Author Archives: Peter Darbyshire
Crypt of the what?: The February 2026 Bibliofiles
February was mostly a weird lit month for me, with a little Canadiana and stoicism thrown in. That probably has something to do with the state of the world.
Fiction
Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud
Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of weird books.
A young woman visits a sanitarium of sorts on the moon, where she has spider silk put in her brain to treat her melancholy. Spider silk is special here, because the sanitarium sits atop a cave that is home to a dead giant moon spider still worshipped by a strange sect. Then things get strange.
Link: https://torpublishinggroup.com/crypt-of-the-moon-spider/
Leech by Hiron Ennes
Leech by Hiron Ennes is an intriguingly weird gothic horror novel like none I have ever read before.
A doctor from the mysterious Institute arrives at a baron’s remote manor to investigate the death of the previous doctor. The manor is home to all sorts of eerie and strange characters — the grotesque ever dying baron, his wife whose children keep dying under mysterious circumstances, creepy twin girls, a mute servant and more.
It’s also home to a very mysterious organism which seems to have colonized the dead doctor and caused him to commit suicide. The reasons why soon become clear.
If that isn’t enough weirdness for you, the doctor from the Institute is a sort of parasite herself, part of a collective hive mind that takes over people to become the Institute. And neither parasite can let the other persist.
There’s all sorts of intersecting philosophies and social critiques here — bodily autonomy, individualism vs. social conformity, the degradations of aristocracy and more.
Think The Thing meets Dracula meets The Name of the Rose, and you’ll have an idea of the flavour of Leech.
Link: https://torpublishinggroup.com/leech
The (Mis)Fortunes of Saint Ilia’s School for Gifted Girls, In No Particular Order by Catherine Tavares
A very clever “choose your own adventure” type of murder mystery set in a school of superpowered girls and women. I had to go through all the options because they were so much fun.
Bleed for Me, Bro by Sharang Biswas
Spec meets kink in this hardcore, fantastic version of S&M clubs with real mutilation, death and resurrection.
I am so vanilla.
Link: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/bleed-for-me-bro/
Non-fiction
The Eh Team by Charles Demers
The Eh Team by Charles Demers is a delightful and charming encyclopedia of Canadiana. Demers muses on such Canadian classics as Nanaimo bars, Cheezies, The Friendly Giant, Wok with Yan and more, all with comedic wit and perfectly personal anecdotes. It should be put in the beside drawer of every Canadian hotel.
Link: https://greystonebooks.com/products/the-eh-team
Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday
Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday takes a different direction from some of his previous books, most notably The Obstacle Is the Way and Stillness Is the Key. Those books are largely concerned with illustrating ways to handle the chaos and uncertainty of life. They’re incredibly important guides on how to live properly and how to be calm and present in the storm of modern existence.
Right Thing, Right Now takes people beyond the self to consider how to live properly in society — and history. It points out quite accurately that this often means going against the social or political current and may require sacrifice.
In many ways Right Thing, Right Now is a more challenging book than Holiday’s previous ones as it requires you to consider more than your self and even consider actions that may be harmful to your self but still be the right thing to do. It’s much less universal — The Obstacle Is the Way can be adopted by anyone, but Right Thing, Right Now will divide people politically.
I admit I found it occasionally frustrating and not as immediately useful to me as The Obstacle Is the Way or Stillness Is the Key. However, that’s the point of it. Sometimes we have to think of larger things than ourselves. And if there was ever a time to be concerned with doing the right thing, it’s right now.
Link: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/right-thing-right-now
How They Messed Up the Book Industry by Ken Whyte
“In hollowing out the institutions that select, promote, and sustain books, Canada surrendered control not just over scale and distribution, but over how (and if) its own history, conflicts, and ambitions are narrated and remembered.”
What’s to be done about the state of Canadian publishing?
A threatening trend
The spam book club reviewers that have been irritating authors with requests for paid services are now moving on to extortion. A number of writers have shared messages they’ve received stating that if they don’t respond, they’ll get negative reviews from “a community of readers” with the intent of damaging the author’s reputation.
What’s the next step? Making damaging claims elsewhere about those writers if they don’t pay up? Something even worse?
I would love for platforms like Amazon, Goodreads, Indigo, etc. to improve the way they deal with negative reviews, but I’m not optimistic. I suspect they either don’t have the resources or don’t care. And I’ll save the argument for whether books should even be rated at all for another day.
