One day last week, two customers said the same thing: the dark came early. And so it does. By October the lights are on before dinner, the rain is at last back, and the question becomes what to do with all these evenings.

Quite a lot. Lyanda Lynn Haupt joins us next Wednesday at the Dungeness River Nature Center; Crab Fest and then the Fungi Festival take the waterfront; on the 24th, forty tables of Northwest writers fill Field Hall for the Port Angeles Book Fest, and the Fall Crawl runs downtown after dark. Two nights later we'll be here very late indeed for the midnight release of the sixth A Court of Thorns and Roses book. And on Halloween, as always, we're giving away books instead of candy.

The shelves have adjusted to the hour too: skeletons, bats, and some of the biggest novels of the fall. If the rain keeps up, the chanterelles will have their say. The dark came early. We brought books.

Saturday, October 24 · 1 to 4 p.m. · Field Arts & Events Hall · free

Last month we promised names.

Field Hall fills up with writers: about forty tables of authors, small presses and booksellers from around the Northwest, mystery to poetry, the people who wrote the books sitting right there and hoping you'll ask them something.

Nellie Bridge, Clallam County's poet laureate, opens the afternoon in the lobby. In the theater, Gregg Olsen talks about two of Washington's notorious women: Linda Hazzard of his Starvation Heights, and Lyda Trueblood, the subject of his new Ordinary Wife, written with his daughter Morgan. It's out on the 27th; we'll have it on our table three days early, and Gregg will sign. Then Alice Derry hosts eight writers from this end of the Peninsula, Tim McNulty among them, and we convene a panel on how a book actually gets published.

Find our table just inside the front door, with books by Peninsula writers who don't have one of their own.

It's free, all afternoon. The one thing we'd ask is that you RSVP. Ten seconds, and it tells the people setting up the room how many chairs to put out.

Session times go up on Field Hall's page once they're set. When the doors close at four, stay downtown: the Fall Crawl starts at five, and we'll be open.

Next Wednesday: Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Wednesday, October 7 · 6:00 to 7:30 · Dungeness River Nature Center, Sequim · free

We've been talking about Among the Birds since August, so this is the short version: she's here next week. Lyanda Lynn Haupt will be in the Rainshadow Room with the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society, showing Justin Gibbens's watercolors from the book and we have a conversation together. Signing to follow. Audubon will have a table at the door if you've been meaning to join.

Free and open to everyone. The room has a limit, so an RSVP helps.

The rain is back and the chanterelles with it. The Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival takes the waterfront October 17 and 18, with a keynote dinner at Field Hall the night before.

For the pack: Daniel Winkler's folding Field Guide to Edible Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest, newly revised. Winkler co-leads Sunday's foray, so you might as well graduate to his Fruits of the Forest. For the shelf: Michael Beug's Mushrooms of Cascadia, the regional key. For the comfy chair: Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, there's no better way to understand fungi.

If you only buy one: David Arora's All That the Rain Promises and More: pocket-sized, funny, and read cover to cover, which you can't say of many field guides.

Find our table at the festival for the full guide and a voucher, then bring it up to the store, where the mushroom books (and more) await.

Oct 4–10 · Banned Books Week.

Wed, Oct 7, 6:00 · Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Among the Birds, with Olympic Peninsula Audubon · Dungeness River Nature Center

Oct 9–11 · Dungeness Crab Festival · City Pier

Sat, Oct 10 · Last day for used-book trade-ins until after the new year. The holidays take all the time, staff and shelf space we have. If you've been saving up a box, bring it in by the 10th.

Oct 17–18 · Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival · the waterfront and in the store

Sat, Oct 24, 1–4 · Port Angeles Book Fest · Field Hall · free

Sat, Oct 24, 5–8 · Fall Crawl · downtown

Mon, Oct 26, midnight · A Court of Splintered Harmony release · the store

Sat, Oct 31 · Halloween book giveaway · the store

Staff Picks

Also new this month: Music Against the Night — Yiyun Li (Oct 13), the Dublin prodigy who invented the nocturne and the orphan from French India he is fated to marry; Every Story Is a Love Story — Imbolo Mbue (Oct 6), three years after his wife died in a car accident, a widower agrees to meet the woman who was driving; The Brightness — Chad Harbach (Oct 27), back to Westish College fifteen years after The Art of Fielding; and The Spirits — Bonnie Jo Campbell (Oct 13), a Michigan farmhouse on Christmas Eve, a dreaded family dinner and one unexpected guest.

Wendell Berry, 1934–2026

Wendell Berry died on August 31, at home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. One more book is coming: Dispatches from Rural America (Counterpoint, October 27, $27), a new collection of essays on farming and the places industrial agriculture left behind, arriving close to fifty years after The Unsettling of America. His last Port William novel, Marce Catlett, is out in paperback this month (see New in Paperback, below).

