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

Zilla: If you’re in the mood for a science fiction adventure, you are in luck, because Fiona Moore is here to tell us about their novel, Rabbit in the Moon. Fiona, take it away!

Fiona: Here’s the blurb:

Ken Usagi, a daring young journalist from the icy wilderness of Nunavut, is thrust into a perilous journey through the war-ravaged remnants of the former United States. Haunted by a chilling encounter with a mysterious biotechnical machine—a relic from his troubled childhood—he becomes convinced it holds the key to ending the devastating conflict tearing the world apart.

Far to the south, Totchli, a brilliant young biotechnician from a Mesoamerican society pummeled by catastrophic climate change, receives a desperate order. He must venture north to uncover the fate of a critical colonial expedition, a mission that once carried the last hopes of his people’s survival. Communication channels with the expedition have fallen eerily Silent.

As Ken and Totchli embark on their separate quests, the very fabric of reality begins to unravel. Their paths converge, leading to a fateful encounter where the boundaries of their worlds blur and shatter.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Fiona: The initial inspiration was something of a mashup. I had been watching Apocalypse Now while also reading the Raffles novels and Castle Keep, and I had an irresistible image of a riverboat going through a jungle, crewed by Harry Manders from the Raffles novels and Alfred Benjamin from Castle Keep. When I have an image like that, I start exploring it. How did it happen? Where are they going? What are they looking for? It all just came from there.

Zilla: I love that! Were there any other images that inspired you?

Fiona: As well as that mental image, there was another source. A friend of mine told me a story about how, on an early morning walk, he’d seen two magpies herding a rabbit. One driving it from behind, the other hopping in front. That struck me as a very sinister image, but also one that tied in with the novel—these people, symbolically associated with rabbits, being driven by forces they don’t understand towards conclusions that might be disturbing.

Zilla: How much research did you need to do for your book?

Fiona: On the one hand, a lot—on the other, hardly any! I’m a university professor in my day job, and I’m very interested in Indigenous approaches to economics as an alternative to the growth-focused model. This is one of the reasons why the novel centres on two futures, one in which the Inuit are the most stable and successful society in North America, and another, where an Aztec-influenced post-human society dominates.

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?

Fiona: You can buy the book here: https://books2read.com/u/mVLQgp and I am drfionamoore on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, BlueSky and TikTok. My blog is www.adoctorofmanythings.com.

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

Zilla: We can all use some beauty in our lives—the open ocean, teeming with life, the unshackled consciousness we call dreams, and the joy of sharing both with each other. Clara Ward’s ecofiction gives us all of these in their book, Be the Sea. Clara, can you introduce us to your book?

Clara: Be the Sea dips into a queer neuro-inclusive future with chosen family, sea creatures, and mysterious dreams.

In November 2039, marine scientist Wend Taylor heaves themself aboard a zero-emissions boat skippered by elusive nature photographer Viola Yang. Guided by instinct, ocean dreams, and a shared birthday in 1972, they barter stories for passage across the Pacific. Aljon, Viola’s younger cousin, keeps a watchful eye and an innovative galley. Story by story, the trio rethink secrets, flying dreams, and how they experience their own minds.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Clara: My earliest memories are of the ocean. I was born in Kāneʻohe, Hawai’i, back when loving the ocean meant fighting to protect Kāneʻohe reefs from human sewage.

Rocking on a boat or standing with surf lapping at bare feet has always been my happy place. After half a century, I realized that wherever life threw me, I always returned to the ocean. My fight has grown to include climate change, ocean acidification, plastic and other pollutants—too much for a single person or a single lifetime. Alongside this realization came the characters for my story, a near-future chosen family drawn together by mysterious forces and their love of the sea.

Zilla: Who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it—your own chosen family of readers?

Clara: While writing, my head was full of characters who cared enough to act. Whether a teacher, scientist, sailor, photographer, lawyer, or marine lifestyle entrepreneur, each found their own path to preserving the ocean. I wrote my characters’ grief over losing the coral reefs alongside their drive to protect a giant manta ray. I believed readers as diverse as my characters could share a sense of wonder and be inspired with love for the ocean, the earth, and each other. People want to save what they love. I pledged all my royalties to Conservation International and launched Be the Sea out into the world.

