The Failures

From a debut voice comes a genre-breaking blend of apocalyptic sci-fi and epic fantasy about a scattered group of unlikely heroes traveling across their broken mechanical planet to stave off eternal darkness. A tightly-coiled puzzle of a thrill ride, The Failures launches The Wanderlands trilogy

Welcome to the Wanderlands.
A vast machine made for reasons unknown, the Wanderlands was broken long ago. First went the sky, splintering and cracking, and then very slowly, the whole machine--the whole world--began to go dark.

Meet the Failures.
Following the summons of a strange dream, a scattering of adventurers, degenerates, and children find themselves drawn toward the same place: the vast underground Keep. They will discover there that they have been called for a purpose--and that purpose could be the destruction of everything they love.

The end is nigh.
For below the Keep, imprisoned in the greatest cage ever built by magicians and gods, lies the buried Giant. It is the most powerful of its kind, and its purpose is the annihilation of all civilization. But any kind of power, no matter how terrible, is precious in the dimming Wanderlands, and those that crave it are making their moves.

All machines can be broken, and the final cracks are spreading. It will take only the careless actions of two cheerful monsters to tip the Wanderlands towards an endless dark...or help it find its way back to the light.

Benjamin Liar is a writer, musician, filmmaker and game designer. He has been writing for most of his life, but The Failures is his first published novel. He has performed his music under many names and in many places, has won several local awards for short filmmaking, and recently published a virtual reality game. His name is clearly a pseudonym, but you still shouldn’t trust anything he says.