INTERVIEW: Evan Leikam
Today, I’m delighted to chat with Evan Leikam, an exciting new voice in fantasy fiction and the host of the Book Reviews Kill Podcast. Evan’s first novel, Anji Kills a King, will be hitting shelves on May 13th, 2025, and it’s already creating buzz. As a lifelong fan of fantasy stories, Evan shared insights into his creative journey, the unique experience of shifting from reviewer to author, and his love for Powell’s Books.
[GdM] How did your background as a musician and music influence your storytelling approach? Does crafting a song feel similar to crafting a story? Do they occupy similar mental creative spaces?
[EL] I’m so happy I went through the process of learning instruments before trying to write. Trying to get better at guitar or drums etc. involves a lot of sitting with the frustration that comes with not being as good as you want to be. I learned in those formative musical years that you really just need to power through being disappointed with your output, and eventually you’ll start learning more and making things you’re somewhat proud of.
Also, most of the songwriting I did while playing in bands was a collaborative effort, so lots of arguing and compromise. There’s still some of that far into the editing process of putting a novel out, but I much prefer sitting alone with just myself and the manuscript for the bulk of the time the book is getting done.
[GdM] You mentioned being a game fan—how do video game elements influence your narrative style or world-building? What is your favorite game right now, and why?
[EL] My favorite games right now are the FromSoft Souls games (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Sekiro). Aside from the challenge the combat can bring, I love the way those games tell their stories (besides Sekiro, I guess, which is pretty clear). Everything you need to know is hidden in the items you find and the conversations you have, but it’s up to the player to dig deep and unravel the mysteries behind the lore. These games also go all out with their presentation of the world and beings and rules in it. There are surprises behind every corner, and just when you think you’ve got everything figured out a giant monster with eyeballs for kneecaps bursts through a wall. It’s amazing. I’m also a big fan of metroidvanias like Hollow Knight, Castlevania SOTN, and Ori and the Blind Forest, which are kind of like Souls games in their own right with regard to exploration and engagement.
Of course, games like The Witcher 3, Elder Scrolls, and Baldur’s Gate 3 have inspired me to write, considering the vast and tangled stories they’re able to tell while presenting a terrific gaming experience. So much to glean from those ones.
I also enjoy Apex Legends, but I am absolute garbage at it. My main is Bloodhound.
[GdM] Clearly, books are your jam. Can you gush about an SFF novel that captured your imagination and tell us if it shaped any aspect of Anji Kills a King?
[EL] Absolutely. I think the early drafts of AKAK (before it became more my own thing) were largely influenced by Stephen King’s The Gunslinger and Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy. They world and stories aren’t exactly the same, obviously, but I loved the idea of two people traversing a wide and dangerous world (Gunslinger), and a character you love but kind of want to shake because they’re making suck terrible decisions (Farseer).
I was also reading a lot of Abercrombie at the time of finishing up the first draft. I love his dialogue, his realism, the personality he delivers. I don’t think I write anywhere close to Abercrombie’s standard, but his style encouraged me to let loose and pull emotion out of these characters and the situations they find themselves in.
I do also want to mention Sarah J. Maas’s character, Nesta Archeron, specifically in the book A Court of Silver Flames, which is from her point of view. Nesta has such a depth that I, as a reader, was almost reluctant to see or accept. I thought Maas did a wonderful job showcasing in Nesta how we might bury our feelings, our traumas, and our intentions under a thick layer we think more easy to express, one that would better serve us in a situation we wouldn’t want to be in. So while I wouldn’t comp mine and Maas’s books for their plots (or their romantic tension and release, sorry), I would say both the main characters of my story were inspired by characters like Nesta.
[GdM] Your podcast Book Reviews Kill dives deep into countless stories. Has analyzing other authors’ work ever shifted your writing approach?
[EL] It absolutely has. In order to have an entertaining and informative conversation about a story, you need to engage with it on a deep level. I’ve had to become maybe a bit more analytical than I’d like with some books, but I think learning how to pick them apart and understand why they work (or don’t work) for me was crucial in building my own.
[GdM] Which feels tougher—reviewing someone else’s story or bracing yourself for how readers might review yours? And how do you keep your inner reviewer from taking over when you sit down to write?
[EL] Great question. I’d say reviewing someone else’s work, now that I’m more familiar with the process and how difficult it can be, is much more difficult. I find myself saying “well, I didn’t like that, and I might not have done it, but it’s your book, it must have made sense to you”. As a reviewer, I’ve always been much more interested in debating the character choices, the plot lines, and revelations and climaxes etc. than picking apart the author’s prose or voice or pacing or whatever. I want to critique from inside the world, inside the fandom, more than I want to dissect someone’s approach or the “quality” of their craft, if that makes sense.
As for your question about readers and their reviews of my work: go nuts, y’all. I’m writing to the best of my ability and building stories I want to read and worlds I want to be in. If it isn’t someone’s jam, that’s totally fine. My priority is self-expression through an immersive story, and if people connect with that story and those characters along the way that’s incredible. If they don’t that’s okay too.
My inner reviewer seems to help quite a bit while I’m working, especially when I’m trying to work out a plot hole or character arc, but sometimes I have to tell him to go outside and touch grass while I get some actual words down. The worst thing I can do is get mired in the bog of self-doubt because I ended a sentence with a preposition.
Author Evan Leikam
[GdM] Podcasting and reviewing must be eye-opening. What’s one surprising storytelling lesson you’ve discovered through dissecting others’ narratives?
[EL] As Vonnegut said: “Make sure your character wants something, even if it’s a glass of water.”
[GdM] What’s been the most rewarding part of creating bookish content online, and does it fuel your creativity, or do you sometimes feel pressure from it?
