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Holly Gattery
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Peter Darbershire
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Peter Darbershire
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Holly Gattery
Hello everyone, and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and I am joined today by acclaimed author Peter Darbershire to talk about his fourth book in the Cross series called the Wonderland wars, which was recently released with Walzack in Wynn Darbyshire's Compellingly or Compulsively. It is compellingly too, though irresistible. Cross is back for a new adventure, a desperate hunt to find Alice, who has sacrificed herself in their confrontation with a mad Noah in his apocalyptic ark and vanished into a whirlpool. Aided by the fairy queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys around the world to mystical islands populated with murderous immortals, into famous libraries with powerful librarians and magical texts until they reach the chaotic and terrifying wonderlands themselves, the dangerous inspiration for the original Alice tales. But the angels are looking for Alice too, and they will stop at nothing to find her. Peter Darberchire is the author of six books and more stories than he can remember. He lives near Vancouver, British Columbia, where he spends his time writing, raising children, and playing D and D with other writers. It's a good life. So, Peter, I really just dumped our listeners in the deep end of Yorba because this is the fourth book in the series, as I said. But the Cross series is like nothing I've ever read before. I've said this to you before. Cross is one of my probably two favorite anti heroes shout out to KR Wilson Stan books. But you know, he's really fascinating. And when we're talking about Alice, we're talking. We are talking about the Alice at Alice in Wonderland. When we're talking about Noah, we are talking about the Noah. There are a lot of wonderful textual meta references in this book and I'm wondering if you could start our listeners off with giving them a little bit of like floaties for your arms, like metaphorical floaties to help them navigate us diving into the fourth book. So maybe talk a little bit about who crosses and, and where this series came from.
Peter Darbershire
Sure, yeah. Thanks. Cross is an immortal soul who found himself trapped in the body that Christ left behind when Christ shuffled off this mortal coil. And so he wanders through the ages causing trouble. He's a drunk, he's a thief, he's an angel killer, the exact opposite of his sort of heavenly host. He hangs out with all sorts of unsavory characters, fairy court and undead Christopher Marlow Gorgons and literary characters such as Alice from the Wonderland tales that you mentioned. And he kind of repeatedly finds himself having to save the world from various threats. So in the first book, the Mona Lisa Sacrifice, he got caught in a war among the angels over sort of the fate of the earth and this renegade group of angels that was trying to transform Earth into a new heaven after they'd been cast out in the dead Hamlets. The second book, there's a ghost story, very Shakespearean ghost story, and he has to sort of save the fairy court from the ghost. And in the third book, the Apocalypse Arc, he has to save the entire world from a crazed Noah, who's trying to end the world using a Lovecraftian monster in a sunken city. And the books are full of literary illusion and myth and history, and they're really my love letter to literature and the arts and to reading and culture in general. And I set them in our world. As you say, it's the Noah and it's the Alice and all that. And I really wanted to kind of take the magic that I've always found in literature, the sort of magical characters, the magical realms, and give them that sense of reality that they actually often have in our lives, like literature. Alice in particular in Wonderland, has a real presence in her life, even though it's a sort of a, you know, imaginary tale and imaginary characters, but they're very real in some ways. And so I wanted to really kind of take that to the next step and make them actually real in our world. And so I wanted to kind of make our world a little more magical, because I think it deserves a little more magic these days with everything that's going on.
Holly Gattery
I couldn't agree more. And it does feel like a love letter to reading and libraries and the whimsy and fantastic worlds that we can access and learn from by just opening a book. I feel like I'm on a PBS commercial right now. But, you know, it's. It's really. I mean, I think that's what I found so magical. You know, I was a nerdy kid. Now I'm just a nerdy adult, but a nerdy kid with not a lot of friends and books were it. And I really found so much to love about these books and their. Their complex characters and how. And how much you could see yourself. So I want to talk a little bit more about Cross, because I could see myself in Cross, and I don't like to admit this, but I could. He's not a particularly likable character, especially when we first meet him in book one. But like all good books, this, the books themselves, and the series as a whole, there's a lot of character development for Crosh. And I was wondering if you could talk about developing Cross, who I would feel like would be a very stubborn character to develop.