This disturbing situation highlights the need for the real community of readers to speak out about the books that matter to them. Recommendations by actual readers to their networks is the best form of publicity after all, especially as the traditional media has essentially abandoned books coverage. Leave positive reviews of the books that you love on your platform of choice, talk about them on social media, bring them into your book club, buy them as gifts, whatever.
If we don’t talk about the books we love, who will?
He panted heavily where?
I keep seeing news that the romance publisher Harlequin is shutting down its line of historical romances. I guess true love doesn’t last forever?
This reminds me of my own personal history as a Harlequin proofreader, where I read hundreds of historical romances. I admit they left me a little puzzled. How were the heroines always able to make peach cobbler out of nothing but dirt and tumbleweeds? Why did the heroes always somehow manage to forget they were land rich? What happened to all the Indigenous people?
I guess I’ll never know the answer to those questions now.
I will, however, have the memories of my favourite typos. There is one that will always stand out for me — the alpha male of typos, if you will.
“He panted heavily in her rear.”
To be clear, my job was to catch typos and correct them. However, I argued long and hard that this was not a typo. There were no errors in this sentence, I protested. It was all correct and we should leave it as written, so as to respect the wishes of the writer.
Alas, dear reader, I was overrruled.
Despite that, Harlequin remains one of my favourite jobs to this day. Although not for the money. It was very much a labour of love.
Anyway, in the spirit of Harlequin I hope you all find true love and someone who will pant heavily in your rear.
We’re all the books section now
I’ve seen a lot of conversation online about the Washington Post shutting down its book review section, and I can’t say I’m surprised whenever I see such news. I ran a books section at a Canadian daily newspaper for a time, and it was incredibly difficult to generate any interest in book reviews. Maybe that was because of my editorial oversight, but I think the overall trend of diminishing books coverage backs up my personal observations.
And if you compare the readership of books pieces to sports coverage? Book reviews aren’t even in the same league.
My time as a books editor was before BookTok became a thing, so I can only imagine it’s that much harder to get attention now with the competition from social media, dedicated literary sites, book bloggers, and so on.
Interestingly, I didn’t see the same decline in book stories. If I could find the right angle on an author profile or news about a book, the readership was often considerable and engaged. One of the most popular stories I ever wrote was about Vancouver writer Sebastien de Castell’s rise in the fantasy scene while he was still an emerging scribe. It far outperformed any reviews we ever published, as did most other pieces that had some sort of “story” angle to them.
In a world where we curate everything to fit our interests (okay, the algorithms curate everything to fit our interests), I think very few readers care about someone else’s opinion of a book. However, I firmly believe there is a very large audience out there that is still interested in discovering new books they may enjoy, which is why the new mediums are so popular. But they are very different models of conversation around books and reading than the traditional books section.
There’s one thing that remains true irregardless of technological and economic change. Word of mouth is the best possible publicity for a book. Passionate readers urging others to check out their favourite books leads to more passionate readers.
So yes, we can mourn the death of the Washington Post books section. We should mourn the death of any such place that facilitates conversations around culture. But each of us should also become our own books section. Share your favourite reads. Talk about them on your platform of choice, review them where you like, tattoo your favourite lines on visible parts of your body. Carry on the conversation and keep culture alive. Because we see what happens when people don’t care about culture.
As always, thanks for reading.
Poetic Devils: The January 2026 Bibliofiles
January was a month where I read a bit of everything: fantasy, literary fiction and even poetry. What better way to start the new year?
Fiction
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
The Devils may be Joe Abercrombie’s best novel yet, and that’s saying something given his backlist of contemporary fantasy classics.
The Devils isn’t set in Abercrombie’s usual fantasy realms but instead takes place in an alternate history where Europe is divided by a religious schism and facing an invasion of… elves.
Yes, elves.
The reader is thrown into this familiar yet strange world to follow a papal special forces squad as they escort an heir to the eastern throne despite the wishes of the current occupants of the throne. And this is where things get really fantastic because this papal squad are mostly supernatural creatures — a vampire, a necromancer, a werewolf, a soldier who can’t die, an elf and so on. Those trying to stop them are even more supernatural — animal soldiers and fish pirates and sorcerers and the like.
It’s a crazed, bizarre and action-packed fantasy thriller that invokes other genre classics — the Magnificent Seven, Frankenstein, the Island of Dr. Moreau and more.
Above all, it’s classic Abercrombie, though — as darkly humorous as it is grimly violent and morally ambiguous.
