Under the Cover: Behind the scenes of The Book of Cross series by Peter Darbyshire

The idea for The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, the first book of my Cross series of supernatural thrillers, came to me from a dream—“The Dream of the Rood,” to be exact. The Old English poem tells the story of Christ’s crucifixion from the perspective of the cross that he died upon, which is determined to nobly bear the weight of such an important figure and share in his suffering. “The Dream of the Rood” is truly visionary—in every sense of the word—and it lingered in my mind for years after I first read it in university like, well, a dream.

At some point I began to wonder what had happened to that cross after the Crucifixion. Presumably it was still out there in the world somewhere, or at least the remains of it were. Was it hidden away by secretive collectors who traded its pieces over the centuries? Was it simply lying forgotten somewhere, buried in the earth among all the other dead? Was it continuing to work some magic in the world?

That, in turn, led me to wonder what had happened to Christ’s body after the Crucifixion. What if it were left behind just like the cross—the physical remains abandoned to our fallen world while the spirit shuffled off this mortal coil to destinations unknown? What if the body was just another rood that held Christ’s spirit for a time? What could have become of it—the holiest of all holy relics? And then a mad thought occurred to me: what would happen if a different soul found itself in that suddenly vacant body?

And so the character of Cross was born, an immortal rogue and antihero with divine powers, courtesy of his unique body, but lacking in heavenly grace and purpose. He’s a drunk, a thief, a killer and a hunter of angels, whose life-force he steals to fuel his supernatural abilities. He’s driven by little more than a primal instinct for revenge upon Judas—an ancient trickster god who is determined to stop humanity from freeing itself of endless strife and keep us all mired in muck and blood.

I knew from the start that I didn’t want to make the book just a tale of some religious war, though—Cross vs. Judas or Cross vs. the angels. I wanted to tell a story that embodied my love of literature and the other arts, where characters from myth and paintings and books are just as alive as Cross and Judas. I found myself thinking of another work of art that had long intrigued me—Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The painting had always struck me as mythical in nature, as if Mona Lisa were in some otherworldly place like Hades. And just like that, I had my plot of Cross having to find the supernatural being that was the real Mona Lisa—a quest that would in turn deliver him his nemesis Judas. 

And once had I introduced one living work of art into the story, I knew there were others that wanted to be part of it, too. The character of Alice from the Wonderland tales let it be known that she intended to be Cross’s friend, although this Alice was an eerie, magical creature stranger than anything in Wonderland. Meanwhile, the faerie queen and her court decided to make an appearance to settle an old grudge with Cross that dated back to Camelot times. And then there were the angels, who had their own plans for Cross, and the gorgons and the djinn, and, well, spoilers. 

I also knew that I needed more than a bunch of mythical characters to hang a story on. I needed a human element. So I grounded the tale in significant moments of our history—the Roman times, the First World War, the Great Depression, the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima, one historical moment after another up until the present day. And I gave Cross a human love, Penelope — someone that could perhaps redeem a fallen soul in a fallen world. Except, of course, the world always has its own way with love stories, doesn’t it?

I knew even before I had finished writing The Mona Lisa Sacrifice that it would be the first book in a series. I was in a sort of delirium, where ideas and characters kept haunting my mind and demanding I let them out into the world. In fact, one of them haunted my thoughts so much I decided to turn it into the next novel. The Dead Hamlets is a ghost story featuring a very literary ghost with mysterious ties to Shakespeare’s famous play — although it is not the only ghost in the story. Cross must discover the secret origins of this spectre and learn what it wants—before it kills his daughter, Amelia. Everyone’s favourite characters from The Mona Lisa Sacrifice return in The Dead Hamlets, along with some fantastic new ones—the Witches of Macbeth, an undead Christopher Marlowe, an angel or two, an enigmatic scholar and even the magical Bard himself. I had worked in the theatre for a time when I was younger, and The Dead Hamlets is very much a love letter to the theatre world, where every performance is full of magic and brings ghosts to life. 

The third book in the series, The Apocalypse Ark, came to me just as quickly as the first two, although thankfully it was not inspired by anything in my life like the other books had been.

I had a vision of Noah and his ark, only it was an ark populated with monstrous creatures—God’s mistakes that had been imprisoned on the ark. Noah was their jailer, a being more powerful than the angels even, but he had grown mad over the ages and sought to end his suffering by ending the world itself. If The Mona Lisa Sacrifice was a mystery and The Dead Hamlets was a ghost story, I decided this one needed to be a thriller. And given its subject matter, it needed to be a nautical thriller. But given that it was also a novel about the end of the world, it had to have some apocalyptic elements as well. Which explains how the book came to contain such a mix of diverse things and characters as Atlantis, Captain Nemo and his submarine the Nautilus, Jules Verne, a Lovecraftian Sunken City, the real Dead Sea, God’s Bible, Ahab and Moby-Dick, Blackbeard and his undead crew, the Spanish Armada, a kraken, Charon, sirens, a very nasty vampire, and more dead and damned than you count. I included every thing I could think of because, well, the book is about an apocalypse after all. The result is perhaps chaos, but I like to think of it as literary chaos. The book also ends on a cliffhanger—several cliffhangers, in fact. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write next, so I gave myself several options—writing prompts, in a sense. Will Cross find a way to rescue Alice, who sacrificed herself to save him in the final battle at the Sunken City? What will he do about the cunning and savage vampire Ishmael, who he has unleashed upon the world? Or Blackbeard, who continues to seek his vengeance upon Cross? Or the countless dead that escaped Hades as the world nearly came to an end? Or or or. It will take a series of books to wrap up all these storylines. But if anyone can manage such a feat, it’s Cross.

If you’ve read the Cross series, or even if you’ve only read this behind the scenes look at its origins, thank you for sharing my dream. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

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Peter Darbyshire 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&D with other writers. It’s a good life.

Photo credit Pacific Newspaper Group

Find the Book of Cross series here on All Lit Up, or from your local indie bookseller.