Zod Wallop

All of the text that follows is from the inside-front cover:

Rock yawned. "Gotta get moving," Rock said. A couple of hundred million years went by. A rock is always slow to take action. A rock watches an oak grow from a sapling to a towering tree, and it's a flash and a dazzle in the mind of a rock. "What was that?" Rock thinks. Or maybe, "Huh?"

That's how Zod Wallop starts. Harry Gainesborough wrote and drew the story three years ago, before his daughter drowned. Now he writes nothing.

Raymond Story read Zod Wallop while he was a patient at Harwood Psychiatric. Now the book means everything to him -- so much so that he'd like to meet its author and live out its events.

In fact, Zod Wallop means so much to Raymond that he has taken great pains to escape the institution and is now journeying to Harry Gainesborough's house with his young wife, Emily, in tow.

These odd things alone would be enough to unsettle Harry, but they're compounded by other coincidences. Bizarre coincidences. Occurrences that lead Harry to believe that Zod Wallop is actually happening.

This fantasy is a true delight -- one of those rare books that brim with insight, entertainment, and storytelling magic. It is a novel to read and reread. (Readers are not encouraged to attempt living out its events, however.)