Peter Darbershire
Yeah, he's a character that certainly has his own life. I mean, he came to me actually, from a work of literature. When I was in university. I'd read an old English poem called the Dream of the Rude, which is basically. It's the account of the crucifixion told from the point of view of the cross that bore Christ. And it's a sort of first person, very complex poem, but a first person sort of account of this cross trying to live up to this incredible responsibility. And it always sort of stuck with me. It was such a unique and original poem. And I found myself, years after university, sort of wondering what would happen to that. That cross. You know, you always see these. This is a relic, you know, piece of the true cross. And, you know, is it or is it not? And I was thinking about it one. One day, and it sort of started thinking about, like, the idea of the body as. As that cross of the. The body that kind of carried that. That divine, incredibly powerful soul. And then if that soul left, what happened to that body? You know, if that body was kind of left behind as a. As a kind of root of its own. And that was where the idea of the character came from. But I knew, you know, he had to be sort of everything that was the opposite, like, as you said, an anti hero. And so he certainly starts off that way in the first book. The book begins with him trying to, you know, kick a drug habit. He's immediately goes off and starts killing angels to get their heavenly grace, which is an entirely different kind of addiction for him because he kind of craves that all the time. Because of his nature, he's almost vampiric in his relationship with the angels, but he keeps doing the right thing, even against his wishes. Sometimes it's his biggest character flaws that he keeps saving the world, for instance, because he doesn't really like being immortal and he doesn't really like this life that he's in, but he's growing attached of his friends or growing attached to his friends. And so often when he's saving the world, he's actually trying to save his friends. He's working at that micro level and having that macro effect. And so, for instance, in the Wonderlands War, he's trying to save Alys, who's gone missing at the end of the third book, the Apocalypse arc, when she saved Cross in a battle against Noah at this sunken Lovecraftian city. And she's sacrificed herself and sort of disappeared with God's. God's Bible. And so the. The Wonderlands war is very much about him trying to. To save Alice. And in the sort of doing, he's also put in a situation of trying to save the world again because the. The Bible that's with Alice is leaking. It's been damaged. And so it's leaking this sort of divine power into the world and causing all sorts of problems. But he's often Doing it for those people around him, those other characters that he loves and are so incredibly important to him. And so he doesn't have a. I wouldn't call it like a redemption arc, but he does sort of move away from that antihero, selfish kind of character that we see at the beginning in the first book, the Mona Lisa sacrifice, and into somebody who's more mature and I think complex as the tale goes on or as the stories go on.
Holly Gattery
I, I agree. I mean, I, I have to admit, by the end, like, by the fourth book, I was missing his impulsive, brash and incredibly abrasive attitude because he'd softened ever. I mean, softened for Cross. I mean, it's not soft compared to. But I missed it. But I also, like, it could not be any other way. I also understood that, That I was longing. It's like me longing for my youth when I used to be out at one o' clock in the morning dancing on tables, and it's like, yeah, do you really want that, though? You know, that's how I kind of felt like, do you really want that guy back? Do you really want Cross back at this point, seeing how he's become a much better friend, as you said. I love how you put it that he doesn't really have an interest in saving the world, but he's just trying to work on that micro level. And I thought that's such a powerful message for people. I think right now in this world is that the world's problems are immense and many, but if you just try to help the people around you, your friends, your family, the people you love, whoever they are, you can make a difference. Like if everyone just worked in their immediate spheres of influence, that you could make a difference. And I know I'm probably reading too much into that, but that's how I felt when I read the book.
Peter Darbershire
No, no, that's exactly it. I mean, it's the, you know, when we look at the world, it's, it's, it's overwhelming. And the only place that we actually can make a difference is in those smaller circles of our friends. You know, most of us, obviously some people have more power than others in society to enact change. But, yeah, for most of us, we're. Our change begins at that personal circle and hopefully has a ripple effect that goes out through other circles and, you know, change the world that way.
Holly Gattery
I want to talk about Alice, because Alice is in the other books, but she's very. Even when she's not in a scene, she's the driving force of this book or a driving force of this book. And Alice is not the Disneyfied Alice that many people might know. And it's Alice is in Eden, Carroll's Alice, the original author's Alice. There's elements there, but she's quite, in some ways, macabre and dark, and I would say, beautifully subverted Alice. And I'd love you to give our listeners a little look inside of Alice and your reimagining of her.
