From Publishers Weekly
Travel into another dimension is a popular fantasy ploy, but rarely accomplished with such humor, terror and even logic as in this stand-alone by bestseller Williams (Tailchaser's Song, etc.). After losing his girlfriend, Theo Vilmos, a singer in a humdrum northern California rock band, finds in his late mother's remote cabin an amazing if incomplete manuscript left by his eccentric great-uncle, Eamonn Dowd, about a fairy world purportedly visited by its author. Unsurprisingly, Faerie turns out to be a real place. Applecore, a short-tempered, red-haired sprite, abruptly appears before Theo just as a horrifying monster starts banging on the door. At Applecore's command, Theo swoops her up and pops through "the Gate" into a magical realm that proves initially beguiling, later strange and finally deadly. Ironically, Faerie is a distorted image of our own world, ruled by cruel fairy tyrants. The powerful classes, each named for a flower, wage war against each other, using colossal dragons as the equivalents of nuclear bombs. Theo discovers love as well as unsuspected secrets of his own birth and family. Williams's imagination is boundless, and if this big book could have been shorter, it could just as easily have been longer. The incorrigible Applecore continually delights, as in her comment on a famous J.M. Barrie character: "`If you believe in fairies, clap your hands'? If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it."Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Williams' latest is unsurprisingly large but is billed as a single-volume work, which is pretty flabbergasting coming from a writer addicted to series of massive tomes. The story begins with the fairly conventional device of a mundane (i.e., a person from our world) stumbling into Faerie. Marginal California rocker Theo Vilmos has just lost his pregnant girlfriend when he discovers an old, handwritten book in a rural cottage. The gritty and even rather grim faerie world to which it leads him is hardly a refuge from reality; indeed, it is so full of depressing details that those who are already somewhat down should consider reading the book only in bite-size chunks. The war of the title is one of numerous factions fighting among themselves, and with it, Williams darkly satirizes every sort and condition of politics, ideology, religion, and other human foibles, much as he did in the Otherland saga. Reader and hero alike remain in some confusion for some while, because Theo's Faerie guide, an obnoxious entity named Applecore, seems to have an agenda of his own and certainly has a stevedore's tongue. Williams has a supremely powerful, if not altogether disciplined, imagination, so that, like Theo, readers may feel they are encountering much that is dreary and dull on the way to the good parts. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Returning to the fantasy genre that made him a coast-to-coast best-selling phenomenon, Tad Williams has written a new stand-alone contemporary novel set in Northern California-and also in the strange parallel world that coexists in the farthest reaches of the imagination.

Theo Vilmos is a thirty-year-old lead singer in a not terribly successful rock band. Once, he had enormous, almost magical, charisma both onstage and off-but now, life has taken its toll on Theo. Hitting an all-time low, he seeks refuge in a islolated cabin in the woods-and reads an odd memoir written by a dead relative who believed he had visited the magical world of Faerie. And before Theo can disregard the account as the writings of a madman, he, too, is drawn to a place beyond his wildest dreams...a place filled with be, and has always been, his destiny.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In this single-volume fantasy, Tad Williams takes a struggling 30-year-old musician named Theo Vilmos and throws him into a magical realm on the verge of war.

Theo's life is not turning out the way he had planned: His girlfriend recently had a miscarriage while he was out late, practicing with his dead-end garage band, when he should've been home with her. After she loses the baby, she promptly breaks up with him and kicks him out of the house. Hoping to get his life back on track, he moves in with his estranged mother, only to find her dying of cancer. Her death and funeral are a blur for Theo, who now has no family, no friends, and no plans for the future. While going through his mother's belongings as he prepares to sell the house, Theo finds a manuscript written by his great-uncle, a diary of sorts that describes a visit to the realm of the Fey and life in an industrial city ruled by powerful, immortal families.

Before Theo knows it, a fairy saves his life from a demon sent to kill him, and he is transported to the world his great-uncle wrote about. But he quickly realizes he is not who -- or what -- he thought he was￯﾿ﾽ.

