Matthew Jobin Books in Order

For the main trilogy: The Nethergrim → The Skeleth → The Darknot
If you want the extra lore: The Nethergrim → The Skeleth → The Book of Deeds: Stories from the World of The Nethergrim → The Darknot
If you're reading with a younger fantasy fan: The Nethergrim → The Skeleth

Matthew Jobin grew up in Canada, just outside Toronto, and a lot of his fiction seems to begin with that early habit of looking at ordinary woods and seeing a whole other world inside them. As a boy, he explored the forest near his home and started imagining places, histories, and dangers that would eventually feed directly into The Nethergrim books.

He was building that world for a long time.

Jobin has said that the village and mood of the series started taking shape when he was around fourteen. He loved history, especially the medieval period, and later studied linguistics and mythology as he worked out how his invented world should sound, feel, and carry its legends. Even the name Nethergrim seems to come from that same instinct. He wanted something that felt old, but still clear enough to live on the page.

Writing did not arrive as a clean break from some other life. It grew alongside his academic work. He moved to California for graduate school, earned a PhD in anthropology at Stanford University, and taught anthropology at Santa Clara University. That background shows up in the books, not as homework, but in the way customs, stories, power, and fear shape whole communities.

He writes fantasy that cares about how people live inside a world, not just how they fight through it.

His debut novel, The Nethergrim, came out in 2014 after about twenty-five years of worldbuilding behind the scenes. It follows Edmund, Katherine, and Tom, three young outsiders who are forced to face an old evil when children begin disappearing. The book was named a Best Book for Teens by the New York Public Library and was a finalist for the Monica Hughes Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, which gave Jobin a strong start as a novelist.

Jobin continued the story with The Skeleth in 2016 and The Darknot in 2019, then added more lore with The Book of Deeds: Stories from the World of The Nethergrim. Readers who click with his work usually like the same mix of things: a dark fairy-tale mood, careful worldbuilding, and a central friendship that has to survive fear, war, and bad choices. His books can be intense, but they are not empty grimness. The emotional core is loyalty, courage, and the cost of doing the right thing.

Across the series, he returns to a few ideas again and again. Legends get polished until they hide the truth. Power attracts people who think they can control it. Young characters are underestimated until the moment they are the only ones willing to act. The setting may feel medieval, but the problems are human and familiar.

That may be where the anthropologist and novelist meet.

His fantasy is interested in belief, memory, and the stories communities tell about themselves. It also makes room for concrete pleasures: eerie creatures, dangerous roads, swords, spells, and the thrill of three kids trying to do what grown-ups cannot. He has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Tina, still connected to the world he started building as a teenager.