Friday, December 13, 2024 – 5:00-6:30 PM EDT
Price: Free
Registration: Seating is limited; please call to reserve your spot: 843-379-7025.
Venue: Pat Conroy Literary Center | 601 Bladen St., Beaufort
Website: Facebook Event Page
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with debut novelist Andrew K. Clark, author of Where Dark Things Grow, in conversation with Dana Ridenour, author of the Lexie Montgomery Series, on Friday, December 13, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Books will be available for sale and signing. Seating is limited: please reserve in advance to attend this free author event: 843-379-7025.
About Where Dark Things Grow
Fifteen-year-old Leo is watching the world crumble. His father is missing, and his mother is slipping into madness as she cares for Leo, his sick sister Goldfish, and two useless brothers. Relatives are no help, and the church folk have turned their backs in the middle of the Great Depression.
When he discovers an enchanted wulver from ancient folklore that will do his bidding, he decides to settle old scores. Revenge is sweet, but Leo soon learns he can’t control what he’s unleashed. It takes his spitfire best friend Lilyfax to help Leo overcome his anger and try to escape the wulver’s evil. As they search for his father, Leo, Lilyfax, and friends are pursued by dark forces and pulled into a rescue effort to find and save trafficked girls rumored to have been taken by the mysterious Blue Man.
Featuring elements of horror, folklore, and magical realism, Where Dark Things Grow is a dark bildungsroman set squarely in the place and culture of the 1930s Southern Appalachian Mountains.
“As haunting as all fireside stories should be. Where Dark Things Grow will make you sleep with the lights on.”—Jason Mott, winner of the National Book Award, and author of Hell of a Book
“Andrew K. Clark’s Where Dark Things Grow, is a page-turning epic of gothic adventure, full of wildly imagined creatures and black magic, propulsive, deeply felt, and wonderful. A marvel of a book.”—Tessa Fontaine, author of The Red Grove and The Electric Woman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Alexander, North Carolina, outside of Asheville where he now resides. His first full-length collection of poetry, Jesus in the Trailer, was short-listed for the Able Muse Book Award.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Coffin Bell Journal, The Journal of American Poetry, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, fall/lines, The Wrath Bearing Tree and many others. Clark earned his a B.A. in English and M.B.A. from Georgia Southern University, and an M.F.A. from Converse College.
Where Dark Things Grow is his debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Dana Ridenour is the award-winning author of the Lexie Montgomery FBI Series: Behind the Mask, Beyond the Cabin, and Below the Radar. Ridenour is a retired FBI special agent who spent most of her career as an undercover operative. She now lives and writes in the South Carolina lowcountry.
