Hundred Thousand Worlds

"A Kavalier & Clay for the Comic Con age, A Hundred Thousand Worlds is a bighearted, inventive, exuberant debut." 
– Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints

"A work of wit and heart, A Hundred Thousand Worlds is for anyone who craves a smart family saga. I loved it completely." —Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
 
A winning debut that tells the story of four people whose lives intertwine in the alternate universe of comic-cons—including a former sci-fi cult TV star who is hiding the real reason for their cross-country road trip from her young son

Six years ago, Valerie Torrey took her son, Alex, and fled Los Angeles—leaving both her role on a cult sci-fi TV show and her costar husband after a spectacular tragedy blew their small family apart. Now Val must reunite nine-year-old Alex with his estranged father, so they set out on a road trip from New York, Val making  appearances at comic book conventions along the way. For Val, the trip is an unwelcome reckoning with both the reason she ran and the reason she’s being forced to return; for Alex, though, it’s a journey to a fantastical place where fiction becomes real.

As they travel west, encountering superheroes, monsters, time travelers, and robots, Val and Alex are drawn into the orbit of the con regulars, from a hapless twentysomething illustrator to a lesbian comics writer to a group of cosplay women who provide a chorus of knowing commentary on the subculture. But as they near their destination, Alex begins to realize that the story his mother is telling him about their trip might have a very different ending than he imagined.

A Hundred Thousand Worlds is at heart a tribute to the fierce and complicated love between a mother and son—and to the way the stories we create come to shape us.


From the Hardcover edition.