Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Coming of age is a fraught time, but how much more so in the world of the fantastical. We love dark stories, and Keith Miller has just what we’re looking for, with his tale of Mira in The Witch’s Journey. Keith, can you tell us about your story?

Keith: In a town beset by demons, from which the children are disappearing, redheaded Mira grows up wild and willful. When she’s around, soups boil over and flowers catch fire, and one night in her sleep she unwittingly turns her house around. The morning of her thirteenth birthday, Mira receives a gift from the river: a gold key. It will lead her on a journey, to seek the door her key will open. The Witch’s Journey is a dark fairytale embroidered with fairytales, full of sorrows and terrors, heartbreaks and delights, chocolates and mayhem and magic.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Keith: At one point, while I was teaching English in Egypt, I had a student named Mira, and I thought, “Good name!” Several years later, on a fall afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin, I was sitting on the porch working on something else when the first page arrived. I set it aside for a while, but Mira kept prodding at me, insisting her story needed to be told. 

There was a deeper inspiration, however: A historian friend had told me about the witch hunts of the early modern period in Europe and the United States, in which up to 100,000 people were killed, mostly women. Many of the women practiced pre-Christian religious rituals and healing methods. There are suggestions that the relative scarcity of red hair in Europe is a result of this genocide.

Zilla: Is there a visual image—a painting or a photo—that inspired you?

Keith: My wife had given me Essential Pre-Raphaelites by Lucinda Hawksley as a birthday present. I was entranced by the lushness and dense herbage. Lots of redheads!

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers?

Keith: I don’t know if I surprise my readers, but I certainly surprise myself! In order to keep my writing fresh, I don’t plot my novels in advance; I create characters and place them in propinquity. What transpires is often a bit of a shock to me.

Zilla: Why do you write?

Keith: I write to scratch an itch. My novels generally start with a character, and I want to find out what happens to them.

Zilla: If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d do instead?

Keith: I’d probably be an artist. I was an art major and still mess around with paints and chisels from time to time. My publisher, Elsewhen Press, kindly permitted me to include illustrations with The Witch’s Journey.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Keith: You can find me at my website or my blog. You can find my book here.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: The most incredible stories start at home—sometimes in the depths of our own family history. Andre Narbonne fictionalized his family’s story in Those are Pearls, and he’s here to tell us about it. Andre, how does the story go?

Andre: From the seeds of an impoverished boilermaker’s adoration for a rich doctor’s daughter grows a sweeping story of a family whose personal passions are woven into the tapestry of world history. Harry Short first rides into battle at the beginning of the Boer War, in 1895, to win the heart of Margaret Roll. In 1914 he enlists again, to escape her. With Margaret, he sires a family that takes the reader through generations and across continents. They arrive in Canada as prairie homesteaders, witness the Winnipeg Riot of 1919, and survive the Great Flood of 1950 as well as marriage to bootleggers and communists, police investigation, unlikely heroism on the battlefield, and, all but one, a torpedo. 

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Andre: I was inspired by my own family’s history, which I have fictionalized. The most extraordinary parts of the novel are the parts that are true. My great-grandfather got a tropical disease after falling off a boiler in Cape Town, South Africa, for which his doctor prescribed moving to Winnipeg. My great-aunt’s gravestone reads, “Old Socialists Never Die, They Organize the Angels.” At the beginning of the Second World War, my mother spent her summer in the “Clean Air Camp” for poor children outside of Winnipeg where she won a medal for the child who gained the most weight. None of my inventions can top those that history.

Zilla: What would it be like to meet your characters?

Andre: My characters lived through three wars, the influenza pandemic, the Winnipeg General Strike and, later, the Winnipeg flood, they lived through the untimely deaths of family members, including the death by suicide of a favourite sister. All this and they still kept their religion. 

I expect they would ask me why I lost mine.

Zilla: Who is your favourite fictional character someone else wrote? 

Andre: Ishmael. It’s his emotional buoyancy I admire the most. He suspects the universe might be one colossal joke of which he is the butt and is willing to laugh at the joke. He can do that because Ishmael is a connoisseur of irony in the way that other people are connoisseurs of wine. The best line in Moby Dick is typical of his observations: “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” What other 19th-century sailor would use a coffin as a floatation device?

Zilla: What’s the secret to editing?

Andre: Here’s four:

Don’t edit when depressed.

Don’t be afraid of changing things—allow for play in your drafts. Important characters can become less important, as can passages of dialogue, actions, and scenes. 

Keep your first save. This is the ‘honest’ save. If you get sidetracked by your changes in subsequent drafts, the honest save will tell you what the story intends to mean. 

Know your audience. A work that’s done, is done. Why change it? The only reason I can think of is to reach an audience. Keep in mind that at this stage you are shaping your work according to the interests of people you will likely never meet and try to imagine them fully and critically.

Zilla: Who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it?

Andre: My first audience was my wife, who was not my wife at the time. In that regard, the novel has proven a great success.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Andre: You can find me here. My book is here, and my press is here.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: We’re big fans of libraries around here. In the real world, they’re necessary collective spaces for sharing information and community. And in the fictional world, they’re that plus a bit more. So The Library Cosmic, by Ben Berman Ghan, caught our attention! Ben, can you describe your speculative fiction collection for us?

