Bibliography
The Godless
The Gods are dead. The world is falling apart. The first book in the weird, literary fantasy trilogy Children.
Fifteen thousand years after the War of the Gods and their corpses now lie scattered across the world, slowly dying as men and women awake with strange powers that are derived from their bodies. While some see these powers as a gift – most call them a curse.
When Ayae, a young cartographer’s apprentice in the city of Mireea, is trapped in a burning building she is terrified as this dormant power comes to life within her. The flames destroy everything around her but she remains unscathed – fire cannot touch her. This curse makes her a target for the army marching on her home – an army determined to reclaim the corpse of the God Ger, who lies dying beneath the city, and harness his power for themselves.
Zaifyr, a man adorned in the ancient charms, also arrives in Mireea. His arrival draws the attention of two of the ‘children of the gods’, Fo and Bau, powerful, centuries old beings who consider themselves immortal. All three will offer different visions for Ayae’s powers – and whatever choice she makes will result in new enemies.
Meanwhile, as the army approaches ever closer to Mirea, the saboteur Bueralan and Dark, his mercenary group, look to infiltrate and learn their weaknesses. Alone in a humid, dangerous land, they find themselves witness to rites so appalling they realise it would take the Gods themselves to halt the enemy’s attack – and even they may not be enough.
Leviathan's Blood
The Gods are dead. The world is falling apart. The second book in the weird, literary fantasy trilogy Children.
“Ben Peek is one of the most accomplished writers of richly detailed an intricately plotted epic fantasy working in Australia today. If you’re a lover of epic fantasy and you’re not reading the Children books, you’re missing out.”
–The Newtown Review of Books
A new god has risen.
The immortal Zaifyr has arrived at the Floating Cities in chains, to await trial for murder. Despite this, he’s preparing for war against a new child god – for she will do anything to destroy those who stand in her way.
A city has fallen.
Ayae must fight to protect the survivors, and finds herself ensnared in a web of political intrigue. She’ll find politics can be as lethal as any sword, and hers is not the only life at stake.
A warrior has arrived.
Across the ocean, the exile Bueralan returns home. And he’s bearing a dead man’s soul around his neck. God-touched and grief-stricken, he treads a dangerous path. He’ll confront a legendary fighter… and discover a secret that will change the world.
The Eternal Kingdom
The Gods are dead. The world is falling apart. The final book in the weird, literary fantasy trilogy Children.
A nation in fragments
On the shores of Yeflam, Ayae struggles to keep her people together. She acts as liaison between the camp leaders and the immortals who could save them. Zaifyr’s immortal siblings have arrived – but they have their own unfathomable agendas and Ayae is caught in their power games.
An army on the march
Heast has returned to his role as Captain of Refuge, a mercenary unit that answers the call of lost causes. With help from an unexpected source, Heast and his band of mercenaries could turn the tide of war – if they live long enough.
A world in danger
Bueralan Le is trapped in the company of the new god child. Though he fights to prevent her from unleashing her forces on the world, he is bound by blood to her darkest creation. The future of the world may depend on his choices.
Saboteurs
A stand alone novella featuring Bueralan Le. Set before the events that take place in The Godless.
Bueralan Le – exiled baron, fighter, saboteur – washes up on strange shores with a stranger mission. Bueralan and his crew have a grand plan: to save a town in this gods-touched land from anarchy, as it heads towards violence and bloodshed. The job will demand all of their cunning, experience and skill with the sword.
But they’ve been hired to right a great wrong and they won’t rest until it’s done.
Above/Below
Originally published as a pair of novellas that you could read in any order, Above/Below is a novel co-written with Stephanie Campisi.
A city has fallen from the sky.
In the wreckage, two men – Devian Lell, a window cleaner in the floating cities of Loft, and Eli Kurran, a security guard in one of the polluted, ground-based cities of Dirt – will find their lives changed.
Devian, who has done what few in the floating landscape have by stepping outside the sanctuary of his home, will be drawn into the politics of Loft, as he is recruited to be the assistant for Dirt’s political representative. On the ground, Kurran, still mourning the death of his wife, tries to remove himself from the violent politics of Dirt even as he is blackmailed into providing security for the diplomatic representative of Loft, a woman three times his age, and the oldest living person he has ever met.
A tale of two cities, the stories Above and Below make up two halves of another in the Twelfth Planet Press Doubles series. Written by Stephanie Campisi and Ben Peek, designed to be self-contained and complete as individual narratives, the two parts can be read in either order, yet also form a single narrative that has been intricately woven and designed to create a single, novel length story. It is a work that suggests not a single way of reading, but rather two, with conflicting morals that will continue to test the reader’s certainty in who, in the cities of Loft and Dirt, is in the right.
Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth
An experimental autobiography.
Written in a set of encyclopaedia entries, Twenty-Six Lies/One truth is the autobiography of a man who has never been anywhere, or done anything. Interior art by Anna Brown.
Black Sheep
Benjamin Peek’s first novel.
This is the story of Isao Dazai, a Japanese-born man who has recently immigrated to Australia with his family. The future that Isao lives in is a world of mass race segregation where each of the world’s cities have been divided into three separate walled ghettos, defined by three ‘mass racial’ categories: Asian, African and Caucasian. Living in Asian-Sydney, Isao knows that simply wanting to cross the city’s boundaries is one of the greatest of crimes in this new world, as is his inability to leave his Japanese culture behind. Within months of arriving in Sydney, he is charged with the crime of multiculturalism and sentenced to Assimilation, a radical and invasive punishment created by the Australian Government. This new punishment strips Isao of his personality and skin pigmentation and leaves him with cold, white skin, and nothing but a number to identify himself with.
Dead Americans and Other Stories
A collection of short fiction.
A collection of the critically acclaimed dark, weird, and surreal short fiction of Ben Peek. It presents a world where bands are named after the murderer of a dead president, where the work of Octavia E. Butler is turned into an apocalypse meta-narrative, and John Wayne visits a Wal-Mart. It presents a world where a dying sun shines over a broken, bitter landscape and men and women tattoo their life onto their skin for an absent god. It presents a zombie apocalypse, Mark Twain dreaming of Sydney, and answers a questionnaire you never read.