Mark Leslie

Q: Will readers find the superhero’s creed that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ in your Fright Nights:Big City novel?

That’s a great question. The creed, which is most popularly known from the SpiderMan comics and movies, is one my main character Michael Andrews lives by. While he may not often actually repeat the creed in each of the Canadian Werewolf novels, he does refer to this line in Fright Nights, Big City. And regardless, in every book in the series it’s always very clear how much of a fan of the wall-crawler he is.

In this particular novel, which outlines Michael’s misled belief that he can just live a normal life, take advantage of an important new “talisman” in his life that removes his enhanced werewolf powers and prevents him from turning into a wolf. But his longtime best friend, and former lover, Gail, reminds him of Michael’s constant need to help people. It’s part of who he is. So denying these special powers that he can use to better help people goes against his nature. The novel also contains an underlying message about the dangers that can come when a person tries to repress who they really are.

Q: How did you get started in writing stories about werewolves?

To be honest, though I’ve been writing in the horror and speculative fiction fields for decades, I’ve never been a fan of trying to write stories using the standard tropes and monsters from horror.

The main reason I wrote a werewolf story in the first place was in response to a call for short stories for an anthology entitled The Beast Within. It had been about the time of my first visit to New York City. The editor for that anthology had been looking for stories that focused on the person, rather than the monster they turned into. It made me think about the possible side-effects of being a man who turned into some typical horror movie monster. Someone like the comic book version of The Incredible Hulk who had no control over the monster, and would wake up with no memory of what had gone down while they were the monster.

So, while walking through Battery Park on the south-western tip of Manhattan, I imagined what it might be like for a man who, living with a lycanthropic curse, woke up there, completely naked, and had to — yet again — figure out what had happened the night before and how to make it home without being arrested for indecent exposure.

The resulting tale “This Time Around” was a 10,000-word short story about a man in this position who, despite his desire to get home and to an important work meeting, ends up repeatedly using his enhanced strength, hearing, and sense of smell to help others as he makes his way across the city. It never sold to the original anthology. But I liked it enough to want to try to cut it down some and sell to another market. When my friend, horror author Sean Costello read it, instead of cutting it down, he asked me what happened next.

“Nothing,” I told him. “That’s it. That’s the end of the story.” After a few trials and challenges along the way he made it home. And, like every other day during his monthly wolf-moon cycle, he can never truly understand what he did the night before. That’s part of the frustration of being who he is.

But Sean kept prodding me to explore the rest of his day, saying there was a novel

there is I just explored how the rest of his day went. And thinking about that helped me to re-adapt “This Time Around” into an 80,000word novel called A

Canadian Werewolf in

New York.

Ironically, this stand-alone single-dayin-the-life novel about a man living in Manhattan with a werewolf curse stayed as a single novel for several years. It wasn’t until a call for a different anthology called Monster Road Trip prompted me to imagine what it might be like for this same character to be stuck on a train speeding across the country-side knowing it wouldn’t arrive at the final destination until 20 minutes after sunset during the cycle of a full moon. That more than 20,000-word tale turned into Stowe Away, the novella-length 2nd book in what was now the Canadian Werewolf series.

Q: Where did the original idea for Fright Nights: Big City come from?

While the end of Fright Nights, Big City had been with me all along, I didn’t even realize it would include an entire novel. Fright Nights, Big City was not supposed to exist. What happened was the story I was building in Fear and Longing in Los Angeles was larger and longer than I had originally intended. So, I had to reimagine a much longer story arc between those two novels. The challenge was that each book needed to work as a stand-alone story, but also work as part of an ongoing series with continuation.

Fear and Longing in Los Angeles

ends with Michael Andrews, the werewolf in question, finally finding what he believes is a “happy ending.” He is returning from an extended trip to Hollywood where found his true love, and a way to suppress the lycanthropy that has plagued him. For anyone reading that novel as a stand-alone, it’s a selfcontained story with a happy ending of a man finding a new life.

Fright Nights, Big City

continues from the point of his return to the Big Apple where Michael learns that the horrors he thought they left behind in LA have followed them home. And that putting aside that aforementioned sense of responsibility and trying to repress the beast within him just makes things worse.

There’s a direct parallel, within the bad guys in these two novels, the PFA, or Proud Fighters for America, a neo-Nazi group attempting to build a new race of supernatural soldiers and chase out nonpure people from the US. There’s a belief that the Nazi’s were beaten in World War II and they ceased to exist. But they didn’t. They continue to fester, globally and infect the world with their hatred, fear, and lies. I leveraged a lot of research into the paranormal and occult activities conducted by Hitler’s Third Reich when developing this fictional hate group.

In case it’s not already clear, if you sympathize with Nazi’s, racists, misogynists, homophobes, or domestic terrorists, you’re going to hate this book.

Q: What is the lure of superhero and paranormal fiction?

People usually like to believe that there’s always some higher purpose to them and their life. Superhero stories allow them to see a character making a different, helping others, saving the day, working for some higher, purer cause. They may imagine themselves in the shoes of the hero and wonder if they would be able to do the same things. Or they may see the hero as someone or something external to them, there to make the world a better place.

