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

Zilla: Crystal AJ Smith’s novel has been described as a fable, winding together all-too-real issues of the lack of justice for murders of Indigenous women and the need to find strength in community with supernatural otters and other beings outside of the everyday world. It’s a powerful tale, and I’m delighted to welcome Crystal here to introduce herself and her book.

Crystal: Crystal AJ Smith di waayu, Txatgiw adat Git lax maadam di wil ‘waatgu, Liǧʷiłdax̌ʷ di wil dzogu
, Gisbutwada de pdeegu. Hello, my name is Crystal Smith and I am from the Ts̓ymsen and Haisla Nations and I have been adopted into the Heiltsuk Nation.

Gitwaałtk is the story of a young Indigenous woman who loses her Sister-Cousin to the highway of tears and who embarks on a journey with her na̱xnox to find and bring to justice to the person responsible for her Sister’s disappearance.

It’s an exploration of how grief and loss can find strength in family, community, and tradition.

Zilla: What do you want to say to your characters?

Crystal: I love you, you are everything I wish I could be. Your strength and determination in our way of being is so beautiful. Your ability to use our language and connect to our ancestors is the dream. T’oyaxsut’nuun.

Zilla: What drives you to write? And what drives you overall?

Crystal: I truly believe that my ancestors are working through me. I write when I feel the story asking me to write. My children are my reason for breathing, I will do as much as I can for them.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Crystal: I am currently hoping to put together a poetry collection and I have already started on a sequel to Gitwaaɫtk. My poetry collection will be poetry I wrote in my early teen years up until now and will include sm’algyax and lik’wila. I am really excited to pull this idea together and I hope to be accepted into a couple different writing programs to support my writings.

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

Crystal: You can find it here.

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

Zilla: For fans of the dark and horrifying, we have Konn Lavery here! A Canadian author, Konn wrote Necroflora, which you can find in Spud Publishing’s Sequel anthology. Konn, tell us about your story!

Konn: Milo is an average student, a decent bartender, and an okay boyfriend, finding his chance at redemption at a mining operation in Northern British Columbia. All sorts of questions are raised after a miner falls into a shaft, but the only thing found is a mysterious, cross-cultural shrine. Milo joins his wayward professor Dr. Rossdale to study and make sense of these strange happenings, only to make one of the most important, and most frightening, discoveries of their careers.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Konn: A part of this story came from my first time flying an airplane. Raised in the flat prairie province of Alberta, when I saw the vast mountain ranges from high above, it made me wonder what could be hidden inside, lost in time. I’m also inspired by nature’s powerful, and mysterious, forces which play a role in the plot.

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

Konn: The mountains were a huge inspiration which I see each day living in Vancouver. But I’d like to note that the artwork within the novella done by Elise Byenkya illustrates the unsettling themes of the story.

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers? 

Konn: I believe so. Necroflora has a couple of really creepy scenes that have left readers unsettled.

Zilla: Why do you write?

Konn: I’ve been compelled to make art since I picked up a pencil. Drawing, painting, music, writing. Telling stories has the strongest grip on me, discovering where these characters will take me. Then, inviting readers to dive into the obscure worlds and give them something to ponder long after they finish the book is quite rewarding.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Konn: I’m writing the finale to my multi-genre trilogy, Ash Born. It mixes urban fantasy and supernatural thriller elements. The series blurb is below:

Lola Cabello is a fugitive after exposing the law’s connection to the notorious Crystal Moth gang who destroyed her life and family, igniting her need for revenge and descending her into a world of reptilian drug lords, demons, and the fantastic.

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?

Konn: Necroflora is available at: https://spudpub.com/products/sequel

All of my novels, audiobooks, and short stories are available at: https://konnlavery.com/

Monthly Newsletter: https://konnlavery.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/konnlavery/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/konnlavery/

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

Zilla: A star-crossed love—or in this case, a Star-Crossed Alliance—always gets our attention, and Monica Goertzen Hertlein has just the thing for us! She’s here to talk about her romantic science fiction novel—so Monica, take it away!

Monica: Princess Shawnia, heir and military leader of her prairie kingdom, intends to marry for love, but when her people are carelessly killed by invaders with unimaginably fast transport and deadly weapons never before seen, she must forge an alliance with the northern kingdom sealed by marriage to their prince. The northern prince is handsome and charming, but believes women and royals should remain protected far from the battlefield. Despite what the marriage will cost her in personal freedom and heartbreak, she resolves to see it through to save her people.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Monica: The romance portion of this story has been in my head for decades (which may reveal too much about my age). The character and her push back against gender constructions, hierarchy, patriarchy, and devotion to her people through leadership based in service rather than command, developed as I was writing. Some of those themes came from my recent degree in sociology, some came from my professional life in a corporate world with far too much bullying.

Zilla: What drives you to write?

Monica: I always wanted to write. As far back as I remember. It’s not for the money!

Zilla: What’s the secret to editing?

Monica: I love editing. It’s fun to make a change and go, “That’s way better, thank goodness no one saw it before!”. If you don’t already enjoy editing, set your most recent draft aside for months (not days, not weeks). After that cooling-off time, remind yourself of your original inspiration. Write a love letter to your draft. Then just read your manuscript (or listen to it). Tackle one issue on each edit pass. Start with the big stuff. As you see the story flesh out, you’ll probably be inspired to keep colouring in your original sketch.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Monica: I hope to release Hideaway this summer, another romantic science fiction story. 

Mary’s worst decision yet, stealing from corrupt law enforcement, could land her in jail long enough to grow old. She flees the spaceport streets for a remote rural outpost hoping for refuge with Finn, the only person she trusts in the world. Despite the strangeness of agricultural life and her prejudice against the family that abandoned her surrogate brother, she finds a chance for love as well as safe haven while hiding the truth behind her visit to the farm. Now she must decide whether to be honest with her found family and risk losing her last chance for a real home, or be exposed as a thief when the law catches up to her.

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?
Monica: Visit me at monicagh.com. You can also find me on Substack or Facebook. Find this book through links on my website.

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

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

Zilla: It’s time for a new take on old classics. We have Claris Lam back with us, this time to tell us about her fairy tale retellings in her anthology Found. Claris, it’s great to talk to you again! Can you tell us about Found?

Claris: Found’s collection of eight short stories brings a twist to retelling fairytales from different points of view, such as the witch that kept Rapunzel in a tower, the titular Juniper Tree, and the hunter that refused to kill Snow White.

Fans of Grimm fairytales and their retellings will find themselves entertained with new perspectives on classic stories.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Claris: Rereading the Grimm Fairytales really inspired me to write this collection, as mentioned in the book’s blurb. I also was inspired by playing ebi-hime’s games It Gets So Lonely Here and its sequel The End of an Obsession. Playing the games really inspired me to write all of the stories in 2^nd person point-of-view!

Zilla: What’s the secret to editing?

Claris: If you think you’ve caught all of the spelling errors, grammatical inconsistencies, and other issues in your manuscript…check one more time before you put up that book for preorder. I found out the hard way when I found three spelling errors in my debut book, Winner Takes All, when first publishing it! 

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Claris: I’m currently writing a fantasy novel where three former Chosen Ones must train three NEW Chosen Ones to save the world! 

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: Found can be, well, found on Amazon and Itch.io. 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: 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/