I found plenty of kindred spirits while speaking on environmental and marine science panels. However, the readers who embraced the book most fiercely from the start, some literally hugging the book to their chests, were those who saw themselves in my neurodivergent, nonbinary, and queer protagonist. Those readers not only changed my connection to our community, but they literally changed the trajectory of Be the Sea a month after it came out. Neurodivergent readers especially told me they, or someone they wanted to share the book with, needed an audiobook version right away. I told my tiny indie publisher, Atthis Arts, and they supported this shift in scheduling. The audiobook for Be the Sea came out in December!

Zilla: If your characters met you, what would they say to you?

Clara: I live in Silicon Valley now, and half the young people I know have jobs that could be read as science fiction by outsiders. They challenge society to accept them as they are: queer, trans, neurodivergent, proud. They ask when—not if—sea level will rise a meter, and they take for granted that we need alternatives to fossil fuels and plastic packaging as soon as possible. It has become common to hear people of all ages say that we need a solution for these problems yesterday. Sadly, although my book takes place fifteen years in our future, that’s what I hear my characters saying to me. I did the best I could, and wrote Be the Sea for them, yesterday.

Zilla: I love this. 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?

Clara: You can find me (and lots of bonus material for my book!) on my website (https://clarawardauthor.wordpress.com/novels/be-the-sea/). Be the Sea is available at your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookseller.  Or go directly to my small press publisher, Atthis Arts (https://www.atthisarts.com/product/be-the-sea/) and use code BETHESEA this week only to get 20% off your entire order and a free Sea Creature postcard!

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

Zilla: Some stories are so real, so important, that we turn to fantasy and fable to give them life. Lauren C. Teffeau gives us a book like this in her environmental fantasy novella A Hunger with No Name. Lauren, can you tell us a bit about your book?

Lauren: A Hunger with No Name is a coming-of-age tale with an environmental focus featuring an immersive fantasy setting inspired in part by the high desert of New Mexico.

Thurava of Astrava is intended to become a herder, a most honored position for her dwindling community that clings to life on the banks of the Najimov, the river that’s the lifeblood of the high desert. But the Glass City on the horizon threatens the delicate balance the Astravans have managed to hold on to for centuries, polluting the air and water as the city grows bigger and bigger. The Glass City’s clockwork liaisons offer to bring the Astravans into the Glass City’s walls, but they will have to give up their ways and their precious herds to do so. Thurava must decide who she is without her animals, using the stars as her guide, putting herself on a collision course with the secrets the Glass City holds dear.

Zilla: Is there a visual image that inspired this book?

Lauren: I had a dream of a young woman staring off toward the horizon and being both horrified and fascinated by what she saw. When I woke, I started writing the story that ultimately became the book.

Zilla: Is your work more plot-driven or character-driven? 

Lauren: No story is exactly the same, but I seem to have developed two writing modes: possession projects and battle projects. Battle projects are usually idea- or world-forward in that I have an idea or story world I want to explore in a narrative way. The trick is finding the right point-of-view character to bring that idea or world to life. That process can often feel like a battle as I try to fit all the pieces together into a cohesive whole and find a compelling character to chart the way. My debut novel Implanted was like this—I had a very ambitious idea for a world, but it took a while to settle on my main character.

In contrast, possession projects like A Hunger with No Name are story ideas that are more character-forward. And once I know the character, I usually have an idea of how the story should be structured to best capture their arc. Once those pieces are in place, the writing process often feels like the story is possessing me until I fully get it out of my system and onto the page.

Zilla: I love that description of writing projects—I relate to that a lot. Who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it? 

Lauren: I was thinking of my daughter and things I wanted to know about how the world worked when I was growing up. The book examines a lot of different types of female relationships: mothers and daughters, female friendships, encounters with women from different generations, and I hope the book provides some insights on how to navigate those relationships. It’s too early to know who will read the book as it’s only been out a few weeks, but I hope it finds readers interested in folklore, science fantasy, automatons, and the high desert.

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?

Lauren: You can find me at my website, or on Instagram, Bluesky, or Linktree. My book is for sale at the press website, as well as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and on Bookshop.

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

Zilla: Night Beats contains plenty of writers, so what about a story starring one? Reggie Morrisey is here to tell us about her contemporary novel, Flights of Fancy, that offers us exactly that! Reggie, can you tell us about your book?

Reggie: The painting The Last Supper, by my artist husband Vincent Mancuso, graces the eBook cover, realizing in pastels my vision of the life of Sage Anthony.