Peter Darbershire
Sure. She is a. I like to think of her as sort of a force of chaos. So I tried to take the whimsy and the sort of insanity, the craziness of those Wonderland books and embody them in the character of Alice, who. Her exact origins are sort of a bit mysterious, but there's certainly a strong suggestion that she's basically stepped out of the pages of the book or the books, and in doing so, kind of embodies those books. So she's not only Alice, the Alice from the books, but she's also all those other characters or the spirit of all those other characters combined, the Hatter and the Cheshire Cat and all that kind of stuff. So she really embodies that madness that takes form in our world. And because of her close ties to being that sort of literary character, she has this ability to sort of move between libraries or any place there's books, really. Like, she can go into one library and come out at another, and she finds her way through this labyrinth of this sort of unending, eternal library, and she can kind of pop out wherever she wants or into bookstores or basically any place there's books. And that's also how Cross finds her. Is he. When he needs her, he goes into a library or a bookstore or someplace like that and looks for a book that's out of place. And when he finds the right book out of place in the right bookstore library, or maybe it's the wrong book out of place, then he can also find Alice, and in the Wonderlands war. Yeah, you're right. She's. She's sort of almost more of an absence than a presence in these books. But her connection to sort of chaos is more clearly laid out, as it turns out, that the original Wonderland tales were actually inspired by sort of another fairy court, not the one that Krauss usually hangs out with, but a different one that's long dead called the Chaos Court. And they had a realm that they had created out of the chaos called the Wonderlands. That was where they took Lewis Carroll, sort of charmed Lewis Carroll, and took him there and exposed him to that. And that sort of formed the origins of the Wonderland tales that eventually. Which is where Alys sort of escaped from. So there's a real sort of exploration of those chaos origins of Alice. And even though she's absent for a large part of the book, she's kind of fleshed out more at the same time because of Cross's search for her.
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Holly Gattery
Yeah, I think these two people, Cross and Alice, are. I mean, I don't think I've ever met a friendship duo quite like them. I mean, it's so unlikely. And the way that they are paired up, it feels perfect but not obvious. Does that make sense?
Peter Darbershire
Yeah. And it wasn't even intended, which is the really interesting thing. So when I created the character of Cross, I was sort of. I had the character first, and then I started developing the world, and then I had this sort of decision where I was like, is this just gonna be characters come to life from sort of Christian mythology, or am I going to expand it? And for whatever reason, the character of Alice, as we know her now, sort of popped into my head and I was like, no, I want this character who's come out of a book and has all these weird quirks and all that kind of stuff. And I didn't intend her initially to be the sort of major character that she's become in the series, but she just has such a life of her own. She kind of creeps into the pages and makes her. Makes appearances even when I'm not planning them. So it's kind of like she's made her own way into the series and it has become Cross's best friend and partner in a lot of ways. Like, he would be dead or trapped in numerous situations if it wasn't for Alice's interventions. So, yeah, you're right. They're like a really weird and unusual and fantastic couple. And I'm not sure I can take any credit for it, think it's largely Alice doing her own thing.
Holly Gattery
I love that. And I was thinking a lot about how they reflect a belief that I have that some of the best friends one will have in their life. And these friends are few and far between. And I think most people are lucky if they have one. But for those of us who have, more than one is good. But they're the people who don't have to understand you to accept you. Because Alice and Cross, I mean, I would argue maybe Alice understands Cross a bit more than Cross. Cross understands Alice. But, you know, Cross is. Has a short fuse with everybody. But with Alice, no, like, he accepts the fact that she talks nonsense. She will not give a straight answer. She speaks in riddles because her. While her. What she's saying may be confusing or baffling or, you know, just murky, her actions are consistent. She's there when he needs her. And I mean, I kind of feel like Alice's relationship with Cross is almost nurturing. And when I say mothering, I mean that in the sense that anybody can mother in a very. Just a way that makes that he is supported and she doesn't expect him to change. Which I think when I first started reading this book, I was like, wow, this. This guy needs some therapy. He needs to talk to someone about this because he's going around killing angels and generally not acknowledging any of the deep feelings, the big feelings this guy is having. He's not acknowledging any of those. So I. I love their friendship. But I'm going to put a pin in my rambling about how much I love Cross and Alice and ask you to read to us from this book.