The Genre Shelf: Halloween Edition

More for the dark: Solace House — Will Maclean (Oct 13), a summer job clearing out a derelict Victorian mansion and the dead owner's coded journals; Find Me Where It Ends — Cassandra Khaw (Oct 6), a 144-page novella in which death arrives as a black dog and Antigone lets it in; and The Sixth Faction — Veronica Roth (Oct 6), the Divergent choosing ceremony run again with a different outcome, in a deluxe edition with designed edges and a foiled case.

On the science fiction and fantasy side: V. E. Schwab finishes the Villains trilogy with Victorious (Oct 6); Annalee Newitz sends a slime-mold graduate student to Pompeii, before the eruption, in A Wall Is Also a Road (Oct 6); Tad Williams opens a new Osten Ard trilogy with The Splintered Sun (Oct 6); and Becky Chambers is back with As You Wake, Break the Shell (Oct 13), about a pilot bonded to a living ship.

New and Notable: Nature

Also on the nature table: The Forest Year — Ethan Tapper (Timber, Oct 6), a Vermont forester's twelve months on 175 acres of worn-out woods he is bringing back; Bogland — Merritt R. Turetsky (Norton, Oct 13), bog bodies, carnivorous plants and black flies; Animals Taught Me Everything — Pam Houston (Torrey House, Oct 13), fifteen essays on the wolfhounds, horses, sheep and one desert lioness in her life; Bird Anatomy — Julia Rothman (Storey, Oct 13), how a feather is built and how an albatross drinks seawater; and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2026 (Mariner, Oct 20), Randall Munroe of xkcd went looking for pieces that explain how we know what we know.

New in October: Nonfiction

Also new: The Savage Mind — David Treuer (Oct 6), a short book on the violence of the frontier and where it went; Blockers — Michael Lewis (Oct 6), the early days of the Department of Government Efficiency, told by the civil servants it targeted; Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited — Tracy Daugherty (Oct 6), a full biography from the biographer of Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry; Will and Attention — Meghan O'Gieblyn (Oct 6), a memoir of drinking again in secret, and of secretly going to mass; and Sleeping Beauties — David Byrne (Oct 6), the David Byrne of Talking Heads on why good ideas go quiet for decades.

For Young Readers

Three for the gift pile: The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium Set 7 — Bill Watterson (Oct 6), the last set, down to the sled ride on the final day of 1995; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: The Illustrated Edition — J. K. Rowling, illustrated by Levi Pinfold (Oct 6), the first volume by the artist taking over from Jim Kay; and Working Boats: Ferry — Tom Crestodina, a ferry-shaped board book from the Bellingham fisherman of Working Boats fame, ages 2 to 5.

And for the younger shelf: Midnight Manor — Sid Sharp, the residents get up at sundown and say goodnight at sunrise, skeletons and bats included, ages 3 to 5; Tom Nancy — Mac Barnett, a farmer's son swaps brains with a talking sheep for a day and the sheep declines to swap back, ages 4 to 8; The Wild Season — Dashka Slater, the true story of four rabbits abandoned in a San Francisco park and the neighbors who set out to catch them first, ages 8 to 12; Building 903 — Lois Lowry, back in the territory of The Giver; What Goes On Inside a Tide Pool (Storey, Oct 6), twenty-four hours with a hermit crab looking for a new shell, ages 7 to 10; and Fight or Flight — Jeff Kinney (Oct 20), the twenty-first Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Poetry

Cloud Runner — Joy Harjo (Norton, Oct 13), the three-term U.S. Poet Laureate's book of mourning for her daughter. We — Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf, Oct 6), her first book since WHEREAS nine years ago,.

And from Copper Canyon Press, four this month: Erin Belieu's new and selected poems, Cocklebur (Oct 6); novelist Aleksandar Hemon's first book of poetry, Godspotting (Oct 13); Chase Twichell's The World It Was (Oct 20); and Ha Jin's Running Away (Oct 27), in the voices of Chinese migrants making for the United States.

New in Paperback

The books you waited a year for, at the friendlier price. Shadow Ticket — Thomas Pynchon ($20, Oct 6): Milwaukee, 1932, and a runaway cheese heiress; The Place of Tides — James Rebanks ($18.99, Oct 13), the Lake District shepherd's spring on a Norwegian eider-duck island; Marce Catlett — Wendell Berry ($16.95, Oct 6), the last Port William novel; The Rose Field — Philip Pullman ($16.99, Oct 20), the end of The Book of Dust; The Gales of November — John U. Bacon ($21.99, Oct 27), the Edmund Fitzgerald, two weeks ahead of the anniversary; and Doggerel — Reginald Dwayne Betts ($15.99, Oct 6), poems about dogs that turn out to be about prison, family and falling in love.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Shirley Jackson ends her novel almost exactly where she began it, with the same sentence about the same house. A great deal happens to the people in between. The house doesn't notice. For an issue about what to do with the dark, here is the book that made a house the thing to be afraid of. Leave a light on.