Zach Stivers – The Witches of Claw and Fang

Today, I have author Zach Stivers in the interview chair. We’re discussing his latest release The Witches of Claw and Fang, a paranormal romance thriller. Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway.

“A hard-edged werewolf crashes into the life of an isolated witch who has temporarily given up her magic. They must overcome their differences and learn to harness their dangerous powers to stop a supernatural evil from corrupting their small town nestled in the Appalachian Mountains.”

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1. What are you passionate about these days?

Zach: Bookbans. Stopping them from happening, that is. Can you imagine, being like really, really gung-ho about removing To Kill a Mockingbird from libraries? I just don’t get that. It’s good business though, for an author to get their book banned. They have a whole corner in my bookstore for “banned books.” That said, all joking aside, children need access to books. Historical books, books about people different from them, books about people who may surprisingly be a lot more like them than they imagined. Not every child can travel to different communities or time-periods or meet people who think differently than they do, but every child should have access to books that can do that. Because that’s what learning is about. Broadening your understanding of the world.

2. What do you do to unwind and relax?

Zach: I’d love to say that I pour my wife and I a cup of tea, put on an evening jazz video on Youtube, and we curl up with our books every night, but that’s just simply not true. Sometimes we do that, on the rare occasion we have plenty of free time in the evening, but it doesn’t happen all that often. The real answer is I collapse into bed and scroll Tiktok for twenty minutes and try to find one of those ASMR videos where someone taps their fingers gently in my face and whispers to me that it’s time to fall asleep.

3. Do you have a favourite movie?

The ‘Burbs with Tom Hanks and Corey Feldman and Carrie Fisher. I’ve watched it at least a hundred times. I can basically quote every line, but it still makes me laugh, every time.

4. What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

Zach: I’m not sure I can really call any of my travels ‘literary pilgrimages,’ but I definitely try to read local authors whenever I travel to new places. The best travel/ author combo experience I’ve had would probably be traveling to Iceland in the heart of winter, after having read Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The northern light’s tour guide on our bus took us past his home when the clouds rolled in and made it impossible to see the Aurora Borealis. As you can imagine, no one on the tour was very happy, except me. I was grinning like a fool at my wife, whispering trivia about the book and the author, while everyone else glumly stared at the night sky, hoping the clouds would go away.

Highly recommend the book, by the way. It’s sort of Moby Dick-esque, but with sheep instead of whales.

5. What inspired you to write this book?

Zach: I’ve had an obsession with werewolves since I was like six years old, and in a lot of media I find that they are frequently given the short-end of the stick and treated as subservient compared to their over-glamorized brethren, the vampire. I’ve always thought werewolves were the more interesting creatures. They are uncivilized, bestial man. Humankind without all of the societal expectations and burdens. The real curse of the werewolf isn’t the silver allergy or the big incisors or the lust for red, dripping meat, the curse is that you’ve suddenly thrown open the door to the primal soul that we normally keep shut and locked. It’s the dangerous freedom of letting the inner subconscious out to romp and rend. Werewolves– like the Incredible Hulk or Mr. Hyde– are a way for man to explore their ancestral, animal selves.

And witches- spooky, non-human, ancient witches, have always terrified me. Their deception and deceit and hunger for char-grilled, candy-stuffed children, I mean that’s just nightmare fuel.

So I wanted to explore these two paranormal entities without side-lining them, and examine the potential consequences that might arise if a witch were bitten by a werewolf. Would they also become a werewolf? Would they be able to stay in their coven? Or join the werewolf pack? I thought there were interesting stories to tell there, and that’s how it began. Of course, the story always mutates from the starting idea, so I’m not going to give away how things evolved during the writing process, but that was the jumping off point.

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Title: The Witches of Claw and Fang
Series: N/A
Author: Zach Stivers
Genre: Paranormal Romance, Thriller

Welcome to the cozy mountain town of Pineville, Virginia. It’s autumn, the leaves are gold and orange, the apples are crisp and sweet, town residents are going missing, and a bloodthirsty monster with ten-inch claws is loose in the forest.

