A perfect storm in Lincoln City
For 23 years, October in Lincoln City has brought shorter days, wetter weather and a very good excuse to curl up with something dark and mysterious.
Driftwood Public Library’s annual Dark & Stormy Night author series returns for the next six Thursday afternoons, featuring writers whose work ranges from fantasy and horror to cozy mysteries, westerns and stories that happily refuse to fit into any single category.
This year’s series gets an early start with USA Today bestselling author Meg Shaffer on Thursday, Sept. 24.
Shaffer is the author of “The Wishing Game,” a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist, Book of the Month finalist for Book of the Year and Reader’s Digest Best Book of the Year. She followed it with the national bestseller “The Lost Story,” while her newest novel, “The Book Witch,” was released this spring.
Shaffer has a master’s degree in TV and screenwriting and teaches creative writing part time. She lives in Kentucky but spent her summer in Oregon within sight of Astoria’s famous “Goonies” house.
On Thursday, Oct. 1, things get decidedly weird with Jeff VanderMeer, author of the acclaimed Southern Reach series and Borne trilogy.
VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” won both the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards and was adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman. His Southern Reach books have been translated into more than 30 languages and were finalists for the Hugo Award.
Called “the weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker, VanderMeer has also written extensively about environmental issues and delivered talks and lectures at institutions including MIT, Columbia and Yale.
Horror takes the spotlight on Thursday, Oct. 8, with Laura Cranehill, whose debut novel, “Wife Shaped Bodies,” was released to acclaim this spring.
Cranehill lives in the Pacific Northwest with their spouse and three children. Born in Michigan and raised on a haunted peacock farm, they studied writing and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.
Their prose and poetry have appeared in “Strange Horizons,” “Vastarien,” “Uncanny” and other publications and anthologies.
Tammie Painter arrives on Thursday, Oct. 15, bringing comic mysteries populated by mythical misfits, magical mishaps and, occasionally, the Grim Reaper.
A former neuroscience lab scientist, Painter now writes humorous paranormal mysteries, fantasy whodunits, novellas and short fiction. Her newest book, “Death Takes a Holiday” pairs a very bored Grim Reaper with an elderly detective who has little patience for his nonsense.
The Thursday, Oct. 22, presenter is Angela Sanders who, before turning to fiction, investigated nuclear waste and natural resource policies, interviewing everyone from Florida Keys fishermen to Czech chemical company managers and workers inside a nuclear reactor producing weapons-grade tritium.
She now writes the bestselling Witch Way Librarian mysteries, Joanna Hayworth vintage clothing mysteries and, under the name Clover Tate, the Kite Shop mysteries. Her newest Sixth Sense mystery series debuted this year with “A Whiff of Murder.”
The series concludes on Thursday, Oct. 29, with Lincoln City author Ken Pratt, whose unlikely path to becoming a full-time writer began with seven years of writing late at night while holding down a day job.
That persistence produced “Willow Falls,” followed by “Sweethome,” launching Pratt on a career that now includes the bestselling 18-book Matt Bannister Series.
Each Thursday’s presentation begins at 4 pm at Driftwood Public Library, located at 801 SW Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City. For more information, go to driftwoodlib.org or call 541-996-1242.