The Graveyard Shift

THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT cleverly combines pop culture and horror in a millennial skewing slasher-crime, and sees a horror-loving radio show become the stage of a gruesome murder. Finely plotted with a brilliant central character, THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT is a magnificent resurgence of the literary slasher through a modern, feminist lens. It will be published by Datura Books in UK and US in September 2023. You can read more in The Bookseller announcement here.  Maria is an experienced screenwriter but also open to discussion about whether or not she would adapt this – strike dependent!

Tinsel Munroe’s dream of working in radio hasn’t turned out to be everything she hoped it would. She has her own show – the aptly titled The Graveyard Shift – where she celebrates the sounds of horror-cinema. It’s a pop cultural oasis for the niche audience she has cultivated, but the wage is barely enough to cover her rent and the midnight hours are putting a strain on her relationship with tattooist boyfriend, Zack. After three years at Melbourne’s coolest station, she’s seemingly no closer to a prime-time slot.

That is, until someone is murdered live on air.

Mistaking it for a Halloween prank at first, a visit from police informs Tinsel that the hysterical call was, in fact, the real deal. She is freaked out by the horrible incident, but her true crime obsessed sister Pandora is fascinated by it. While detectives assure them the killer will soon be caught, the bodies continue to drop with the killer striking at locations tied to Australian film history in increasingly gruesome ways. With a growing, macabre audience to her radio show – that potentially includes the killer – Tinsel begins receiving strange messages over the text lines. Her home and her workplace suddenly aren’t the sanctuaries she once thought they were.

Tinsel and her sister are left no choice but to team up with Detective James as they race to find the connection between her and the culprit. The people she thought she could trust are now those she should fear the most. In order to survive, Tinsel is going to have to listen to more than just the airwaves…

Maria Lewis is a best-selling author, screenwriter, and pop culture etymologist from Australia. She’s the author of the internationally published Supernatural Sisters series of eight books, which includes the Aurealis Award-winning THE WITCH WHO COURTED DEATH. As a screenwriter, she has worked across projects for AMC, Netflix, SBS, Ubisoft, ABC, DC Comics and many more. She’s the presenter, writer and producer of award-winning audio documentaries, and her journalism has appeared in publications around the world (such as the New York Post, Guardian and Daily Mail). THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT is the triumphant return to her first love: she started out as a crime beat reporter…

Maria is represented by Ed Wilson at Johnson and Alcock.