If you’re looking for similar reads, try Sebastien de Castell’s The Malevolent Seven series, Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief or Cameron Johnston’s The Maleficent Seven.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/233800039-the-devils
Ink & Sigil by Kevin Hearne
The first in a parallel series to Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid tales, Ink and Sigil follows Al MacBharris, a sort of magician in Glasgow. Al uses sigils and other arcane tricks to try to keep the realms of supernatural beings such as hobgoblins and faerie hidden from our own. But when his apprentice winds up dead, Al is drawn into a secret plot to unleash chaos upon his world. A fun yet dark tale with plenty of action, a great magic system and a promise of many adventures to come.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49183690-ink-sigil
Cherry by Nico Walker
The hallucinatory chronicles of a young American man who moves through life in a drug haze, joining the army and shipping off to Iraq, then returning to wander through a life of bank robberies and other misadventures. Jesus’s Son meets Catch-22.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36521370-cherry
Poetry
NMLCT by Paul Vermeersch
Rereading NMLCT by Paul Vermeersch and my mind is still blown. How to make sense of these poems that question the reality and hallucinations of our post-truth society. As if some haunted god was trying to speak to us through AI prompts, perhaps even to warn us.
“Is that what I want? I don’t know.”
“A rugged weird western edge”
Delighted at this Locus Magazine review of my latest weird western tale!
“Darbyshire’s Azrael stories are terrific reads, written in a tersely lyrical prose with a rugged weird Western edge, and a rich tapestry of worldbuilding as backdrop.”
“The Angel Azrael Visits the Trading Post at the End of the World a Final Time” was published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Link: https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-angel-azrael-visits-the-trading-post-at-the-end-of-the-world-a-final-time
Check out all my Azrael stories at peterdarbyshire.com/Azrael.
Everyone reading this is a suspect: The December 2025 Bibliofiles
December saw me on a mystery reading binge. Why do my thoughts turn to murder around Christmastime? Who can say…?
Fiction
Ocean Drive by Sam Wiebe
Hard-boiled British Columbia.
That’s what best describes Sam Wiebe’s Ocean Drive, a dirty thriller set in the idyllic community of White Rock on BC’s West Coast. Only this paradise by the water has a seamy underside of sex, drugs and murder. Lots of murder.
Ocean Drive tells two stories: that of Cam, a troubled young man who’s just been released from prison for manslaughter; and Meghan, a divorced “cop mom” who’s trying to solve a murder where Cam quickly becomes a suspect.
Both are caught up in a world of urban gangsters and a changing world, where the old farmland of the West Coast is being replaced by urban sprawl and casinos, and society is increasingly divided between the generationally wealthy and those who can never get ahead.
Ocean Drive could have been pulled from the headlines of BC’s newspapers — it has bloody gang warfare, crooked lawyers, desperate losers, infamous criminal brothers and cops that walk all the grey alleys in between.
You’ll never look at Beautiful BC the same again.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200358289-ocean-drive
Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson
Author Ernest Cunningham joins a writers fest on a cross-country train in Australia in the hopes of finding inspiration to follow his debut book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. You can probably see where this is going right away and, yes, his fellow travellers are a cast right out of a classic murder mystery novel in an even more classic setting. The bodies start piling up and each of the suspects has their own secrets, grudges and schemes — layers upon layers of secrets, grudges and schemes in fact. What makes the novel all the more fun is that the suspects are writers, publishers and agents.
And Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect is very fun. It’s not just a murder mystery with multiple bodies but a meta-mystery with one of the most unique and clever narrators ever in the genre. Cunningham — or is that Stevenson? — knows all the rules of mystery novels and delights in incorporating them all into his tale with conspiratorial charm, delivering a masterclass in storytelling to the reader in a wonderfully self-aware reinvention of the genre. It’s clever and funny while at the same time being a wicked mystery.
Truly a revelation!
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167006698-everyone-on-this-train-is-a-suspect
Rashomonster by Michael Allen Rose
This rather sums up this bizarro monster story:
“The wolfman, in human form, attended a birthday party, which his friends had put together for him. At some point in the evening, two children played a prank resulting in the wolfman being fully startled, and this caused an expulsion of breath beyond normal expectations, setting a nearby mummy on fire. The wolfman, still human, tried to extinguish said mummy, but due to a mixture of incompetence and comic misadventure, the wolfman caught fire as well, was horribly burned and otherwise injured, and proceeded to transform into a wolf, because of the stress. The wolfman was subsequently taken to the veterinarian by Frankenstein’s non-monstrous person consisting of collected body parts repurposed for new opportunities.”