I started to imagine her life on a 2014 transatlantic flight to New York and filed away my notes in a folder labeled ‘Tomorrow File.’ For literary purposes, let’s say I imagined her story on a flight from Paris to New York.

Sage Anthony is a mystery writer, pigeonholed into a genre that bores her. Murder in medieval convents and abbeys are her stock and trade, but she cannot write gore anymore. After growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley minus a biological father, taunted by a homicide-detective stepfather and wary of Stepfather #2, Sage has a mind rife with suspicion. Blunt trauma to her head makes her thirty-something life tortured, even though she lives in a loft apartment on the New Paltz, New York estate of an aging billionaire who is obsessed with her––but then, so was his wife.

Unconditional love eludes Sage. Guarded affairs and a fixation with finding her “Dad” consume her. Her Irish-born mother is similarly guarded in her affairs, critical of Sage’s choices, and she fumes as a 21st century American patriot. Her daughter is not tuned into politics or current events, only the weather.

Sage’s life proves the maxim, “What you think about expands.” Up against a book deadline, her creativity kicks in an unlikely direction. Luck follows as Sage strikes it rich and does whatever she fancies at her own New Paltz estate and in France. 

The book takes you to France more than once. The last trip is capped by a February 2020 stopover in Milan for Fashion Week. Remember what happened in the winter of 2020 in Milan and the rest of the world? Yes. That.

Zilla: What’s the link between music and your book?

Reggie: Music plays a role in all my books. Characters reveal themselves in the music that feeds their souls, and it even hints at their moods and ulterior motives.

Zilla: What author do you wish would read your books?

Reggie: Amor Towles is my ideal choice to read my books. The author of A Gentleman in Moscow is a master of plot, dialogue, pace and eras, and when it comes to surprise endings, Towles has the instincts of Edgar Allen Poe.

Zilla: What role does the setting play in your book?

Reggie: Location is so vital in my stories that each setting could be called a character.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Reggie: The sequel, Gossamer Wings, launches in 2025.

Sabitha: 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?

Reggie: You can find Flights of Fancy by clicking on my Amazon Author Page, or aim your device camera to scan the QR-code.

Follow me on Instagram@OfTwoMinds2, and find me on Goodreads. Check out my Reading Nook interview about my 2022 eBook, The Monks of Malibu. And visit my website to read short stories and essays, read or listen to my poetry, see works of art and learn more about Flights of Fancy

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

Zilla: There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the world, and sometimes what we need is a reminder that more hopeful futures exist. Brightflame is here to tell us about their solarpunk fantasy, The Working, which offers us just that spark we need.

Brightflame: A modern coven must thwart a looming eco-cataclysm and find the key to the bright futures we need.

Betsy’s a modern-day Witch with an ageless problem: she’s worried about screwing up her coven’s ritual. Again. But the coven has a bigger issue to face—a greed-fueled entity will soon obliterate Earth’s ability to support life.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Brightflame: I wrote The Working to answer my own burning question: what can we do about the massive ills of the world, not only our climate emergency, but all the intertwined ills that include fascism, racism, and greed? What is the Working to counteract this and restore a vibrant, regenerative Web of Life? I didn’t have an answer when I began to write.

I also wanted to embed real magical practice and ritual for younger Witches and covens—or anyone drawn to an Earth-based spiritual path.

Zilla: I love that, but let’s delve deeper into your inspiration. Is there a visual image that inspired you?

Brightflame: A pentacle—the five-pointed star—inspired the structure of The Working. There are five coven members in the story, each with their own point of view. A pentacle represents interconnection—each point is connected to every other point. The number five also represents the Elements: Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and Spirit.

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

Brightflame: I would thank them for their wisdom and allowing me to tell their stories. Yes, this is a work of fiction. Still, I got to know Betsy, Sail, Fire, Mari, and Tal as dear friends through the years of writing the book. And the five Old Ones in the story are based on my actual Ancestors who I met in the astral realm and who told me to get this story out to the world!

Zilla: And what would they respond back!

Brightflame: I fear the five coveners would ask who my favorite is. But that would be like asking who my favorite child is. I love them all!

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Brightflame: I’m shopping my story collection that forms a mosaic novel—the stories are all set in the same solarpunk future through time. Some of them are published—links on my website. And I’m working on a nonfiction Solarpunk Witchcraft book.

