Zachary is the child of an immigrant, gay, and is going to college to work as a game designer. The world is composed of symbols, the logic is the fever dream logic of Alice, lost in Wonderland it is new myth, new legend, a story with it’s roots firmly entangled in America. The reader looking for explanations and reasoning will not find it here, this is a story of layered metaphor, a story that disregards many conventions of world building and the fantasy genre in general. Zachary’s story is layered with others legend and myth, folk and fairy tale, the recounting of nightmares that have been folded into stars and cast away. That is why, years later at twenty five, Zachary finds a book that will give him a second chance to enter a world made of story and dream, a city by a dark sea and a starless sky, a dying place more alive then our own world. On that day, child Zachary chose to walk away, but Fate has a way of finding you, regardless of how many times you turn your back on it. Zachary Ezra Rawlins once found a door a door that was absolutely painted, yes, but also a door that was real, a door that was made for him to find, and open. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are.” Stories upon stories upon stories men lost in time, girls who are rabbits, owls who are kings, pirates who are metaphors… The first four chapters alone create a paradox of story and time, providing a mystery so curious that our hero Zachary Ezra Rawlins is compelled to give chase down the rabbit hole, and what he finds is a world of faded gold, dazzling ghosts, and stories.

Now author Erin Morgenstern is back with The Starless Sea, a story about stories, a book the intertwines myth and folk tales with modern story telling. Eight long years have passed since The Night Circus burst into the literary scene with a shower of black confetti and red rose petal, bewitching it’s readers with gorgeous prose and an imaginative world that made you never wish to leave.

The starless sea genre