MARIA LEWIS

The urban fantasy writer bringing greater diversity to genre fiction

The brilliant urban fantasy novelist shares the secrets of her latest book, The Witch Who Courted Death.

sometimes, it takes a while for the world to catch up – it was 2014 when maria lewis pitched the idea of The Witch Who Courted Death. while she sold Who’s Afraid?, her much acclaimed novel about a female werewolf and its sequel Who’s Afraid Too?, publishers weren’t keen on the idea of an urban fantasy where, to quote lewis, “the main character was a queer woman with a limb difference.”

fast-forward five years and, while progress has often been maddeningly slow, things have changed. “Not only is representation and diversity something publishers want to have on their roster, it’s commercially viable,” says lewis. “You’d like to think there’s a hunger for stories like that, but the reality is they only get greenlit if there are similar examples that have made money out there in the market.

“if furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road didn’t exist, if marvel’s Bucky Barnes wasn’t around or, heck, even something like Atomic Blonde hadn’t been extremely successful, i don’t know if there would’ve been a belief that The Witch Who Courted Death would find an audience, regardless of whether the big bosses like it or not.”

in which case we would’ve missed out, because the novel shows how lewis is coming of age as a writer. at its centre lies Casper von klitzing, the world’s most powerful medium and a character readers first met in Who’s Afraid Too?, whose life is turned upside down by an attack that leaves her learning to use a prosthetic arm. Casper’s told the attack was orchestrated by witches, but she’s not buying this.

MENTAL STRENGTH

for lewis, the book was in part a way to explore a different kind of protagonist to earlier books. “i was really excited to spend time with a main character whose strength isn’t physical,” she says. “[Who’s Afraid? protagonist] tommi’s an angry, impulsive, occasionally villainous werewolf who can decapitate an enemy with her bare hands if she wants. Casper’s power and her strength is mental, it comes from her mind, and she’s in her 30s: she knows who she is, she’s not on that journey of self-discovery like tommi.”

that said, these are books set in the same fictional universe, and certain elements and writerly tics inevitably recur. in particular, they’re written by a novelist who grew up, initially in rural New Zealand, steeped in genre. “my grandad would tell me stories about werewolves, that they existed, and it was the kind of place where you’d believe that what he was telling you wasn’t bullshit!” she says.

she also loved old monster movies, such as Universal’s Frankenstein. “the characters were really complex and relatable, but they were also stuck in these changing situations and being very misunderstood,” she says.

Nevertheless, lewis, who has Polynesian heritage, began to question traditional genre narratives. “a lot of werewolf stories are almost exclusively male and almost exclusively white male stories, which is kind of strange because if anyone is going to understand blood and gore, and turning into a monster a few days a month, it would be women,” she says. in contrast, Who’s Afraid and its sequel were “about female rage, the feminine grotesque and using lycanthropy as a metaphor for the experience of growing up biracial”.

ANY WITCH WAY

from a different angle, when lewis was growing up in the 1990s, tales of witches – The Craft, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Practical Magic, Charmed and many more – were at the centre of popular culture. “it started an early obsession with witchcraft and wicca practices, which manifested into adulthood, and as you grow up you realise a lot of these elements are the same principals of feminism: sisterhood, equality, self-power,” says lewis. The Witch Who Courted Death, she adds, “uses witches and ghosts to explore the idea of ‘otherness’ and familial relationships”.

it’s an approach she will continue with her next book, The Wailing Woman, which “follows a family of female banshees who run a forensic cleaning business”. Banshees, she says, are “a means to talk about finding your voice and using it”. the book will also feature familiar characters from lewis’s other books, including It Came From The Deep (think The Little Mermaid meets Creature From The Black Lagoon), which gives lewis immense satisfaction. “You can’t just immediately start with a shared world, you have to earn it, and by book five we’re deep into it,” she says.

Considering she’s also a journalist and screenwriter, and travels extensively to research and promote her books, lewis is clearly busy – but she’s not grumbling. in part that’s down to a health scare, a transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke, that she had at 22. “strokes actually happen to young people all the time, it’s super-common,” she says. “it’s just that it’s not really a super-sexy disease.”

this incident helped lewis (now an ambassador for the australian stroke foundation) to find focus. “it became this catalyst for me becoming a lot more hungry and a lot more ruthless in terms of trying to get [my writing] in front of publishers and trying to get my stories out there.”

The Witch Who Courted Death is released in paperback on 13 June, published by Orbit

“My sTroke was a caTaLysT and Made Me More ruThLess”