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?
Brightflame: Visit my site https://brightflame.com and consider subscribing to my newsletter and blog. My book: https://waterdragonpublishing.com/product/working/   Follow me on Instagram (@brightflame.2), Bluesky (@BrightFlame), Facebook (@brightflame.1), and Mastodon (wandering.shop/@BrightFlame)

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

Zilla: Rachel and I both absolutely adored Gyre, Dale Stomberg’s literary fiction novella about abuse, fate, the creative urge, and repeating our mistakes. We had to bring Dale in to talk about this work of art, so here he is! Dale, give us your best shot at putting the magic into words.

Dale: The story begins when Abigail is born with a fully formed adult consciousness and an awareness that she has lived a prior lifetime, albeit with no specific memories of her past life. As an adult mind in a baby’s body, she is physically helpless but also impossibly precocious. Her father, Raj, is overjoyed at how special she seems; her mother, Faye, is disquieted.

As Abigail grows up, scraps of memory from her prior life begin to return to her. She comes to understand that she did something terrible back then, and her wonder at being reborn clashes against her deep sense of shame and worthlessness. A family tragedy exacerbates the strain in Abigail and Faye’s relationship, and things start to spiral downward.

So the book ends up being a meditation on cycles of mistreatment, on the ways we struggle against our own pasts and ingrained predilections, and on how a sense of fate’s inescapability can come to tyrannise us.

Rachel: Can people change? The commercial fiction model is about a protagonist who changes as a result of their experience, and Gyre almost seems like a grim rebuttal to that narrative arc. How important was realism in this story?

Dale: The real world is given to us by evolution, by history, and by the ongoing machinations of disunited masses of individual minds. Fiction, on the other hand, generally takes place in a world created by a single mind. So it stands to reason that fiction will tend to be more orderly than reality. I think the stereotypical “tidy-change arc” is a symptom of this bent toward orderliness. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with this kind of arc, but there’s also no law demanding that every story conform to it.

Can people change? (Yes! We’ve all seen people change for the worse. Your fascist uncle used to be hip.) I’d reframe the question: how much of the way we change is under our conscious control? To say, “I shall now change,” and expect to just up and change is of course about as realistic as deciding to forget your native language, on the presumption that it will be wiped from memory on the spot. We all know this, but this fact is also weird because supposedly “I” (and no one else) am in charge of “my” decisions. So we recognise that our behaviour derives only in part from the in-the-moment choices of a sovereign will.

Speaking only for myself, to attempt to control my own mind can feel like being in the pilot’s seat of a spaceship whose autopilot system fights me, sometimes allowing me to exert a certain amount of manual control or at least influence, but other times not. I think of the quarrels I’ve repeated “a thousand times” with someone close, quarrels which inexorably end up running along the same awful, habitual grooves—despite the fact nobody involved wants them to. I think especially of certain shortcomings of mine (thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, habitual failures to duly notice) whose core characteristic is precisely that they are outside subjugation to the conscious will in the moment they occur. So you might read the overarching situation in Gyre as an exploration of the feeling of self-heteronomy, of being unfree vis-à-vis your own self. The story has a magical-realist setup which makes its protagonist literally unfree, yet I also think the way it reads is that, within this unfreedom, she has some latitude of action, and what constrains her (at times) is not a monolithic external fate but an internally imposed fatedness. Does the fact it comes from within make it more, or less, unshakeable? Hard to say. But I think it is noteworthy that Abigail normally doesn’t say she is unfree—instead, she insists she is worthless.

Zilla: Abigail is unfree in some respects, though. She’s a victim of the cycle of abuse, she’s predisposed to alcohol abuse—though she’s also a victim of her own choice not to try to escape the cycle. How much did you intend to show her as doomed by the narrative vs doomed by her own choices?

Dale: The premise in Gyre, that Abigail knows she has been reborn, turns the whole story into, as it were, an extended metaphor, or in other words a story with two simultaneously possible readings. In the story’s reality, fate has mandated her path, so she is of course trapped by the narrative. To readers standing outside that narrative, I think this will be overlaid with a sense, perhaps familiar from their own lives, of existing hemmed within the consequences of a million prior decisions others have made, and of having before them only a very limited palette of available choices, a narrow range of freedoms within which to act, with not every freedom equally available: the cost of getting things wrong is higher for some paths than others, and our level of confidence that a path will lead to a good outcome likewise differs for each. Escape from is also escape to, and what is on the other side can be frightening in its unknowability.