[EL] It sounds so cliché, but it’s the friends I’ve made along the way. The online reading community is incredible. There are so many conversations I’ve had and stories I’ve read that never would have come my way if not for Booktok and Bookstagram. I owe everything I have to those spaces. I’m still learning from being in them to this day, and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so.
There is definitely some pressure to keep putting out consistent content, but I think influencers and creatives will feel this in every medium for as long as the internet exists. Hell, it probably existed before the internet too. There’s always more you could be doing, better ways of entertaining and engaging with people. That sort of self-applied pressure is kind of always there, but having such an incredible community helps take some of it away.
[GdM] Can you tell us about your new novel, Anji Kills a King?
[EL] Of course. AKAK is about a young woman who works as a laundress in the depths of a castle. By chance, she finds herself faced with an opportunity to not only assassinate the ruler of the country she lives in, but to escape the city with her life. She actually makes it a fair distance from her old home, but she’s captured by a famous bounty hunter who is determined to drag her back to answer for her crimes. What follows is a sort of road-trip story from Anji’s perspective. She, of course, does not want to return with her captor to face torture and execution, and the bounty hunter certainly wants to get her there, but their exact reasons become more murky as we spend more time with them on the road. They’re also being hunted by…well, readers will find out.
I wanted to take someone arrogant yet insecure, passionate yet somewhat ignorant, eager but sort of sheltered, and throw them into an uncaring world and make them face the consequences of their actions, even if their heart was in the right place. It’s a bit of a self insert, and I’m kind of talking to myself sometimes in the book. I’ve felt so correct about things in my life, and it’s taken other people’s reaction to my own actions, in addition to experiences I never thought I’d have, to change my mind about the way I view the world. It can be a painful process, but ultimately so rewarding. That’s the essence of what I’m trying to capture with this book. Watching a character work through inner conflict and change for the better (maybe for the greater good) makes for a compelling read in any world.
[GdM] Tell me about Anji and Hawk—they have such compelling chemistry. How did. their dynamic evolve during the writing process?
[EL] Thank you! Without spoiling too much, the Hawk was initially a pretty one dimensional antagonist. I wanted someone to capture Anji, and that’s about as far as I’d taken her character before heavier revisions. I got a lot of inspiration for the Hawk from Kratos in God of War (2018), the Hound from ASOIAF, and Joel from The Last of Us. These are characters who know much more about the world’s hard reality than their younger counterparts, but they still have their own demons to grapple with.
Anji and the Hawk definitely have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other, and I kept a lot of that in, but they also underestimate each other. It was a really fun dynamic to write and work through.
[GdM] You start the novel boldly and bloodily—with a king’s assassination. Did you always know you’d start there with a proverbial bang or a slice of the carotid?
[EL] I actually wrote that prologue pretty late in the revising process. The book started with Anji in a tavern for the longest time, and I’d played around with giving the reader bite-sized glimpses into what had happened before Anji is caught, but I ultimately decided to have a small chunk at the very beginning just showing it all.
Personally, I like that the book starts with blood spurting all over Anji. No thought, no descriptions of the room or anything. It really lends a lot to how spontaneous and not very well thought out it was of her to do that. I’ll admit, however, that it’s a pretty gross way to start a book, for sure.
[GdM] As a debut author with an established online following, did knowing readers might analyze every detail embolden your writing choices? Or did it ever make you hesitate?
[EL] My mindset has been this pretty much from the beginning: I’m going to be critiqued no matter what, so I might as well do what I want. I hesitate if I think I can do better or squeeze more out of a scene or arc or something, but I try to stay as true to what I want it to be as I possibly can.
[GdM] I’m fascinated by the Menagerie, your masked bounty hunters. What’s the story behind their creation, and do you secretly have a favorite among them?
[EL] I knew I wanted more people chasing after Anji (I think the main inspiration for them was from 3:10 to Yuma, though that’s a little different of a dynamic), but I also wanted something different in this story—not just another group of people. Let’s make them legendary and mysterious, but kind of past their prime as well. Give them magical masks—that’s just a good time right there.
My favorite to write was the Bear. She’s just absolutely lost her mind. I literally had to make an effort to make her rants kind of nonsensical in their own way, but also kind of terrifying. So much fun to write.
[GdM] Your action scenes feel effortlessly cinematic. Was there a particular scene in Anji Kills a King that flowed naturally or required wrestling onto the page? Do you storyboard your fight scenes?
[EL] Thanks for saying that. I personally think my fight scenes could use some tuning up. I don’t like to read super technical fight scenes in books, so I tackled my own with maybe too firm of a grip if that makes sense. I don’t storyboard the fight scenes, but I try to remember to make them efficient in the sense that they should be exciting and also move the story or the character forward. A fight should reveal something or change something, not just be there for spectacle (my opinion and preference, of course).
[GdM] Morally gray characters are the best. Did you struggle to balance Anji’s darker decisions with her likability, or did you wholly lean into the moral messiness?
[EL] It took a while to land on that balance. I think that’s where a lot of the revising went. By my 20th run through, I had a good idea of how Anji would react to things, what she would say, how her feelings evolved over the course of events. I want her to be proactive, but flawed, so dancing on that line took a lot of erasing and rewriting.
[GdM] Finally—and crucially—as a fellow Portlander (I just moved away) at heart, we need to settle this first: Can we officially agree Powell’s is the greatest bookstore on the planet?
[EL] Powell’s (especially the downtown PDX location) has my whole heart. That store was there for me when I moved to Portland and hardly had any friends or family to lean on. I wandered around in there with no money for hours and was never asked to leave. When, on occasion, I managed to scrounge a few bucks up, there was always a cheap used fantasy book on those shelves for me to dig into. I’ll take that gratitude with me to the grave.
This interview was first published in Grimdark Magazine Issue #42
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