Peter Darbershire
Sure. So I'll read a bit from the Wonderlands War. And the section I'm going to read is. So, as I mentioned, Cross finds Alice by usually by going through the libraries and looking for that book that's out of place. But he's been unable to find Alice since she disappeared at the end of the third book, the Apocalypse Arc. And so he doesn't even know if she's even alive anymore because she was wounded in this battle. And so he's in this. He's found himself in Paris, and he goes to this sort of famous library, the Mazarine, in search of her. And I'll just read that section now. I went through the library slowly, searching for a book, any book that was out of place. When I found one, I pulled it from the shelf and looked around. This was how I'd always found Alice before Pull the right Miss Shelved Book out, and she'll show herself like she's been there all along. Sometimes she comes down the row like another patron searching for a book. Sometimes she climbs out from amid the books themselves, and yet other times she'll make her presence known in another part of the library. The last time I'd found her in the Mazarene, she'd been wearing the bloody dress that Marie Antoinette had on at the time of her execution, and she'd been carrying a basket full of talking books. That had drawn some attention, given it was the 1980s and they'd been a tour of visiting scholars from some academic conference or another going through the place. Alice didn't show herself this time, though, no matter how many books I pulled from the shelves. I tried to remember if I'd already gone through the Mazarene looking for her, but I couldn't be sure. It felt as if I'd searched every library in the world since she'd gone missing. I was beginning to lose hope. And then my eyes caught on a book on one of the top shelves of the row I currently wandered through the looking glass. It had to be some sort of sign. I took the book down from the shelf. The COVID was read Morocco, with the title of motifs in gilt on the spine and gilt edges. An illustration of a queen in profile holding a scepter over her shoulder was on the front. A first edition, if I wasn't mistaken, which meant it was worth the small fortune. It also meant it wasn't the sort of book that should have been left in the stacks. I glanced up and down the row once more, but still there was no sign of Alice. I opened the book, hoping to find some clue inside, and that was when the angel erupted from its pages and buried a sword in my chest. The sword that the angel ram threw me was ablaze with white flame, which made it hurt even more. Not for the first time, I really wished angels didn't love flaming swords so much. The angel had taken the form of an old man with long hair and a wild beard. The plate armor that covered every part of his body except for his head and wings was as white as the flames. I wasn't sure why he was wearing it, and I hadn't seen an angel in such armor since it had gone out of style a few centuries ago. Then again, I couldn't recall the last time an angel had come out of a book to attack me either. And I knew he was an angel because this close I could sense the heavenly grace inside of him. You'd observe the rules of battle, of course? He asked, in what seemed an overly friendly manner, considering the circumstances. I dropped the book and slumped against him, making a few sounds of the sort one does when impaled by a burning sword. The angel raised his bushy brows at me. You didn't cry so much as I thought you would. There was something familiar about the words he spoke, but I couldn't place it right away. It was hard to think on account of the sword in my chest. For that matter. It was also hard to keep standing and even draw breath. He shoved me back and planted his left foot against my stomach to push me off the sword so he could free it for another strike. But I managed to find some strength and kicked his other foot out from underneath him. He fell into the shelves and I stumbled away, ripping the sword free of his grip. I took hold of it and pulled it from my chest, and the world turned nearly as white as the angel. But I managed to stay upright for a moment longer. This wasn't the first time an angel had stabbed me with a burning sword. I'd had far too much practice with this sort of thing. He came at me in a rush that was careless, given I was a few seconds away from dropping. It was almost like he wanted me to stab him. So I obliged and lifted the sword to his throat. The point sank into his flesh. Blood welled out. He tried to stop himself, but his momentum carried him forward as the sword came out the back of his neck. Glorious victory, the angel said. Another odd thing to say, but I was in no condition to make sense of things. I managed to wrench the sword free. I'm not the type to leave a good weapon stuck on someone else. You never know what they may do with it. I didn't have anything left after that, though, and I fell against him as the life drained out of me. The world went black as I died. And then everything flared to light again as his blood poured over me and the heavenly grace that was his essence sank into my body. I was bathed in that grace. Enough of it that it filled the emptiness within me. And I resurrected even as I was dying. And then things get weird.
Holly Gattery
Yeah, Like. Yeah, that was so completely. I was gonna say normal, but I mean, what is normal? I don't know. And I felt like this book was just. I mean, all of them are so supernatural, but also natural. I think it's just your storytelling. So there's so much that that excerpt brings immediately up in the questions that I have prepared to for the second half of this interview. Number one, we haven't really talked too much about the fact that Cross constantly resurrects, but listeners, he does. And as Peter said, this grace helps him resurrect, and the more he has, the more quickly he resurrects. Is that correct?
