Dear Librarian,
In my heart, there’s one place on earth that represents the platonic ideal of the local public library: the Nassau Free Library in the village of Nassau, NY (population one thousand or so). My grandmother volunteered there before I was born – there’s a bench by the back door with her name on it – and my mother volunteers there now. Over the years it’s changed and kept up with the times, but it still smells the same as it did when I was a little girl and thrilled to be able to exercise the incredible power of my new library card. Some of my earliest reading memories are wrapped up with the specific smell and feel of that library: settled into a little chair in the kid’s section to read, flipping through the card catalogue, browsing through the shelves to discover something new to take home. The library, to me, was two magical things at the same time: the safest and coziest place on earth with a thousand adventures snuggled up inside of it. I think I was longing for both of those things – a sense of safety and the possibility of adventure – back in the spring of 2020, when, during peak lockdown, I binged a bunch of episodes of Murder She Wrote, and started to wonder, “Why on earth is this cute little town the scene of so many weird homicides?”
The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is my attempt to answer that question. It stars Sherry Pinkwhistle, a sixty-something librarian (whose daily work life may be suspiciously lacking in ordinary library tasks) with a knack for solving murders. At first, being an accomplished local amateur sleuth feels perfectly normal to Sherry, until she slowly comes to realize that there’s something very wicked going on in the charming little village of Winesap. Pretty soon all hell (or at least a little bit of hell, if you believe in that sort of thing) breaks loose. The Sheriff is talking in someone else’s voice, pictures are screaming, and Sherry’s fat orange cat keeps insisting that he’s a famous Tudor politician. Sherry has to enlist the help of an anxious priest, a skeptical psychologist, and a not-excessively-merry widow to help her crack the case before any other bodies turn up. It’s a little Agatha Christie with a splash of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a dash of silly jokes and meta genre commentary, and a dollop of Upstate New York coziness on top. I wanted it to be the kind of not-too-scary spooky season treat that will pair perfectly with some hot tea, rain against the window, and an oversized sweater this fall. I hope that you’ll have as much fun reading as I did writing it.
Sincerely,
C.M. Waggoner
