Creatures of the Night follows an orphan fleeing captivity into the Yukon, where she finds a community of women and confronts human predators and a monstrous presence stalking them. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve wanted to write horror – and a werewolf horror in particular – since I’ve been writing. I was a little kid thinking about how scary werewolves are. But what scared me about them was not a big, menacing dog. I never really got into the stories about the person who has the werewolf curse. For me, I was always more sympathetic toward, or I was more scared for, whoever the other character was. I really loved The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. It scared me so much as a kid. That centralized the victims, not the predator, as werewolf stories tend to do. Talbot and such. We’re supposed to feel for them. And in the other movies, Jenny Agutter’s character, or Emily Perkins’ Brigitte, or Dee Wallace in The Howling, I was always so much more on their side or feeling for them because here was someone they loved and trusted who turned into an out-of-control beast and tried to kill them in their own homes. Of course, that is absolutely a very real and horrifying situation for many women and children out there in the world, especially women and children. So it had to be young women. And of course all kids go through puberty, but for women it’s this huge transition around them where they go from innocent, cute little doll to something to be preyed upon and sexualised, sometimes consciously but also unconsciously, and by members of their own family. The men and women in their own homes suddenly start treating them differently. All of a sudden the world is full of predators, and they are the prey. And it happens so young for them, you know, you listen to women talk about the first time a family member sexualised them, either by accident or deliberately, and it’s like, they’re kids. Children. I think that Little Red Riding Hood takes on a whole new meaning when you know that. The coat being red is a metaphor: the predator, the girl going out on her own. It’s such a vulnerable time.

So I had that. Little Red Riding Hood was the big one, but all of the stories that have used lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescence. I am a huge fan of Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, and I love Ginger Snaps the movie, but I wanted to bring the concept back to the Red Riding Hood origins, where adolescence makes the girl a predator, which I think is a little unfair, and instead makes them vulnerable to society’s predators. And I needed a setting where all of that could come together, so to speak, with the men everywhere, and religion, and the authorities, all these patriarchal, male-dominated spheres. So a mining boom was perfect. And when I found Donald Trump’s connection to Klondike – his grandfather Frederick was a vile, sex-trafficking pimp and predator; that’s where the Trump fortune started – I had to, because who is the most prominent face of a predator of children today? Of course. Epstein’s number 1 fan and friend. Plus Yukon, Dawson City, it’s so remote, so cold, so isolated. I love Canada’s landscapes. I spend as much time as I can there, and I always feel like I’m going to be inspired by the surroundings. And I did follow the White Trail up to Dawson City, by car – I’m not crazy – and I couldn’t think of a better, or worse, situation to put these women in.

How did you approach writing Eliza’s transformation from the frightened Miss Laura into someone capable of defining her own identity?

As much as I love them and they are an inspiration, I’ve also always been a little offended by the metaphor of adolescence turning a girl into a monster. You see it a lot. Sometimes it’s done beautifully well, with great sensitivity, but I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to have it, yes, make her vulnerable to predation, but also that feminine rage that comes upon so many girls in puberty; that’s a strength. That’s a defensive mechanism. And with everything I just described, how society just turns on so many girls, of course they lash out. Of course they scream and slam doors and go nuts. I wanted it to both make Eliza vulnerable but also be the defining difference that makes her a survivor and helps her stand up against the dangers.

The women in the novel have remarkably distinct voices and relationships; how did you develop them as individuals while maintaining the sense of a shared found family?

I worked in a women’s prison for three years as a teacher. I taught creative writing and various other literacy-based courses, and while I would never directly depict anyone’s personality with whom I met in there, there were certain dynamics among the women that were really inspiring. The depths of their character. It sounds silly, but women in prison are not only a cohort that are demonized, painted in very simple dimensions, but stupidly sexualised by predator filmmakers as well. But found families were everywhere in there. I saw women who hated each other come to one another’s aid if a vulnerable moment should have come upon them in the presence of the guards or something; the need to protect each other from predation – which the screws in that prison absolutely were – came before any other disputes between the women. It was amazing. Society never looks deep enough to see how amazing the dynamics are in a women’s prison. And who else gets treated like that? Sex workers. In horror especially, the genre has a lot to answer for; the sexual women always die horribly, and they’re never really explored. They don’t have origins or destinations. They’re just victim one, victim two, and the way they’re written, especially if you go back to slasher movies from say twenty to twenty-five years ago, there was almost a fetishised delight or voyeurism in watching these characters die.

So it was very important to get their individuality. I spent a lot of time on that. Who are these women, where do they want to be, where did they come from? I had a great cache of experiences to draw from since the prison.

Was the creature intended to represent the predatory behavior of the men in the story, or do you see it as having a different symbolic meaning?

It was a culmination of the predation by the men, yes, and the religious institutions, and the authorities. Once you open that door, you see it everywhere. Structural predation. Not just enabling predators, but maintaining the vulnerability of their prey. That’s why I had to have a culturally diverse cast. Because as bad as it could be in a Catholic orphanage, there were also residential schools, there were brothels run by Trump-esque men, there were police who used their authority and their positions to prevent people from protecting themselves while not protecting anyone as they should. And of course the fetishisation of Shuya’s culture. You see how a woman like Tigra could occur. I’m not asking for anyone to sympathise with Tigra, really, because she’s ultimately doing her share of awful things, but you can see how a person like that could be created by a world so fiercely predatory.

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