Peter Darbershire
Yeah. So if he's just killed an angel, for instance, and drained them all of all their grace, which is kind of like their soul or spirit, then, yeah, he's got a ton of power, essentially, and he can resurrect right away. Or even if he's just draining an angel like he is in this case, if he doesn't have very much grace, then it takes him longer, but he'll eventually always resurrect, which makes for interesting scenarios, because then the stakes are less about life and death and more about sort of bigger things and whether or not he gets killed, because he's always going to come back. So you have to make the stakes of the tale about something massive like the end of the world or about the other characters or something like that.
Holly Gattery
And then we also the fact that angels aren't the way many people would think of angels. So if somebody says to me, which honestly doesn't happen often, if ever, holly, you're an angel, that usually means that you're such a good person and there's that positive connotation. But angels in your book are much like people. Some of them are not so bad, some of them are terrible. And they're not the angels that we would think about biblically. And I was wondering if you could talk about that choice.
Peter Darbershire
Yeah, well, I think they are what
Holly Gattery
you think about biblically. I said that. I'm like, no, the angels weren't that great.
Peter Darbershire
I mean, that's. That's. The interesting thing is they're. They're creatures of incredible power and often can be quite monstrous. And they take on different. Different incarnations, and they may be working to a good purpose, but even then, not always. I mean, we have the story of the fallen angels, which do figure in these books, and kind of all of the angels are fallen. The scenario is the angels don't know where God has gone somewhere, and they don't know where, which is why they're so interested in finding God's Bible in the fourth book, the Wonderlands War, because it's kind of all they have left of not only God, but of heaven. But, yeah, I've always liked the idea of the angels as just really mysterious, powerful, enigmatic creatures, not the really beautiful, lovely things that are always helping humans, but that are working their own schemes in the absence of God. And some are on the side of humanity and really trying to, to help humans and even help Cross at certain points, but others are certainly not. They've got their own agendas and plans.
Holly Gattery
And I was thinking as you were talking about how with God, Mia, it's not really explained where God is. And I'm sure a lot of people in this day and age, or any day and age could ask the same question. Where are you? What's interesting is that the forces or the force that I felt working most powerfully through the novel in the absence of quote, unquote, God is love, friendship, like Alice and Cross or anyone who Cross is working towards like that force, any action, any belief founded in that love, whatever kind of love it is, was what was continuously saving people. And I found that to be just as a personal reflection because books are mirrors. So Holly is obviously going through something. Readers, I think we're all going through something. So I found the book really cathartic, not just because there's this escapism which, which there is, but there was also, because it's a kind of a genre mashup, we also have a very strong vein of literary fiction. There was a, there was a very tangible, I don't want to say lessons because I don't believe that books are prescriptive, or at least good books aren't prescriptive. But it was there, there was enough of that fullness of story for me to create or take away my own lesson at the end of it. Are you following me here, Peter?
Peter Darbershire
Yeah. And, you know, that's so wonderful to hear actually, because one of the things that I try and do in these books is kind of try and do collaborative storytelling where I don't try and be prescriptive and say, here's the message of the book. I mean, the plots are, you know, fairly self contained and apparent that way. But I love the idea of, of sort of planting seeds for readers, whether it's a story idea or, you know, an emotional idea, and then letting them run and, and you know, with that story or that emotion themselves and creating their own kind of, you know, parallel story or, or whatever it is to the one that, that I've written. So, so, yeah, so I love it when I, when somebody says, you know, I had this, this, the story made me think about this, or I came up with my own story about it. And certainly there's a lot of emotion in all of these books, but in particularly in the Wonderlands war. And there's a lot of feelings about love, which is the sort of most divine power, the most divine grace, if you will, in the world. I mean, it's such a transformative thing. But there's also the loss of that and grieving, the inevitability of change, of transformation, of. I mean, I was. I'm feeling older, obviously, as I'm writing these books. I'm getting older. I just underwent cataract surgery recently, and so I'm feeling my age. And it's starting to make itself known in these books too, I think. But there's also just that kind of undoing of things that comes with age. The cross develops a different relationship with the angels in this book because he has to sort of work with them because he recognizes at some point God's Bible, which is damaging the world because it's damaged, does need to be repaired. And the angels are the only ones who can really manage that. He's got a changing relationship with the fairy. The fairy's cord is falling apart as some of them get killed in the book. And he's got a different relationship with his daughter who transforms over the book, the sort of undead daughter who's born from the fairy court. But it's not just about loss and grieving. It's about finding new ways of going on in life and finding new ways of going on when your whole world falls apart or is blown apart. And love is certainly one of those things, a love of friends that is, you know, a different kind of love than a. Than a relationship love. And, you know, I wrote this. I wrote this book when I was going through a lot of change in my life, and my friends were the sort of things that were my anchors. And I think some of that really, really crept into this book as well.
