Published: Dec. 16, 2010
Words: 61,700 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781458003676

Short description

Stories create the world. They live on your skin. In your bones. Lose your stories? Cease to exist. The world will not remember you. Sally Gold has only one chance to stop that terrible death from happening to everything and everyone she loves: She must take a dangerous road into a parallel world and battle an evil older than time itself.

Extended description

Stories create the world. They live on your skin. In your bones. Lose your stories? Cease to exist. The world will not remember you.

Sally Gold has only one chance to stop that terrible death from happening to everything and everyone she loves: She must take a dangerous road into a parallel world and battle an evil older than time itself.

Tags

novels, universe, history, parallel world, stories, memory, tattoos, storyteller, alternate, skin and bone

Available ebook reading formats

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Reviews

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Review by: Lilac Moon Books on Dec. 09, 2011 : (no rating)
This is a lusciously drawn book. The images are stark and beautiful by turns. A very different book brought to life by a master storyteller. I want to see what tattoos she has.
(reviewed long after purchase)

Review by: Twisted Root Publishing on Aug. 22, 2011 :
Wow! With gritty details, Leslie Clare Walker draws you in and forces you to sit down and keep reading. Wonderful, mysterious world building and a lush and telling eye for details make this novel a gripping read. Walker builds characters you can care about and keeps you on the edge of your seat as you enter a world where towns and cities have been set adrift from the landscape to stagnate in an isolating mist.
(reviewed long after purchase)

Review by: JJ Press on Aug. 05, 2011 :
An unusual horror tale that hits the ground running and makes you hang on for the ride. Sally Gold is a Storyteller, learning her gift in order to fight the Bone Man, a creature who consumes people's stories by eating their bones.

This is not a tale for young people, or those who can't stand gore. But Walker makes you care about Sally and those around her, and you will find yourself reading on to see what's going to happen next.
(reviewed long after purchase)

Review by: Fiero Publishing on July 14, 2011 :
Some fantasy/sf worlds ease you into them with subtle (or not) explanations of why things are the way they are. Others just plunge you in and challenge you to catch up as the story races forward. This book is definitely of the latter variety. I found myself going WTF a bunch in the beginning, even as I was intrigued by the characters and creepy situations which aren't for the faint of heart. (Eviscerated bodies anyone?) But as everything starts to make more sense and the history of what happened in this alternate reality becomes clear, the tension just keeps on building to a nice pay off - a truly epic battle between a born storyteller and a monster in desperate need to fill himself with stories by crunching/sucking/ripping them out of the bones of his unfortunate victims.

Lots of poetry about storytelling and meaning and family and life and death wrapped into a visceral, punch-in-the-gut narrative.

Cool beans.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)

Review by: White Sun Press on July 05, 2011 :
Fascinating world with a tough and very authentic heroine whose gift as a "storyteller" is what both gives her power and also marks her for death. I found myself drawn completely into this world and its characters pretty much from the beginning, when Sally stumbles in to find her grandmother murdered on her own kitchen floor. She manages to pass Sally a final story as she dies, about a creature called a "Bone Collector" who hunts storytellers like the two of them.

From that moment forward, Sally is both chasing and hunting one of the more frightening villains I've read in a long time, who eats the bones of storytellers to take their stories into himself. He hunts her friends, her father-figure, Doc, her lover, Rafe, all in an attempt to collect on the deal her grandmother made with him many years previous. In the process, Sally is forced to brave the void to other worlds, and to do whatever she can to kill the Bone Collector before he kills her.

It's difficult to summarize this story, as so much of it is in mood and feel, which alternates between darkly poetic and gritty and very urban/real feeling. The characters are sympathetic and multi-dimensional as they struggle with the multiple realities they are facing. The world which Sally inhabits used to be a part of our world, but for reasons unknown "drifts away" from the world we knew, until no one there needs to eat, and there is no contact with anyone past the void at the edge of town. That alone forms such an interesting backdrop...this fading world and how the people of the town cope with their situation.

It actually at times reminded me of the Gunslinger stories by Stephen King, part mythos and part reality...or some of Neil Gaiman's work. A very unusual voice and world, and one that will stay with me probably for quite some time.
(reviewed within a week of purchase)

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