A new novel grounded in Moose Jaw’s skies is turning heads with a fictional twist on real prairie danger.
Paul Grant’s Astraphobia is set entirely in and around Moose Jaw — he calls the novel “a love song” to his wife’s hometown — one of the lightning capitals of North America. The book, released by BWL Publishing as part of its Paranormal Canadiana series, follows three generations of a Saskatchewan family plagued by what they call the McKenzie Curse: a supernatural link to lightning.
But behind the fictional curse is real research — and it's coming from a lifelong journalist and storyteller.
“The word astraphobia is a fear of lightning, which is not an unfounded fear,” said Grant, a retired CBC Radio producer now living in Moose Jaw.
“It kills one in every 10 people it strikes. It leaves a lot of the rest of them damaged for life — with hearing problems, post-traumatic stress. You can be safe in a house and still be struck by lightning.”
That very scenario happened near Moose Jaw in 1890. A farmer named Henry Bartell was reading to his daughter and her friend when lightning struck the chimney, travelled down the stove pipe, and crossed the kitchen. All three were killed. A few years later, Bartell’s cousin was also killed by lightning.
The story stuck with Grant, and later on he was walking through a Moose Jaw cemetery when he noticed gravestones listing cause of death as lightning. It seemed to happen more often to some families than to others.
“I thought, wow,” said Grant. “What if lightning actually stalked them — was in their DNA and sought them out?”
That question gave rise to Astraphobia, a multigenerational family saga that begins in 1905, the year Saskatchewan became a province, and stretches into the 1970s. Along the way, the McKenzies live through the First World War, the Depression, nuclear fears, and the upheaval of the sixties — always with lightning crackling just beyond the horizon.
“There’s no big, overarching plot, per se,” Grant said. “It’s just following these families through three generations, seeing how they responded to the issues of their time. And meanwhile, in the background, is this lightning threat. They’re always looking over their shoulder, wondering who’s going to be next.”
Grant’s attention to detail stems from both his journalism career and his deep dive into Saskatchewan lightning lore. His research includes gravestone visits, cemetery records, and Environment Canada archives. One file he compiled lists more than a dozen lightning fatalities between 1890 and 2005 — many of them within an hour’s drive of Moose Jaw.
Those real-world incidents echo throughout the book. One man is killed while carrying a milk pail. Another dies behind a steel mower. A woman’s spectacles are melted by the strike that killed her in a potato patch. Grant calls Saskatchewan “one of the most lightning-prone places on Earth,” with more than 600,000 strikes every year.
“There seemed to be families who were more prone to lightning,” he said. “I started to imagine — what would it feel like to grow up under that cloud?”
Astraphobia is available in print and online through Books We Love (BWL) Publishing, a Canadian small press based in Alberta and Saskatoon. Grant said he’s grateful to be part of the BWL lineup.
“They’re a Canadian company publishing Canadian authors,” he said. “They showed some faith in me — and I’m really proud to be associated with them.”
Astraphobia is Grant’s first novel set in Moose Jaw, and it won't be his last. Notorious is due out in early 2026. That one, he says, trades the paranormal for meth, money laundering, and pandemic-era real estate — “a straight-ahead mystery,” with Moose Jaw once again in the starring role.