Blog Entries

One evening, Sarah, a midwife in late 19th century New York, is called to a boardinghouse to deliver the owner’s baby. A guest walks in during the delivery, and for an instant, Sarah thinks she recognizes her and calls out a name, startling the young woman. The guest leaves, and Sarah spends the next several hours delivering the baby. When she returns later to check on mother and child, she is surprised to learn that the young female guest has been murdered.

In 1984, two masters of horror collaborated to bring us this novel. In it, young Jack Sawyer goes on a magical quest to save his dying mother by obtaining the powerful Talisman. An evil sorcerer also desires the Talisman and attempts to thwart him at every turn. Jack’s path crosses America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and traverses not only our mundane world (He visits a fictional boarding school here in Springfield!), but also crosses into a parallel fantasy realm called the Territories.

Kate is a twenty-six-year-old reporter working for the local neighborhood newspaper in Brixton, London. After writing mostly about lost pets and trying (unsuccessfully) to keep her anxiety and panic attacks at bay, she is assigned to write about the closing of the lido, or local swimming pool. At the lido, she meets Rosemary, an eighty-seven-year-old widow who swims at the pool every day, and has for most of her life. Kate asks Rosemary for an interview, to which the older woman agrees only if Kate goes for a swim in the pool.

It all begins with a family on vacation in Ireland. On their way back home to New York, the husband grows sick. By the next day, he's in the hospital, dying. The sickness spreads quickly-- worldwide. Governments collapse, mayhem reigns supreme. Only instead of a zombie apocalypse, people start seeing things out of fairy tales: people flying, unicorns in the street, monsters in the subways.

There have always been stories of children disappearing into other worlds-- fairylands, wonderlands, netherworlds, and more. But what happens when those children come back? What happens when their families no longer know what to do with them, when all they want is to jump back down those rabbit holes?