Acclaimed Canadian poet Steven Price has conjured a stunning debut novel that explores what we ask from each other, and how much we are prepared to give.

Set in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, Into That Darkness opens at the moment when a massive earthquake hits the entire west coast with devastating results. Amid the destruction of the city, survivors are left to negotiate a calamity in which bonds of civility are pushed to their limits and often broken.

When Arthur Lear hears a voice crying in the rubble, he finds himself descending deep under a collapsed building in a desperate attempt to save a young boy and his mother. But what he discovers there will change him forever — as circumstances lead him across the city’s broken landscape, through the chaos of its hospitals and streets, in a harrowing search for the mother’s lost daughter. Over the days that follow, Lear’s very sense of humanness will be tested and compromised, as he faces the limits of himself and his fellow survivors, in his long journey home.

A novel for our age of anxiety and fear, Steven Price delivers a powerful story about the physical manifestation of the darker things lurking in our culture, in ourselves.

Steven Price was born and raised in Colwood, BC. His first collection of poetry, Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books, 2006), won the Gerald Lampert Award and was named a Globe & Mail Book of the Year. His work has appeared in Canadian and American literary journals. He is one of the poets in Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane. Price graduated from the University of Virginia Writing Program, and currently teaches poetry and writing at the University of Victoria.

Steven Price's profile page

Price's form is intriguing

book addiction

There is not a word wasted in Into That Darkness, and every sentence is at once carefully crafted and seemingly effortless...

The National Post

It is, above all, compelling and real, a novel that will satisfy at every level.

The Vancouver Sun

This novel is a real feat. It is visceral. You feel this book creep into your very organs while you read.

The Winnipeg Review

If beauty can emanate from tragedy, Price has made it happen.

Times Colonist