offer any sort of sense of belongingness in a physical realm of community,” Mellow added. “When you come to Twisted spines or any other independent bookstore, the books here are curated by real people not AI, who can give you TBR recommendations based on your personal interests and not based on five star anonymous reviews.”
The store offers more than horror fiction. Its café serves spooky treats and coffee in skull mugs, while its merchandise reflects collaborations with friends and local artists.
“Our logo T-shirt was designed by a friend of Lauren’s, and the skull T-shirt and postcards were designed by my childhood best friend. We are lucky to have people in our lives who are creative and are willing to come together and share their talents with us,” Mellow said.
But like many small businesses, Twisted Spine has also felt the sting of recent U.S. tariffs.
“It definitely impacted us because there were several goods that we imported from abroad ahead of the launch,” Mellow said — the store’s skull mugs are made in Thailand, its coffee machine and equipment come from Italy and the coffee beans are imported from Columbia. “There is a small business based in Montreal that has been unable to send to us the haunted house shaped candles due to these trade tensions. The only thing that is spared from tariffs are the actual books, which are mainly made in America.”
Twisted Spine has a packed October lineup that includes author events, spooky story time for children in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, community horror movie nights and a silent book club that encourages screen-free reading and discussion. The owners say nothing like it exists in New York — and they’re ready to carve out a space for horror readership in the city this fall.
