Do we like Peter Clines?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A clean search and a bit of real community work, but too little on the record to score him higher.
Peter Clines is the American writer behind the zombies-meet-superheroes Ex-Heroes books. He was born in Cape Neddick, Maine, in 1969. His first genre story appeared in 2009, and the Ex-Heroes series kicked off in 2010 with superheroes fighting a zombie apocalypse in California.
From there he went genre-hopping: 14 (a haunted-house story), The Fold (teleportation that creates parallel worlds), and Paradox Bound. The SF Encyclopedia says his growing skill and willingness to experiment may lead to substantial future work. His latest is God's Junk Drawer (2025), about a valley that pulls in visitors from different eras.
On the harm check, we went looking and found very little. Searches for him alongside LGBTQ+ and trans issues, women, climate, vaccines and politics turned up no statements, campaigns or donations either way. Nothing came up about him platforming anyone who pushes harm, either. That's a clean result, but it's partly a quiet one: he doesn't appear to be a commentator, so there's not much to judge him on.
On the good-person side, we found no court cases, lawsuits or allegations against him in the sources we checked. Searches for his name with those words mostly returned other people with similar names. He seems to be a working author who mostly lets the books do the talking.
The real good stuff is community. A 2020 LitReactor interview says he has hosted The Writers Coffeehouse, a free, informal meeting for writers, for about four years. It also says he runs a dystopian book club at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. Free help for people trying to break in is the kind of thing a mate would shout him a drink for.
His own words are mostly shop talk. He says his recurring theme is trying to find your purpose and where you belong, and he told one interviewer he hopes readers think about what they loved in their youth and whether they can move forward. That's gentle, fandom-friendly stuff.