In the face of such anxiety, the self erects defences. Abigail indulges in a dichotomy between blame and responsibility. The more harshly and pitilessly she blames herself, the more she damns herself as doomed never to change—which of course “absolves” her of responsibility to change, since you can’t very well escape your doom. I find it remarkable and difficult to explain why some of us cling so strongly to our own intense feelings of self-dislike. Perhaps this helps clarify it: a strong self-dislike can be easier to face than the fear of trying and failing to make forthright choices, even including choices which could offer us escape or liberation.

Zilla: One line that’s stuck with me is when Abigail suggests, “Perhaps a computer could be taught to write songs, but it would do it only when you told it to. A songwriter would write songs even if you told her not to.” It’s an interesting counterpoint to her mother Faye’ song writing, which is described that, “She wrote for the satisfaction of a puzzle well solved.” Is this the same kind of restless creativity, or is this a different flavour?

Dale: I think a fair number of would-be creatives (musicians, artists, writers, &c.) hit a snag in the gap between the initial urge to make something and the laborious process of seeing it to its conclusion. What sparks the creative notion and what drives the creative work can be different things.

Some creators I’ve known have had the ability (necessary in order for them to make a living) to create things according to someone else’s specifications. Think TV writers, or 3D animators, or pro songwriters. Because nearly any other job would have been easier to get into, they would never have become creatives if they hadn’t been driven by the pure need to create—but they are also able, for example, to revise dialogue (initially written by someone else) in response to notes given by the showrunner: to create art specifically to solve a problem set before them.

Faye is the sort of songwriter who has a knack for this. Doing so involves effacing the self, and (as the story shows) Faye has plenty of reasons for wanting to escape herself. But she also, when not working for hire, compulsively explores sound in a highly solipsistic way, a retreat-from-the-world that can be keenly personal. I think this latter personal exploration comes out of the restlessness Abigail mentions, but with Faye it’s a two-sided thing.

Zilla: I thought it was fascinating how Faye enjoyed the construction of a public persona. Could you tell us a bit about your thoughts on public vs private identities?

Dale: This ties quite nicely to that concept of two-sided-ness. Faye, like many entertainers, maintains two faces: one private, one public. I think many of us, though not famous, nonetheless might recognise this in ourselves. When I was a teenager, I was one person around my parents, a rather different person around my friends; I recall a situation once in which I, my mother, and a certain school friend were all in one place for the first time, and I experienced an uncanny weirdness that made me hesitant even to speak—I was unsure which version of me I should be. Each of those me’s was, in a sense, a construct, and they were not very compatible with each other.

The special thing about a public persona is that it is designed to ease you past such uncanny paralysis. The world will know you as, not the bumbling screw-up you are, but the manicured image you would rather be. The less fond you are of the person you imagine yourself to be, the more attractive you will find the possibility of donning a mask, and Faye knows that there is something festering down in her core, something she feels she must, at all costs, conceal. We were just talking about Faye’s two different modes of songwriting, and this ties in to that: for the most part, her personal explorations of sound and music stay concealed from the world. What the world sees are the songs she writes for others. 

The mask can also pose a danger. However professionally detached Faye may be when writing for hire, when it comes to her passion projects, she has not risked exposure and thus has not developed any callouses. A point comes in the story when she reveals her private self to the world in a pair of songs but is unprepared for the attention, especially the criticism. She’s taken a rash risk and been unsteeled for the outcome—thrown herself from the pinnacle of the temple and expected angels to break her fall, as it were—in a kind of ill-considered gamble that to give the world a glimpse of what’s behind the mask will not bring disaster. But eventually her mask slips entirely off. The consequences are ruinous.

Rachel: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Dale: The best way to keep up with me is to sign up for my newsletter. It’s called The Seldom because I send it only seldom, but when I do, I include my own and my comrades’ writing and publishing news.

Or, for anyone who’d like to cut to the chase, Gyre is available as a paperback ($8 on Amazon) and an ebook ($3 on Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Amazon &c).

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

Zilla: Here in the Night Beats Community, we embrace the unusual, the unexpected, the things which don’t quite fit. So of course we had to have Tom Norford here, to give us an interview about his collection of science fiction short stories which does exactly that. Tom, can you tell us about Anomic Bombs?

