Dale McGlothlin

“We’ll cry or laugh when we’re through, then we’ll have time to be young again. We have to be heroes.”

Pre-teen boredom in the rural Scottish Borders leads recent American transplant, 11-year-old Fletcher Bell, and three new friends into a mysterious abandoned house, where they activate a machine that sends them through the veil from the world of the living to Necropolis, the City of the Dead.

Poor Fletcher has yet to deal with his mother’s death from cancer (though she’s now speaking to him in his nightmares), his father’s depression, and their sudden move from crowded Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to the Eildon Hills of the Scottish Borders where sheep outnumber people. Fletcher is confused, asthmatic, lonely, and a typical sullen preteen. But in Otherworld, he’s a prodigy at everything from talking to animals to military tactics, and he’s certain others are making a dangerous mistake by pinning their hopes on him to be anything other than a normal boy.

Fletcher’s traveling companions are:

Mairen Gunn, a tomboyish girl from the Highlands who prefers hunting, history books, and tending sheep to people

Owain Goch, a tall, clumsy Welsh boy whose hyper-intelligence is key to making sense of the strange new world, and perhaps getting home

Tory Quill, the toffee-nosed daughter of an earl who will sacrifice anything, including the others, for her own desires

As “warmbloods,” Fletcher and friends don’t belong in Otherworld, called the O.W. by those who live there. The script if flipped, however, because in the O.W. the Living are the imagined wraiths and specters of scary stories and haunted houses—repulsive with their squishy warm blood and beating hearts. To the Dead, the Living are the things under the bed that go bump in the night.

And they are hardly prepared for the harsh environment of Otherworld, which was once the solitary paradise of the Allfather, now covered in ice and snow, a result of the Great War in which the bright Archangels, the entire angelic host, and their allies the Dead Souls of Otherworld, defeated the rebel Dark Angels, the Fallen, exiled long ago from the Firmament to the ghastly Underworld.

At the center of the O.W. is majestic Necropolis, the Venice-like megacity built to house souls waiting for judgment from the Court of Truth whose judges have stopped coming leaving souls to stack up like cordwood. While daily life is run with military precision by the Marcher Lords, time and mathematics is not on their side. The four young people find themselves quarantined to the grand Luminous Academy, and guarded by the enigmatic headmaster, Cariadus Peregrym.

As time goes by for their families back in Scotland, the Living Souls and four young Dead allies: Pimm Paisley, September Halwyn, Rajan Singh, and Q Peel find themselves chess pieces on the multi-dimensional game board of good v. evil, their every move a stumble in shadows. As Mairen Gunn tells them, “We’ll cry or laugh when we’re through. Then we’ll have time to be young again. For now we have to put it all in a box inside and lock it away. Tears, grief, sadness, homesickness, regrets, fear—all of it. We have to forget we’re weak. We have to be heroes.”

Can they find what’s lost and stop the Dark Angels from using the rift in the veil to destroy the O.W., then burn the Living World to the ground, and finally march their dark armies of malignant demons and creatures to the very gates of the Firmament? Can they get back through the veil before the bulldozers of a greedy property developer destroy the only way home—the machine back in Scotland?

It’s up to Fletcher Bell and his friends to save all worlds.