Link: https://magazine.trollbreath.com/rashomonster-2/
Non-fiction
How to Fix Book Publishing by Kenneth Whyte
Canadian-published books now account for less than 5% of the Canadian publishing market — and the situation is getting worse, not better. How to turn that around?
How about reinventing the PLR (public lending right program) to better reward authors with Canadian publishers and the publishers themselves?
Link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-180628703
Keep Going by Austin Kleon
Keep Going by Austin Kleon is a slim little book but it’s one of my most highlighted books after only one read. Billing itself as a primer on “ways to stay creative in good times and bad,” Keep Going is an informal yet deeply insightful series of meditations on not only the importance of creativity but the sustainability of creativity.
Kleon acknowledges the world can beat down creatives but that a shift in mindset can keep creativity alive. Focus on the daily rituals and routines of creativity and find a “bliss station” so that the creative practice becomes not a means to some illusory goal but a meaningful thing on its own.
Keep Going isn’t a how-to manual or a deep dive into creative strategies and techniques. It’s a book about perspective and mental shifts and probably belongs on the same shelf as James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Ryan Holiday’s Stillness Is the Key. It extends beyond creativity to living a good life overall. As Kleon says in the book: “None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40591677-keep-going
The Fall of the English Department by Adam Walker
There was a time in my life when I was a graduate student eyeing the contemplative life of a professor. The Fall of the English Department by Adam Walker lists more than a few of the reasons I eventually left the ivory tower for the delightful chaos of the outside world.
Link: https://substack.com/@adamgagewalker/p-177582596
If Chatbots Can Replace Writers, It’s Because We Made Writing Replaceable by Andre Forget
“Market pressures are now so intense, and industries have become so consolidated, that a good deal of what gets published every year already reads like a photocopy of a photocopy.”
Publishing was already in trouble before AI turned up.
Link: https://thewalrus.ca/if-chatbots-can-replace-writers-its-because-we-made-writing-replaceable/
Poetry
Grawlix by George Murray
They’re not done following you,
these childish angers, like stormy
weather pushing in, memories
hovering near the edge of the panel,
peripheral to the eye.
30% off all books!
My publisher Wolsak and Wynn is holding a holiday sale and all books are 30% off until Dec. 15. Plus free shipping on orders over $50. Here’s your chance to complete your library of my books at a discount!
Direct links from Wolsak and Wynn
In Has the World Ended Yet? we start with retired superheroes living in a soulless suburbia where everyone gets lost trying to get home. Then the angels start to fall from the sky. Is it Armageddon? And do we want the world to end or not?
These tales link together superheroes, ghosts, the undead, a hired hitman, the Cold War, the Rapture and avenging angels in a Twilight Zone–style collection that is riveting and human. We follow characters that are identifiable through situations that are unreal, through a technicolour landscape we are all familiar with. The end of the world is not what we expect, what any of Darbyshire’s characters expect and may not really be happening at all. But should it?
“Even angels have to make a living these days.”
With this dry observance Peter Darbyshire introduces us to Cross, a man who has lived thousands of years, though he’d prefer not to have, and who is now hunting angels in a Barcelona filled with tourists, phone cameras and deep mystery.
The Mona Lisa Sacrifice is a layered supernatural thriller, filled with history, magic and beloved characters. When an angel promises to deliver Judas, a forgotten god of a forgotten people, to Cross for revenge if he can find the real Mona Lisa, a cascading set of mysteries involving a sisterhood of gorgons, Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Morgana le Fay and renegade angels is set in motion. Everything hangs in the balance. Even the fate of the world.
The Witches never failed to extract a price somehow.
When Cross stumbles drunkenly into a darkened Berlin theatre that is staging Hamlet, he does not expect to see Morgana le Fay on stage as Queen Gertrude or witness a real murder. But a deadly ghost is haunting the faerie queen’s plays and Morgana expects Cross to solve the mystery or risk his daughter, Amelia, becoming the next victim. With the fate of Amelia in the balance Cross tries to unravel a mystery that takes him to libraries outside of time, into battles alongside an undead Christopher Marlowe and to bargaining with the real Witches of Macbeth. But is the play the thing, or is there something far older haunting Shakespeare’s famous work?
“You fool,” Sariel said. She gestured with a hand and the table between us slid to the side. “You ridiculous mortal fool. What did you do with the sphinx?”