Blurb: Morgan Reaves tries her damndest NOT to use magic. That’s why she hid in Pineville, after all. But now, Morgan needs to dust off her spell-casting skills, ASAP. Problem is, she may have lost her touch.

She has another problem, too, and it smells like wet dog.

Max: AKA the naked man with rip-cord tight muscles that stumbled out of the woods near Morgan’s house, ranting about curses and conspiracies and a coven of witches.

Is he a werewolf? Well, yes. But he’s also the only one who can help her defeat whatever evil is threatening her adopted hometown. That is, if they manage to not kill each other first…

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She leaned into the car and reloaded the veggies one at a time back into the bag, her head pressed against the seat as she rooted around on the floor mats. Joey started barking.

“I said he’s not there!”

She felt the final onion just on her fingertips, but she couldn’t quite reach it. She adjusted and stretched out her hand… Joey’s barking got louder, closer, and more frantic.

What the hell was the matter with the dog?

The car jolted sideways, slamming Morgan in the shins, knocking her legs out behind her, wrenching the breath out of her lungs. A massive vice-like hand gripped her ankle, yanked her upward and tossed her haphazardly into the air. She crashed down into the lawn some twenty yards away, her skull bouncing hard off the ground. She blinked, trying to clear her head. She was in the middle of the lawn.

How was she in the middle of the lawn?

Joey yelped. She looked over as a massive furry brown thing slapped Joey halfway across the yard. Bear, she thought, in a detached, concussed sort-of-way, but it was clearly not a bear.

It was taller and thinner than a bear and it looked more wolf than bear and it looked more demonic than either wolf or bear and it glared at her with ferocious golden eyes. It took a step toward her, and she could see it had a thick scar running up its ribs onto its neck, could see sinewy muscles under brown fur, could see absurdly large white teeth inside a snarling lupine mouth. Could see a torn piece of her mail haphazardly dangling from its sickeningly large, clawed hands.

A scream got stuck in her throat.

Fear flooded her mind, pushing out the fog of the concussion. She knew she needed to act, before the monster turned her and Joey into dinner. But she felt pressed frozen into the ground.

Joey found his courage before she did. The dog barked and lunged at the monster. The beast leapt toward Joey.

“No!”

She pushed out her hands, fingers dancing, wrists snapping with an instinctual twist. The wind gusted behind her, and she heard a musical sizzling zap and the demon-wolf-thing, mere moments from striking Joey, yelped and leapt back, fleeing for the woods. Joey barked at it and chased it to the edge of the property but did not follow it past the tree line. Morgan ran for the front door, pulling the keys from her sweater pocket.

“Joey, come!”

She fumbled at the deadbolt. She tried the wrong key at first in her panic, flipped and flipped the key chain around, almost dropped the key chain completely, found the right key, jammed it at the door and it bounced off the hole and then it bounced off the hole again and she knew the beast-monster must be emerging from the woods by now, surely it was coming for her, blood-red slobber dripping off its fangs, and she realized she still was using the wrong key and she groaned and then she found it, the correct key, finally—thank god—but her hands trembled and the key wouldn’t slide in the hole, and then the keys slipped out from her sweaty fingers and they dropped onto the deck, and then, as if in slow motion, gravity pulled them through a crack between the wood planks and the blackness under the deck consumed them.

She wanted to scream and yell and pound on the door.

Focus.

She heard rustling in the woods.

Joey began barking again at her side.

It’s coming.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

She pressed two fingers against the keyhole, extended her other hand out into the air, flicked her fingers, and visualized the lock turning.

Remember.

Remember the old ways.

Remember what your father forbid.

The door unlocked.

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Zach Stivers lives with his wife in Virginia, at the foot of the Shenandoah National Park. He loves to tell people they do lots of hiking in their free time, but usually they just go for a short stroll in the woods with their dogs and then stop off for a drink or two at the local brewery. That still counts as hiking, right? He has a degree in English Literature from Florida State University, runs really slow half-marathons, and leads an overly-competitive book club that reads a book a week … or else.

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