Local Victoria author Septimus Brown’s latest offering frames the ongoing US-Canada trade as a satirical fantasy quest titled We’ve Come for Your Eggs (And Other Reasons to Annex the North).
According to Brown, this book was a bit of a happy accident, as he was working on another project he found himself struggling to finish.
“It was kind of a more serious project and I was just having this mental block and I thought, maybe I needed to write something that’s not so serious,” Brown told Victoria Buzz.
“I started thinking maybe I would write kind of a D&D romp, something more silly to try to get out of this headspace and do something different.”
This all happened around the beginning of 2025, when Trump’s tariffs were announced and the Canada-US trade war was in its earliest phases.
One aspect that Brown chose to focus on was the egg shortage that was taking place in the United States.
“I just kept coming back to what’s going on in the world and I thought, why don’t I tell a story of some adventurers who are starting out in a fantasy version of America and they’re sick of the egg shortage, so they want to come to a fantasy version of Canada to topple the government and restore the flow of eggs from north to south,” explained Brown.
His resulting novel, We’ve Come for Your Eggs (And Other Reasons to Annex the North) follows a small “bonsai” frost dragon named Glimm, who is the pet of the delusion wizard Jorvun Prattlethorne, who is meant to represent Jordan Peterson.
Also in the novel, there is a lampoon version of Elon Musk, Lauren Boebert, Alex Jones and there is also a character that is meant to be a characterization of Fox News, who Brown describes as a bard who is also a pathological liar.
Brown says this cast of reprehensible characters set out on their mission, but are misled to believe a fantasy version of Victoria called “Gorptoria” is the capital of the northern nation, and the plot follows their silly adventure to get there.
“Once I started writing it just sort of flowed out of me,” said Brown.
“Normally I would take a lot longer with projects and I would outline extensively, but this one I just sat down and went at it.”
He added that he felt the story was timely and so he wanted to fast-track it and get it out as soon as possible, while its themes were still relevant.
According to Brown, one challenge he faced in writing this was that he had never written a comedy before.
“My concern was that I’ve never written comedy before,” he said.
“I like to crack jokes with friends and stuff but I didn’t even know if I could be funny, so this was an interesting test. I try to be more silly than anything else, so that’s what I tried to channel with this.”
It seems Brown succeeded in writing his first comedy, as some early reviews of the book have called it “laugh out loud funny,” with one reviewer stating that they spat their drink out of their mouth at one point due to laughter.
“It’s been great to hear that the comedy is working for people,” Brown explained.
The story of Glimm and his companions has only just started in We’ve Come for Your Eggs (And Other Reasons to Annex the North), as Brown says that this is just the first part in a duology he is planning.
The followup novel is now in the works and will expand on the journey in which the characters will go eastward to a fantasy version of Ottawa to attempt a coup of the actual capital of the northern nation.
He hopes that this sequel will come out in spring.
We’ve Come for Your Eggs (And Other Reasons to Annex the North) is available now at Bolen Books, Russell Books and Chapters-Indigo in Mayfair Shopping Centre.
And coming up, on Saturday, November 15th, Brown will be doing a book signing at Mayfair from noon to 3 p.m.