Holly Gattery
I love it. I think platonic love is something that I've always enjoyed reading about and I think should be written about more. Because, I mean, not. I don't. Don't get me wrong, I love a good romantasy. I've been known to dabble in smut, but that's a quick fix. I think love between friendship friends is something that sustains a little bit, you know, a more even. Even sort of energy over time. So I really enjoyed reading this book. My final question for you is, what are you working on now?
Peter Darbershire
Yeah, it's a great question. So throughout these books, I've left kind of numerous unfollowed narrative threads. And so, as I said, some of them are meant for readers to create their own stories in their minds, but a few have lingered with me too, long enough. And so there's a few that are kind of calling to me, saying they want me to tell their story. So I'm probably going to visit one of those next, take one of those storylines from one of the previous books or even this book, and see where it takes me.
Holly Gattery
One of the questions that you didn't answer and I couldn't figure out, and I still don't know if I want answered, is who the heck was Cross before he entered the body of Christ? And again, I don't actually know if I want that answered, but it's a question because I can't figure out how important it is. It only matters what he is now and what he's doing now. So I can't figure out if I really want to answer it or if I want. I want to live with the excitement of that mystery. So no pressure and actually no expectation, because if you do, I'll be happy, and if you don't, I'll be happy.
Peter Darbershire
Yeah, it's.
Holly Gattery
It's.
Peter Darbershire
Well, it's a question he doesn't know the answer to. And in that sense, I kind of wanted him to be like an everyman kind of person. Like, you know, we're all born into this world, sort of anonymous, and no idea who we are. And, you know, we are who we make ourselves. Obviously there's external influences, parents and society and stuff like that, but, you know, a lot of it is the choices we make and our experiences and things like that. And so there's a certain element of that in Cross for sure. In the first book, I think it is the Mona Lisa sacrifice. His sort of nemesis is Judas. So Judas is obviously responsible for Christ's death. But in. In my telling of the story, it's Judith, Judas is an ancient trickster God, not a man. And so he totally intends to derail civilization by getting rid of the savior figure because he doesn't want humanity to rise above the sort of blood and mud, as he puts it. And Judas at one point says to him, you know, like, you're just an accident. Like Christ's soul went on. The body was meant to be left behind, and maybe the body just created a new soul because something was lacking. And so it did that, but nobody really knows, and Cross hasn't even found that out yet. And at a certain point, he doesn't care anymore. Like, he used to care, but now he is who he is and he's made a life and he's got all his experiences, and that's who he is. And so that's kind of the thing I want the readers to take away, is that the choices that we make in our life really determine who we are, what kind of person we are, and what our future may be.
Holly Gattery
That's one heck of a way to end this. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today on NBN to talk about your really fascinating novel, the Wonderlands War, which is available from Wallsack and Win. And you can pick it up wherever books are bought or borrowed. And I suggest you read the other ones as well. Not because you need to, but just because you'll enjoy them. Everyone. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today.
Peter Darbershire
Thank you.
Holly Gattery
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Peter Darbershire
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Holly Gattery
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Podcast Summary: New Books Network Episode: Peter Darbyshire on "The Wonder Lands War" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) Host: Holly Gattery | Date: May 7, 2026
In this episode, host Holly Gattery interviews acclaimed author Peter Darbyshire about his latest novel, The Wonder Lands War, the fourth installment in the Cross series. The conversation explores Darbyshire’s mythic, literary, and metafictional approach to fantasy, the evolution of his anti-hero protagonist Cross, subversive reinterpretations of Alice in Wonderland, and deeper themes of love, friendship, mortality, and finding meaning amid chaos.
The conversation is lively, witty, warm, and reflective, blending nerdy literary enthusiasm with philosophical depth. Both host and guest share personal feelings and connect them to the story, making the episode welcoming and insightful for longtime fantasy readers and new listeners alike.
This episode is a rich dive into metafictional fantasy and character-driven storytelling, with The Wonder Lands War positioned as both a love letter to literature and a meditation on the power of friendship, myth, and self-determination. Highly recommended for fans of genre-bending fantasy, literary mash-ups, and complex anti-heroes.