Superhero stories are often stories of hope, and of triumph over bizarre or otherwise unexplainable circumstances. They take the unknown, the strange, and the unexpected, and turn them into stories that are often good beating evil.

When it comes to paranormal. I believe that’s also a fundamental uniqueness of humans. For me, I’ve always enjoyed stories that spark a “sense of wonder” or explore a unique and intriguing “what if.” That has led me to want to write speculative tales, and, often, tales that involve paranormal elements. Because from humanity’s earliest days, when we huddled around fires inside our caves, we always wondered, with a combination of curiosity and fear, what lurked outside those dancing shadows, in the deep dark vastness of the night.

Q: Besides the Canadian Werewolf series, what other projects are you working on?

I have so many irons in the fire it’s hard for me to keep them straight.

In October of 2022, on what’s the 35th Anniversary of the John Hughes movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles I’ll be releasing a project I’ve been working on in bits and pieces, for a few years. I’m a huge fan of that movie, and of Hughes and Canadian actor John Candy. My book, The Canadian Mounted, is a trivia guide to the classic comedy, and intentionally takes the title and looks like a book that John Candy’s character, Del Griffith, is seen reading in the

New York airport where Del and Neal Page officially become acquainted. You also see a version of The Canadian Mounted in one of the Deadpool movies. Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds had the prop department create a replica as a nod to John Candy.

I’ve got a straight up thriller, or perhaps a techno-thriller, called Evasion that I released back in 2014. After finishing that stand-alone, I came up with an idea for two more books in that series, to make it a trilogy. But the half-finished first draft of book two in that series, A Covert Life, remains on an untouched back-burner. I’m looking forward to getting back to that. But readers are enjoying and want more Canadian Werewolf novels, and I’m still having so much fun exploring the further adventures of Michael Andrews and his friends.

Right now, Julie Strauss, who coauthored the paranormal romantic comedy Lover’s Moon, the fifth book in the series that immediate follows Fright Nights, Big City, and I are in the planning phase to begin work on the very next one called Hex and the City.

Another project I’m beginning to work on for late 2023 is Weird Waterloo – a book of true paranormal and ghost stories of the Greater Region of Waterloo, which is about a one-and-a-half-hour drive west of Toronto, Ontario. I’ll be writing that one with coauthor Alyssa Kuron.

Q: How would you describe your writing style in three words?

Stream of consciousness. Q: For aspiring writers in your genre, what advice would you give them?

I would advise young writers who are truly passionate about building a life-long career as an author to never give up on that dream. And remind them that patience, practice, and persistence are three of the hallmarks of success for any writer. Regardless of which path a writer chooses, traditional publishing or self/indie publishing, it can take years of a lot of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, to realize their dreams, or reach their goals and achieve whatever level of success they intend. And that being said, try your best to not judge your beginning with someone else’s middle or end. You’ll likely have no idea of how long they might have spent getting to where they did. So attempting to be anywhere other than ahead of where YOU were the previous day can be a fruitless and debilitating endeavor. Keep looking forward. Keep persisting. Keep focusing on that passion that drew you to writing in the first place.

ABOUT MARK

Mark Leslie Lefebvre has been writing since he was thirteen years old and discovered his mother’s Underwood typewriter collecting dust in a closet. He started submitting his work for publication at the age of fifteen and had his first story published in 1992, the same year he graduated from university. Under the name Mark Leslie, he has published more than a dozen full length books. He pens a series of non-fiction paranormal explorations for Dundurn, Canada’s largest independent publisher. He also writes fiction (typically thrillers and horror) and edits fiction anthologies, most recently as a regular editor for the WMG Publishing Fiction River anthology series. The very same year, Mark saw his first short story in print he started working in the book industry as a part-time bookseller, and was bitten by the book-selling bug. He has worked in virtually every type of bookstore (independent, chain, large-format, online, academic and digital). He has thrived on innovation, particularly related to digital publishing, and enjoys interacting with the various people who make the book industry so dynamic. Between 2011 and 2017, Mark worked at the Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations for Kobo where he was the driving force behind the creation of Kobo Writing Life, a free and easy to use author/small-publisher friendly platform designed to publish directly to Kobo’s global catalog in 190 countries. By the end of 2016, Kobo Writing Life established itself as the #1 single source of weekly global unit sales for Kobo and, in primarily English language territories, responsible for 1 in every 4 eBooks sold. Mark has spoken professionally in the United States and Canada, in the UK and across Europe, specializing in advances in digital publishing and the vast and incredible opportunities that exist for writers and publishers. Stark Publishing is an imprint Mark created in 2004 when he released his first book One Hand Screaming. He has used the imprint to publish more than 25 books. Campus Chills (2009) and Obsessions (2020) are two of the titles he used to anthologize other authors writing. Rude Awakenings from Sleeping Rough is the first single author title from a different author that he has published.

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