Tom: Anomic Bombs is a collection of science fiction stories. They vary from semi-serious to outright silly, a tale of aliens commandeering the body of the wrong Taylor Swift due to an admin error being a prime example of the latter. One of the more serious ones is about an incel-type kid who develops an affinity with the angry alien locked in his barn. I’m a bit of a weirdo, I fear, and the stories are written with fellow weirdos in mind.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Tom: I’ve hawked my first novel, The Starved God, at various book events and craft fairs, but was a bit self-conscious at having only one book on offer. I had a few short stories knocking about which I’d written for my blog subscribers, and figured if I could squeeze out one or two more, I could release them as a collection. I got to work on a story which rapidly ballooned into a novella, and bundled it together with four shorter pieces. Retrospectively, I realised the stories were loosely held together by the theme of not fitting in.

Compared to my first novel, this collection is more accessible and light-hearted. The Starved God was a little dense for some readers, like some miserable 19th century Russian novel

Zilla: I love miserable 19th century novels! But I take your point. In your short stories, who was your favourite character to write?

Tom: Probably Tavian, a hog wrangler in the story “The Sacred Furcula of Yukiang the Bird-Whale.” He comes across like a simple country bumpkin, cap-doffing to his betters and overly attached to Janet the mad pack-sow, but is actually cunning and resourceful. A bit like a rough version of Wodehouse’s capable gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves. For example, he gets his friend out of a scrape with an eldritch contraption powered by human brains by getting the thing stoned on the psychoactive weed he smokes habitually. (It makes sense when you read it. I think). I also like Tayler Swift, a Deliveroo driver who finds himself in the body of pop megastar Taylor Swift. He’s understandably discombobulated but makes the best of it.

Zilla: That sounds delightful! Is your work more plot-driven or character-driven? Or a secret, third thing?

Tom: Some stories are more character-based, others plot-driven, but overall I wanted to convey a sense of wonder, of novel things happening in novel places. You could call it environment-driven I suppose.

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?

Tom: You can find Anomic Bombs here on Amazon and check out my Substack blog here. The blog is very silly. This is a Booklinker link to Anomic Bombs (so wherever you are in the world, it will take you to your own country’s Amazon store).

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

Zilla: Cherry-Rose: Blood & Wishes is a fairy-tale that exists at the boundary of reality and fantasy, and a book that I unabashedly loved. We’re lucky enough to have Jeff Wiederkehr with us to tell us about his moody, atmospheric novel. Jeff, take it away!

Jeff: Cherry-Rose: Blood & Wishes is a horroresque fairy-tale retelling that turns wishing upon a star into an allegory for when wishes go wrong. Set in modern California, this coming-of-age story is woven with beasts, a Blue Fairy, and an unexpected romance all set against the backdrop of classic fairy tale horror.

Cherry-Rose finds herself reborn into a world that seems too good to be true, because it is exactly that. Too quickly her loving sisters vanish and the dark secret behind her mother’s magic is revealed. In time she breaks free from the isolation of the forest and her mother’s spell in the hope of finding her sisters. However, on the other side of the forest, she seems to have found more trouble than she had at home.

On the journey to find her sisters, Cherry-Rose is pursued by a gang peddling a drug called pixie-dust, she finds help in the form of a beastly mentor, and she is presented with the prospect of love in a world that just might be more dangerous than the forest filled with all of its chasing wolves.

Zilla: The theme of the cycle of abuse really spoke to me. Even Sal, who recognises the lure of the cycle, can’t stop himself from repeating it. Is it the animal or the human, the wolf or the mother, bear or father, which compels this cycle?

Jeff: That’s the thing, it is the great universal Mother-Animal-Man which is compelled by the Hunger. Mother, because it is the omnipresent. Animal, because it is hungry and it must eat. And the human, to ensure that the cycle is unbreakable.

Zilla: Everyone in this book has something they need to escape, whether it is in their past or present. Sometimes they run, sometimes they turn to the Blue Fairy, and sometimes they turn to blue pixie dust. How intertwined are these three options?

Jeff: These options, like the cycle of abuse, are inescapable, we have fight or flight, drugs and dreams, and … or death. Here we have the desire to escape, the desire for something other than our station, and we have methods of distraction (pixie-dust) and hope for something greater than ourselves (the moon, the stars, the Blue Fairy).

