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“A smart, engrossing tale steeped in both a profound sense of place, and an intoxicating mystical realism that beckons you to follow it to ever-frightening depths. An unlikely stylistic marriage between the writings of Aleister Crowley and Burnett’s The Secret Garden. A read that will have you spellbound from word one.”
—Andrew Kelley Stewart, author of We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep
"This was such a refreshing, thought-provoking read. I lost myself in a Cornwall steeped in the occult, against a very real backdrop of war and loss. Compellingly imagined and brilliantly written, with moments of clear horror shining through the mud, The Dark King Swallows The World is a devastatingly beautiful book."
—Natalia Theodirodou, winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction
“The Dark King Swallows the World twists various genres into one and creates a fantastical world that is part Dante, part C. S. Lewis, and in the end, absolutely original. Nora, the main character, is complex and brilliant, curious and imaginative, as is the language Robert Penner uses in this story that rises toward the light.”
—David Bergen, award-winning author of The Time in Between
“I loved the hallucinatory weirdness ... a Hero's Quest, which changes everything and solves nothing.”
—Julia August, author of A Shrine to Saint Ann
While isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief, Nora’s mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, a self-professed necromancer who Nora believes is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother’s love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora embarks on an epic journey and is plunged into a world of faeries, giants and homunculi. Eventually she reaches the land of the dead where she confronts the dark king who rules that realm, attempting to retrieve her half-brother and heal her mother’s broken heart.