Ben: My next book is a collection of loosely connected novellas and novellettes titled The Library Cosmic, in which people throughout time and space are confronted with terrifying giants and monsters and systems of oppression that are worth fighting even when the odds seem impossible. A ghost builds a library in the spiritual plane that grows to the size of a planet. A golem adopts children throughout the universe as stars collapse, while on Earth, a young man chases a legend of a disappearing library. There is one cute robot.

Zilla: Only one? I kid, I kid. What inspirations did your story draw on?

Ben: When I think of the scale and the creatures of The Library Cosmic, I think of the work of Jack Kirby. I think of the Celestials as he depicts them through The Eternals. I think of his Galactus as the devourer lands on Earth in the pages of Fantastic Four. He was Jack “The King” Kirby for a reason. Fighting Nazis and dreaming in a scale our cosmos can barely contain.

Zilla: If you could meet your characters, what would you say to them?

Ben: I would either say “Yikes! Get away from me!” And then run, or I would offer a hug, and an apology, and a coffee. All my characters are tragedies, or devils, or me.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Ben: You can find me online at or on Bluesky at @inkstainedwreck.ca or on Instagram @ink.stained_wreck! And you can pre-order The Library Cosmic from your local bookstore, or directly from the publisher.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Claris Lam is a prolific Chinese Canadian indie author & poet. We’re never certain what she’ll have crafted next time we talk to her, but we’re always excited to find out! This time she’s going to tell us about her children’s book Sadie Rowe And The Missing Necklace. Claris, take it away!

Claris: After losing her grandma’s necklace, Sadie must work together with a fairy named Pearl in order to find it. But can Sadie learn to trust Pearl as they continue working together, or will her doubts about others keep them from finding the necklace at all?

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Claris: Reading Gwyneth Rees’ Fairy Dust book series and Daisy Meadows’ Rainbow Magic book series were major inspirations for writing this book! 

Zilla: What about them inspired you?

Claris: The illustrations from Gwyneth Rees’ Fairy Dust book series really helped inspire me! They’re quite detailed for a kids’ chapter book, and I wanted to bring that same level of detail to Sadie Rowe And The Missing Necklace.

I am grateful and fortunate that I had the opportunity to work with artist Lora Elezovic for Sadie Rowe. She did a fantastic job designing and illustrating the book’s illustrations and cover while keeping the original inspiration in mind! 

Zilla: What drives you to write?

Claris: What drives me to write is to create some hopeful stories. It’s so easy to find so many stories that lack hope, that are dystopias with tragic endings. So, my hope is that by writing more hopeful and/or optimistic works, it’ll help balance out what’s out there to read! 

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Claris: I’m currently writing a cozy fantasy novel…Or I might be completely done writing the final version of it by the time of this interview being published, who knows!? I write quite quickly, so that helps!  

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Claris: Check out Sadie Rowe And The Missing Necklace here. Find all links to my socials here.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Darkness blends with crime and murder mysteries in Lucy A McLaren’s latest novel, Echoes of the EtherStone. Lucy, can you tell us about your gothic book?

Lucy: Absolutely! Echoes of the EtherStone is a dual-POV gothic horror fantasy book. Here’s the blurb:

Beth lives a seemingly perfect life of luxury in the city of Alpinside. Her upcoming betrothal to the eligible Lord Ashford is all she can focus on… until she meets El, a young woman from the slums whose father was a victim of the Scrubbers’ Stalker, the ruthless killer haunting the city. 

Thrown together by the dreadful murders, the two decide to investigate. The catch? The evidence points towards Beth’s own brother as the Stalker. Their new-found friendship is tested as their investigation begins to reveal far deeper secrets than either of them were prepared for, uncovering a truth which rots the very core of Alpinside.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Lucy: This story was inspired by Jack the Ripper and came about after I’d read The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, a book exploring the traumatic and tragic lives of the victims of the infamous killer. This left me wanting to write a story about two women being empowered to bring down the murderer and, in doing so, fighting the patriarchal system in which he operates… and Echoes of the EtherStone was born. This story is dark, exploring themes of religious and patriarchal oppression, childhood trauma, grief and addiction, as well as the more hopeful elements of found family and fighting oppression. 

Zilla: What drives you to write?

Lucy: I write because I love stories (obviously!!) but, more than that, I use my writing to explore societal, political, and mental health issues. With everything going on in the world, writing is both my escape and my means of trying to process what is going on. And I hope my stories also provide that for readers, too. 

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Lucy: My next project is This Loathsome Monster (another gothic horror fantasy), a story of love, obsession, rage, repression, and revenge, where two women must learn to embrace their powers in order to free themselves from their oppressors. I’m currently querying it in the hope of finding a literary agent.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Lucy: Thank you for featuring me!

If you’re interested in checking out Echoes of the EtherStone on ebook or paperback, you can do so here: https://linktr.ee/lucyamclaren 

I have a newsletter which you can sign up for at the bottom of my author website (https://lucyamclarenauthor.co.uk). On this I share writing and book news as well as my latest reads/watches/games. You can also follow me on Instagram to keep up to date with my book and writing news: https://www.instagram.com/lucy_a_mclaren/