Announcing Night’s Edge, a New Novel from Liz Kerin
Liz Kerin’s Night’s Edge, a poignant vampire novel about mothers, daughters, and the price of freedom, will be published by Nightfire in early 2023!
Mia and her mother have rules, the kind you live or die by. They’ve had to, ever since Izzy was infected with Saratov’s Syndrome thirteen years ago, when Mia was only ten years old.
Both beguiling and phenomenally strong, “Saras” must consume fresh human blood to survive, and it only takes seven seconds of sunlight to burn them beyond recognition. They are considered so dangerous they aren’t allowed to live among society. Sara Centers, masking as treatment facilities, simply lock the infected away from the outside world, never to be heard from again.
The two of them have been able to keep Izzy’s condition a secret for more than a decade, living by their code. They go outside only at night. They don’t let anyone follow them home. They have each other, and that has to be enough. When Mia discovers Izzy has been breaking the sacred rules, all of their carefully constructed walls come crashing down. She finds unexpected solace in Jade, a carefree, rebellious musician who shows Mia what it would be like to live a normal, twenty-something life. But is Mia strong enough to break away from her mother?
Both a story about the fight for survival and an emotional portrayal of a deeply flawed mother-daughter relationship, Night’s Edge is a searing, poignant exploration of the dangers of codependency, and how sometimes in order to get out alive you have to abandon the ones you love.
Here’s what Liz Kerin has to say:
“The characters of Mia and her mother have lived rent-free in my head for nearly a decade. That being said, I needed time and space to process my own experiences before I was ready to channel them into a work of fiction. Night’s Edge is a horror “memoir” about a child whose life gets turned upside down by her mother’s mysterious and terrifying illness. I find I’m able to write from a more personal and honest place when I can use some sort of genre element as a buffer between myself and my past. While I obviously didn’t grow up in a world where a vampire could seduce your mom and blow up your whole life, I have felt that exact kind of fear and nauseating day-to-day uncertainty. This story is fictional. Mia’s emotions are not. Writing this book was a strange, exhilarating kind of therapy for me, and I’m honored that Nightfire has given me a platform to share these characters with you.
A lot of people have asked if I was inspired to craft this world because of the pandemic. Honestly, I just so happened to finish the manuscript in 2020 after years of chipping away at the concept. I will say, however, that the worldbuilding was definitely bolstered by feeling so isolated this past year, and all of those dramatic exercises of “pretend as if” weren’t pretend anymore. A horrible illness was taking the planet by storm. It was easy to imagine a universe where this had happened because it was actually happening. I’d been living the emotional experience of my main character, but I wasn’t living in her world yet. I guess 2020 was good for one thing—although she’s not off the hook yet, not by a long shot.
Anyway, I’m over the full harvest moon to be joining the coven at Nightfire and I can’t wait till this book—and its follow-up!—are in your hands. I’m so excited to put Mia back in the ring to battle her (literal) demons to the death, and for you to meet her in Night’s Edge.”
And from Kelly Lonesome, senior editor at Nightfire:
“Night’s Edge is horror doing what it does best: examining painful experiences in an emotionally charged and unique way. Cloaked as a fictional monster we know and love so well – vampires – Night’s Edge grapples with addiction, codependency and the abuse that comes along with both. It’s a propulsive coming-of-age story about a young woman who had to grow up way too fast and who is now only beginning to find herself at age 23, in the middle of a nationwide and personal crisis.
Just as Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels transcended what we’d come to expect from werewolf stories, so too does Night’s Edge. This is a novel about vampires, but it isn’t a novel about vampires. At its core, Night’s Edge is about a daughter as petrified to leave her mother’s side as she is to stay, and I think a lot of horror readers will be able to see themselves in the world that Liz has so beautifully created. She explores all of these themes with care and empathy, adding a razor-sharp layer of social commentary to the monster narrative. Nightfire is delighted to welcome Liz and Mia aboard!”
Liz Kerin (she/her) is an author, playwright, screenwriter and a graduate of the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of The Phantom Forest (Inkshares, 2019) and the play STOP-MOTION, which was awarded the 2018 Parity Commission and is in production with Parity Productions in NYC. She lives in LA.
Night’s Edge will hit shelves in early 2023!
