Four Questions with Mark Leslie
I love werewolves. Both watching werewolf films and reading books prominently featuring the shapeshifters. So I’m really excited that author Mark Leslie took the time to stop by. He’s published more than two dozen books, including his popular Canadian Werewolf series. The latest installment, Only Monsters in the Building, was recently released.
Tamika Thompson: What is horror?
Mark Leslie: I’m a subscriber to the notion that horror is not merely a genre, it’s an emotion. And that emotion typically involves fear. Horror inhabits a far broader realm than most people realize. And it’s as much a fabric of humanity as romance—with as many specific types. In the same way that the romance genre can be broken down into so many unique styles, themes, categories and subgenres, so too can horror. Love and fear are universal. And they are both genres that transcend genre. You can find elements of love in almost any other genre. The same is true of fear. We can find it throughout literature, film, and television. Whether it’s brutal, shocking, disturbing in some way, or it's quiet, subtle, and atmospheric, fear slides into our lives—and the stories we want to experience as readers, listeners, or viewers—in the same way that the setting sun creates slow moving, ever-growing shadows that eventually consume the entire world.
Thompson: What is the spookiest experience you've ever had?
Leslie: I think the spookiest experience—and something that has fueled more than one horror story that I’ve written over the years—is when I was a teenager working at Fox Lake Lodge in mid-northern Ontario. Me and two other workers shared a cabin while working there, and this one night we stayed up far too late sharing ghostly tales.
This one eerie ghostly revenge story that my friend J.P. told about Old Crooked Neck—a man who had been unjustly blamed for a crime and hung in the forest, then came back to seek his revenge but hasn’t stopped there and is still endlessly seeking victims—wouldn’t let me go.
I ended up tossing and turning, and practically jumping out of my skin every time I heard the call of a loon from the nearby lake. In J.P.’s story, it was the call of the loon that announced the approach of Old Crooked Neck. So every time that haunting cry echoed in the dark of the night, a fresh chill ran down my spine.
Thompson: What is the scariest book you've read and what about it frightened you?
Leslie: Similar to that teenage experience at Fox Lake Lodge, there are two books that terrified me the most as a young reader. The first is an anthology or collection of stories that I can’t remember either the name or author of. But a couple of the tales within it still give me chills.
The other is a non-fiction book that I still own. John Lee and Barbara Moore’s book Monsters Among Us: Journey To The Unexplained. It was published in 1975, and I bought it at a garage sale when I was a kid. Because the stories were about strange true encounters with Bigfoot, UFOs, other cryptid creatures, and unexplained phenomenon the book gripped me. If so many bizarre and difficult to explain in a rational or scientific way could happen, then the world was a far scarier place—there could be something lurking in every shadow, around every corner. While I knew I would grow up to write horror and speculative fiction inspired by such tales, little did I know that, later in life, I would write half a dozen similar books exploring true ghost stories and other unexplainable true tales—such as Haunted Hospitals, Spooky Sudbury, and Tomes of Terror.
Thompson: With Only Monsters in the Building, the seventh installment of your popular Canadian Werewolf series recently released, why do you think the journey of Michael Andrews, who has learned to live with lycanthropy, resonates with readers?
Leslie: I think that Michael Andrews resonates with readers because he didn’t ask for what happened to him. He’s a normal guy who struggles with confidence issues and just “making his way in the world today” (to borrow from the lyrics to the Cheers theme song). Michael has to try to live his life while dealing with the side-effects of turning into a grey wolf during the phase of the full moon.
The frustration he experiences in the way it affects his personal life (how can he maintain a normal relationship when he disappears unexplainably for 7 nights in a row every month), combined with the humorous and embarrassing situations it puts him in (waking up naked somewhere with no memory of the night before and struggling to find clothes and get back home), may be unique to him, but we can all understand. He’s dealt a hand of cards and does his best to play with them. Just like we all do in our own unique situations and challenges. And just like us, he often questions himself and whether he’s making the right decisions and choices along the way.
After years of struggling, mostly on his own, Only Monsters in the Building introduces Michael to a group of other misfit Paranormals. Like Michael, they’re not “measuring up” to what others of their kind are supposed to be. He befriends a troll who is a people-pleasure and welcomes people in rather than scaring them away from his bridge, a studious faerie who has trouble practicing artful deception, a mermaid who repels men instead of attracting them, a werecat whose behavior is more like a loyal and loving dog, and a vegan who finds himself afflicted with vampirism.
In this book, and in the overall series that follows Michael along, we can laugh along with and empathize with the various struggles that each character faces. But ultimately, we can realize that we’re not alone in those day-to-day ways we often question whether we’re good enough, or doing the right things.
Mark’s first short story appeared in print in 1992, the same year he started working in the book industry. He has published more than twenty-five books under the name Mark Leslie that include thrillers and fiction (Evasion, A Canadian Werewolf in New York, One Hand Screaming), paranormal non-fiction (Haunted Hospitals, Spooky Sudbury, Tomes of Terror) and anthologies (Campus Chills, Tesseracts Sixteen, Obsessions). Under his full name he writes books to help authors navigate publishing, and they include The 7 P’s of Publishing Success and An Author’s Guide to Working with Libraries and Bookstores.
His industry experience includes President of the Canadian Booksellers Association, Board Member of BookNet Canada, Director of Author Relations and Self-Publishing for Rakuten Kobo, Director of Business Development for Draft2Digital and Professional Advisor for Sheridan College’s Creative Writing and Publishing Honours Program.