With these words Cross finds himself thrust into his most dangerous adventure yet, working with the double-crossing angel Sariel to stop Noah from ending his eternal suffering by ending the world. But this Noah has not saved any beings from the flood, he is God’s warden, and he is bound to hold all God’s mistakes captive on his ark for eternity. And he has gone mad. Between provoking the sorcerous pirate Blackbeard, dealing with the devious vampire Ishmael and travelling beneath the seas with Captain Nemo and the last of the Atlanteans, Cross struggles to keep one step ahead of Noah until the last battle occurs before the very doors of Atlantis itself.
The immortal Cross is back in a wild new adventure – a desperate hunt to find the enigmatic Alice from the Wonderland tales. Alice has helped Cross save the world countless times over since she stepped out of the pages of her book, but now she is the one that needs rescue after vanishing during an apocalyptic battle. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys to mystical islands populated with murderous immortals and into famous libraries with powerful librarians and magical texts until they reach the chaotic and terrifying Wonder Lands, the dangerous inspiration for the original Alice tales. But they are not the only ones looking for Alice – a rogue group of angels are also hunting her for mysterious reasons of their own. The very fate of the world may rest upon who finds Alice first.
Malevolent babbling: The November 2025 Bibliofiles
This month saw me reading some heady, intellectual historical fantasy while at the same devouring a book about vampire kangaroos and other strange creatures. Plus a bit of weird fiction and weird journalism!
Fiction
Babel by RF Kuang
Babel by RF Kuang is a complex and multilayered novel that defies easy description — which is befitting, given its subject matter.
Equal parts historical fantasy, dark academia, anticolonial manifesto and coming-of-age tale, Babel relates the tale of Robin Swift, a Chinese child orphaned by a plague and whisked away to Oxford to study the secret arts of magic.
In the world of Babel, magic is generated by the sort of imaginative gaps that occur when words are translated from one language to another and their meaning changes, creating a sort of linguistic loose energy. This energy is in turn channeled through silver bars — the physical manifestations of empire and power. It’s a compelling and utterly unique magic system that is well developed by Kuang, and there are echoes of, well, Eco here in the book’s linguistic and historical awareness.
The wonder of the magic system, which is used to transform every element of western society, is put into stark contrast with the abuses of the colonial system. The enchantment that Oxford holds for Robin soon fades as he realizes it is but another tool for sustaining the colonial machine — and he and his friends are but a cog in the machine.
Things inevitably come to a head when a war with China looms, driven by false pretences, and Robin joins an underground rebellion that strikes at the heart of the empire’s power.
The coming of age elements are layered everywhere throughout these events, as Robin confronts what it means to grow up in a place that was never meant for you, where you can never belong, and which uses you while abusing your people. It’s an interrogation of empire that examines more than colonialism and stretches wide to include capitalism itself. It’s all the more timely because of it.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57945316-babel
The Malevolent Eight by Sebastien de Castell
Deranged mercenary war mages, scheming celestials, diabolical infernals, dark magic, black humour and vampire kangaroos. Enough said.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223758590-the-malevolent-eight
Doctors HATE Her!! Local Woman Is NOT Cursed by Bree Wernicke
A woman starts coughing up Lego blocks and then instructions for a town. After that things get strange.
Link: https://www.bourbonpenn.com/issue/37/doctors-hate-her-local-woman-is-not-cursed-by-bree-wernicke
Non-fiction
How the Fight to Save Canadian Publishing from the American Market Shaped my 50-Year Career by Scott McIntyre
“Books are not mere merchandise. Books are a nation thinking out loud.”
Link: https://thewalrus.ca/i-was-warned-theres-little-money-to-be-made-in-publishing/
Forget Running Groups and Work Socials. Find a Book Club by Janna Abbas
Are book clubs the new way to make connections in an increasingly lonely world?
Link: https://thewalrus.ca/find-a-book-club/
Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era by Nicholas Hune-Brown
Who was the writer Victoria Goldiee? Did she even exist?
The Wonder Lands War on Night Beats
I’m over at Night Beats talking about the inspiration for my new novel, The Wonder Lands War, and why my characters never listen to me.
Excerpt:
Who are the Cross readers?
Peter: Anyone who loves a serious mix of the literary and fantastic, who wants to see their favourite characters from other books and plays and myths in one place, and who loves seeing literary tradition torn apart and reassembled into new forms. So basically I’m writing for people like me.
I’ve been amazed and gratified by the audience that is out there for these books, which is much larger and diverse than I expected. The Cross series started out being a love letter to literature but I feel it’s grown into a love letter to an entire community.
peter darbyshire 