This week, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Scott Lax, the author of The Year That Trembled, Vengeance Follows and other works, in Chagrin Falls. Scott is teaching some awesome workshops focused on the art of fiction and essay writign in collaboration with Fireside Bookshop. This is another local gem that has been reinvigorated by new owner Lori Muller-Zaim and her business partner Jean Butler. Info about Scott's workshops, which have been selling out, are on his website at www.scottlax.com.

Stop by and check out Fireside Bookshop at 29 North Franklin St. in Chagrin Falls. Their website is www.firesidebookshop.com.

"Good doesn't always look like how you imagine it," Benjamin Percy writes in The Dark Net. "Sometimes it cusses and wears a leather jacket and motorcycle boots and chain smokes. Sometimes it deals a little on the side. Sometimes it kills."

Percy's book, a vampire novel that is simultaneously about the dangers of the Internet, tells the story of demons who flow into the world through a virus propagated on the Dark Net (where dangerous and illegal stuff takes place on the Internet).

Somehow this gravel-voiced writer (have a listen here) manages to take a genre novel and imbue it with cheeky literary significance -- in the book there are debates about God, good and evil, as well as a frightening sense that our society is headed towards calamity by our over-reliance on insecure Internet connections. Holy public policy, Batman!

Percy is coming to Cleveland Public Library as part of its Writers and Readers series in collaboration with Literary Cleveland on Fri.-Sat. Aug. 3rd-4th.