Zilla: There are many births in this book, but every birth comes with a death. Is the reverse true? Or is there death without birth?

Jeff: The silly answer, the quip of an answer, and the real answer are all the same: yes (to all).

Zilla: Many of the characters carry double names: Marybelle/Mother, Just John/Brother John, lost/Gideon, Sky Blue/Shy Blue. Often in stories, a character with two names chooses the second name for themselves, as a sign of agency. Here, both names are gifted to them by others, or represent their relationship to others. Is it possible for a person to define themselves?

Jeff: Possible? I could make an argument, that no one could do it without help. Foucault would say, we cannot be who we are until we see ourselves reflected back from another. Think about it, who would we be if we lived alone on the moon? All of our insecurities, our issues with our own bodies, the fight between who we want to be and who we think we should be … it wouldn’t exist. For me, I’d say that others are signposts, not intentionally guiding, but unconsciously showing us the ground we are standing upon. Cherry-Rose had to go through a lot to accept the truth that we all know and rarely accept and look where she ended up ~ you have to read the book to find out.

Zilla: You mix together the real and the unreal–Hollywood and William Hale Academy for Children of All Sorts, wine and pixie dust. What is the line between reality and fairytale? Is there a line?

Jeff: This is the fun of writing fiction. I wrote and wrote as if I were on the moon and then when I came back down to earth too soon, often I was shocked by what I read. Whenever that happened I’d stop writing until I could get back to the moon. At every turn, whenever I got insecure and wanted to tell myself that I had gone too far, that there is no way … I somehow found a way to go further. And in the end, when I had to write ‘The End,’ I was pleasantly surprised by how shocked I was. For example, the chapter titled Moon Love Ritual … it is bizarre and beyond and I wish I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil the fun. The intention was to blur all of the lines. To say, “Why not?, Why the hell not?!, Hell yes!” Because we, the reader and the writer, decide where all the lines go.

Zilla: And last but not least, I know there’s a Spotify playlist—can we have it?

Jeff: It is called Honey and Gold. You can find it here.

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?
Jeff: Find me and the book at my website.

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

Zilla: Danger and romance are hand-in-hand with Frankie Sutton’s paranormal romance, Vampiric Crush. Frankie, can you introduce us to your book?

Frankie: Shae Taizer hides in the protective Royale Realm, away from the reach of Gerard, the infamously manipulative Vampire King. She seeks a way to rid herself of the vampire’s crush on her, denying him an ally in his crushing quest for pleasure. She would rather die than become his Vampire Queen.

Her only plan is visiting the deadly Battle Realm. There, she hones her weapon and magic skills as a Deviant.

But after recalling a childhood of being raised among Civilians, she is gifted her own Pandora’s Box. She discovers a prophecy bonding her to two Civilians, Nickolas and Kiran. One is the key to defeating Gerard. However, reuniting with them ignites something more sinister—her own Vampiric Crush.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Frankie: Vampires such as Selene from the Underworld series and Saya from the Blood+ anime. And my love of swords, as well as Japan.

Zilla: Is there a visual image that inspired you?

Frankie: Oh yes. Back around 2000 I was part of a select group of Hollywood entertainers. Not mainstream, however. But they were professional tap dancers, singers, and actors. One of them was a female singer. She had a photoshoot and one of the pictures was her posing with a sword. I used that image as personal inspiration for my main character in Vampiric Crush.

Zilla: And that image inspiration made it to the cover, which is also a picture of a woman with a sword! I love that. Next question—if your characters met you, what would they say to you?

Frankie: I reckon they’d say, “Thank you for listening to us and sharing our story.”

Zilla: What background did you need to develop your story?

Frankie: When creating the prophecy for my ‘chosen one’, I discovered where exactly to set the story. Normally, the color blue isn’t associated with Halloween, but it fits for my story.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Frankie: There’s actually two. One is a women’s fic inspired by my love of techno music and Celine Dion. The other one is an experimental dark fantasy—a short story collection that actually tells one whole story. It’s all connected!

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?

Frankie: Thanks everyone for taking the time to read about me and my creations. For more information about me, please visit BlueSky, Instagram, or my website. Vampiric Crush is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Walmart, Kobo, Bookshop.org or Books-a-Million.