While the subject of changelings has been explored numerous times, Williams keeps the theme fresh by incorporating his trademarks of wonderfully complex plot twists, masterful character development, and expeditious pacing. Highly recommended. Paul Goat Allen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Theo Vilmos' life is about to take a real turn for the worse.

Not that it was ever that great -- spending the last decade of his life as a singer in a succession of not terribly successful Northern California rock bands isn't exactly a dream come true. But what can Theo do? When his girlfriend Cat gets pregnant, it seems like it's time to give up his irresponsible dreams and settle down. Until now, Theo has always skated through life -- getting by on good looks and charm but short on accomplishments, never quite fitting in. The only place that he's ever felt truly right, the only world to which he's ever really belonged, is onstage, enveloped in music, singing his heart out. But isn't that a pretty immature way for a thirty-year-old to feel? Now Cat is pregnant and things are going to change big time. Theo will be forced to change, too. So maybe this is a good thing -- just what he needs. But, as Theo discovers, he hasn't hit bottom yet, not by a long shot. He soon finds himself alone, heartbroken, and plagued by a recurring nightmare -- and he can't shake the feeling that these bad things are happening to him for a reason. When he comes across a mysterious old letter from his grandmother's brother, a man named Eamonn Dowd, and with it the key to a safe deposit box, he decides to investigate. What he finds is an old handwritten book.

Seeking solace and escape in a cabin in the woods, Theo begins to read his great-uncle's book and quickly becomes mesmerized. Dowd writes of another world -- the world of Faerie -- but it is nothing like the familiar fairyland of childhood stories. Caught up in the book's compelling tale, Theo begins to hear strange sounds and experience odd fears. Then one night, all his fears manifest when a horrifying thing tries to break through his front door -- a terrible hunting-spirit in the body of a dead man. Terrified and trapped, Theo is saved only by the intervention of a tiny, foul-mouthed, winged sprite named Applecore, who transports him through a surreal portal into the realm of Faerie. But this fairyland is even darker and more bizarrely modern than Eamonn Dowd had described, similar to the mortal world and yet dangerously different, and although he can't imagine why, there are creatures in it who intend Theo Vilmos serious harm. Chased by corpselike cave trolls and the undead spirit which had pursued him from his own world, at the mercy of immortal beings whose personal and political affiliations are bafflingly unclear, and with only the reluctant sprite Applecore for a guide, Theo begins a journey that will lead him from the palacetowers of the most powerful and treacherous of the fair folk to the camps of rebel goblins and other places beyond his imagining, on a search for the true meaning of his life -- before those who seek him can cut it mercilessly short.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Travel into another dimension is a popular fantasy ploy, but rarely accomplished with such humor, terror and even logic as in this stand-alone by bestseller Williams (Tailchaser's Song, etc.). After losing his girlfriend, Theo Vilmos, a singer in a humdrum northern California rock band, finds in his late mother's remote cabin an amazing if incomplete manuscript left by his eccentric great-uncle, Eamonn Dowd, about a fairy world purportedly visited by its author. Unsurprisingly, Faerie turns out to be a real place. Applecore, a short-tempered, red-haired sprite, abruptly appears before Theo just as a horrifying monster starts banging on the door. At Applecore's command, Theo swoops her up and pops through "the Gate" into a magical realm that proves initially beguiling, later strange and finally deadly. Ironically, Faerie is a distorted image of our own world, ruled by cruel fairy tyrants. The powerful classes, each named for a flower, wage war against each other, using colossal dragons as the equivalents of nuclear bombs. Theo discovers love as well as unsuspected secrets of his own birth and family. Williams's imagination is boundless, and if this big book could have been shorter, it could just as easily have been longer. The incorrigible Applecore continually delights, as in her comment on a famous J.M. Barrie character: "`If you believe in fairies, clap your hands'? If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it." (June 3) FYI: Williams is the author of Sea of Silver Light (Forecasts, Apr. 9, 2001) and other titles in his Otherland series. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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