Book Title: GOODNIGHT MONSTERS
Character Name: Lia Montgomery
How would you describe your family or your childhood?
My childhood was picture perfect—a patient mother who had her quasi-healthy chocolate chip cookies at the ready each day after school, a permanent imprint on the edge of my sister’s bed for how often we played Uno while talking about boys, and a dad who let me help drive the tractor and feed the goats and asked me for a dress-up date every month, just the two of us, to talk about my future hopes and dreams. Picture perfect, right? Until it wasn’t.
What was your greatest talent?
My ability to imagine, to create stories in my mind. Is that a talent? I know it doesn’t translate to anything tangible, not something I can quite share with others, but it feels like a skill, a talent for sure. I have this strong capacity to imagine something so vivid I often forget it’s not real. Maybe one day I’ll write these stories down. Into a novel or something.
Significant other?
Evan? My husband? He’s pretty significant. Evan saved me from a Freudian relationship I was dabbling in, literally grabbed my hand and dragged me away. Not forcefully; he’s gentlemanly and thoughtful and only sometimes sexist. But we can’t help what we’re taught. I blame his mother for that.
Biggest challenge in relationships?
It’s not who’s doing the laundry, I’ll tell you that. My friend Celia would say it’s monogamy. I would say . . . I don’t know if I can say it out loud, next question, please.
Where do you live?
In the South! I’ve experienced many parts of Tennessee—rural farm life, suburban city living, even a mountain retreat.
Do you have any enemies?
Not anymore. Oh wait, my mother-in-law. I’m not sure why she keeps coming up in this conversation.
How do you feel about the place where you are now? Is there something you are particularly attached to, or particularly repelled by, in this place?
I’ve really come to understand that home is inside of me. The places we live, the geographical location of our bodies, are not as meaningful as coming home to self. OMG therapy Kool-Aid coming at you. It’s true, though.
Do you have children, pets, both, or neither?
Um, next question.
What do you do for a living?
I watch dead bodies decompose. I know, it’s weird, but it’s important work. The FBI can solve murder cases based on the data I track. As an anthropologist, I used to work with fossils, so I consider the body donations just like fossils, only newer. It takes a keen eye to notice subtle changes in a decomposing body day to day. And a strong stomach.
Greatest disappointment?
That I couldn’t save my dad.
Greatest source of joy?
Life. A beating heart.
What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun?
I love daydreaming and can get lost in my own thoughts for incredible periods of time. It’s like meditating, really.
What is your greatest personal failing, in your view?
Oh. I think anyone who’s familiar with my situation already knows this. Must we harp on it?
What keeps you awake at night?
The monsters in my mind. Obviously. But seriously though…it’s true. It’s the little nagging inside. The where-why-how’s of all those questions and annoyances from the day that just poke and poke and poke at you until you want to snap! And I fall into these half-dreams—nightmares—about bizarre things like slitting my husband’s throat because, like, I’m so mad from stupid marriage stuff, but at the same time I wonder what it would be like to watch him die. To watch his essence drain from his body. That imagination talent I have is pretty wild. Plus my curtains are not blackout curtains and sometimes the moon is incessantly bright and who can really sleep with all that intrusion of light?
What is the most pressing problem you have at the moment?
You know, I’ve learned that all problems come from within. So I guess my most pressing problem is me, myself. I am the problem. Isn’t that a Taylor Swift song?
Is there something that you need or want that you don’t have? For yourself or for someone important to you?
I’m going to say simply, time.
Why don’t you have it? What is in the way?
You may recall that I am the problem. I get in my own way. I think it holds true for all of us.
For fans of Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Ashley Audrain’s The Push, a psychological horror novel that follows a woman obsessed with death who must decide if she’s fit to bring new life into this world—especially after someone she’s fantasized about killing turns up dead.
Southern suburban housewife Lia and her husband Evan have long dreamed of becoming parents—but when a pregnancy test shows positive, Lia questions whether she wants the child and keeps her pregnancy a secret.
As she’s holding new life inside, she intentionally surrounds herself with death by blackmailing her way into a job at a forensic anthropology center endearingly called The Body Farm. At The Farm, monsters emerge from within Lia—the desire to kill—and she begins daydreaming about murder. Because fantasizing never hurt anyone. Or so she thinks.
Then a body donation to The Farm turns out to be someone she’s imagined killing, and reality and fantasy begin to blur. As people around her begin to die, Lia loses trust in her loved ones and herself . . . and ultimately must put her monsters to bed.
Horror | Thriller Psychological [ She Writes Press, On Sale: September 1, 2026, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9798896363880 / eISBN: 9798896363897 ]
Suzanne was destined to write strange and dark characters considering she was crushing on Hannibal Lecter as a teenager in the Nineties rather than the pretty boy next door. But before turning her hand to novel writing, she studied nutrition at the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, becoming a Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist. While the science- and relationship- based career has served her, so do isolated days spent creating—a true Gemini. A Tennessee native now transplanted to Colorado, Suzanne finds each new character she writes calls her back to her roots, writing in the voices of nontraditional southern women.
Only after writing four novels did Suzanne discover she writes horror. Not the gory, slasher, or even ghost story type of the genre, but the horrors of our everyday lives—societal and cultural pressures, expectations of femininity, the misgivings within our minds. She believes our own psyche can be more horrific than the external world.
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