Author Erik Larson to speak at Sarasota Library Foundation luncheon

Erik Larson is one of the heavy hitters in the narrative nonfiction history genre, with a shelf’s worth of New York Times best-selling books to his name, including “The Devil in the White City,” “In the Garden of the Beasts,” “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania,” and “The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz.”

Yet his most recent work is neither history, nor nonfiction, nor even a printed book.

“No One Goes Alone,” published last fall only in the audiobook format, is a ghost story that emerged from a lot of unused material about the 19th-century fascination with the occult that he’d collected doing research for “Thunderstruck,” his 2006 book that runs parallel storylines about wireless inventor Guglielmo Marconi and serial killer Hawley Harvey Crippen. And one he almost gave away on his website, until his publishers heard about it.

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“It took me years to do. I’d dip in, leave the book, dip in again,” said Larson in a telephone interview from his home in New York. “Finally I had this novella that my daughters pronounced as really kind of scary. I thought I’d try to release it as a serial on my web site. When I mentioned this at a marketing meeting…it was like I had dropped a hand grenade on the table.”

Larson will come to Sarasota next February to discuss his work at the Library Foundation for Sarasota County’s 11th annual Love Our Libraries Author Luncheon at the Ritz-Carlton. Tickets and sponsorships for the fundraising event are now on sale.

Larson said the audio-only format is ideal for a ghost story, which are best told to a shivering, giggling audience at night.

“An audio-only work lets you listen completely in the dark,” he said. “It was really fun, a kind of labor of love.”

And it’s been picked up by Netflix for a movie treatment.

His most recent book prior to “No One Goes Alone” was the best-seller “The Splendid and the Vile,” which to his surprise resonated especially well with readers during the pandemic. Published just before COVID-19 struck, the book seemed to touch on a trifecta of topics.

“Events can make things fresh,” he said. The pandemic and the lack of leadership in the United States “drew people to Churchill and solace.”

Then came Black Lives Matter, and “suddenly people wanted to talk about Churchill as a racist. Then came the war in Ukraine, and people wanted to talk about Churchill and Zelenskyy.”

About Erik Larson: He began his writing career as a journalist

Larson began his writing career as a journalist, first at the Bucks County Courier Times in Pennsylvania and then at the Wall Street Journal, where he found his niche writing long-form narratives.

His first book, “The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities,” was a collection of essays about how companies spy on individual consumers that “sold like absolutely nothing,” but he’d been bitten by the bug of writing full-length nonfiction books. His next book, “Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun,” did better, and “Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History,” about the 1900 Galveston hurricane, was his breakthrough title.

He’s at work on a new project, but wouldn’t say more.

“I never talk about what I’m working on,” he said, not because he’s afraid someone will steal his idea.  “It’s more that if I told you what the idea was, your reaction might be, oh really?”

Love Our Libraries

2023 Author Luncheon, 11:30 a.m. Feb. 10, 2023, The Ritz-Carlton, Sarasota. Tickets start at $200. sarasotalibraryfoundation.org

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota library foundation books author Erik Larson for luncheon