Thin Places (Paperback)

"You are a thin place, Ewan Coles. . ." Ewan Coles is a perfectly normal person who's taking a shot at the job he's always wanted--professorship at an Ivy League University. His interest in thin places was academic, a figurative phrase for the places where reality and imagination almost, but not quite, touch. Places in this world where one can spy a giant living in the arboretum, grey wolves swimming down the Swan River in Perth. . . Or a Unicorn on Times Square. But when he meets a little girl on the flight from his native Australia to America, Ewan finds himself tumbling between two worlds. Not just encountering thin places, but encountering this world as a thin place, himself. A place where the worlds pass especially close to each other. Dangerously close, because one never knows what will follow them home. . . At first, the other world seems little more than an eccentric next-door neighbor until something reaches from the gloom, from the dark places, and catches hold of Ewan. The Maugrim; not so much a creature as a presence. As the people closest to him begin to disappear, leaving behind no trace or even memory of their existence, Ewan is forced to fight for his reality. He must find a way to destroy the evil clinging to him before it consumes him and everyone he loves. His only weapons are his books and his imagination. His only allies are a dubious cast of dream figments and unicorns who have, to say the least, their own agendas. