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

Zilla: Matt Maxwell’s series defies easy explanation. Haunted houses, memories of Los Angeles, and a girl who wants to feel something real, trapped between life and un-life. This might be an impossible question, but Matt, can you tell us about Hazeland?

Matt: About it, I’ve started saying, “In 80s LA, the darkness eats well” and that’s as close to anything in terms of getting the vibe across. The current book in the series (though it’s also a good starting point) is called My Gifts Are Hungry. For that, I’ve been saying, “Not all houses are haunted by the dead.” A little more enigmatic. It’s about a girl who runs away from home to visit the coolest club in Hollywood and finds herself crashing at one of the old houses up in the hills, the kind built by silent film stars and liquor kingpins of the past. And she comes to find that the house has been waiting for someone just like her for a very long time.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Matt: I suppose inspiration for the book came from me wanting to play around with some expectations in horror/fantasy reading. For instance, the nature of the ghost in the haunted house in My Gifts Are Hungry is something a little weirder, hopefully unexpected. I’m always interested in injecting something new, not just being one-note scary or bleak over and over.

A lot of the inspiration for the book came from historical research, particularly old houses in Los Angeles. LA isn’t that old of a city, though it’d been established a lot longer ago than people think. A lot of money came west in the 1890s to build grand houses that don’t look like anything else, not just Victorians.

Zilla: Your take on ghosts and darkness isn’t like anything else. Do you surprise your readers?

Matt: Hopefully I’m surprising my readers. I even end up surprising myself along the way. When this book started, I had a very particular idea of what the haunting started as and stuck with it until I found myself bogged down in things. Then I came to the realization that it wasn’t what I’d originally thought at all, something completely different. This made the book make a lot more sense in terms of how the main character was navigating her way through things, but also the other girls staying at the Casa del Palomas, as the house was named. Gotta let yourself be open to this sort of thing, be able to let go of something you thought was cool and working so that you can change things up when needed.

Zilla: What drives your writing?

Matt:  I dunno, pathology I guess. I can’t not, even if I find the process of dealing with the book after the writing has been done to be frustrating at times. And I have no idea what I’d be doing if I wasn’t writing. All the creative fields have been clobbered by this new economy. Maybe I’d go into plumbing.

Zilla: What’s your next project?

Matt: My next book doesn’t have a title yet. I’ve cycled through a bunch. It’s about the specter of nuclear war in the ‘80s and a weird manifestation of it.

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?

Matt: You can find my work at highway62press.com. I’ve got books on Amazon and at Ingram. Working on an independent ebook solution as well. The crowdfunding campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highway62/my-gifts-are-hungry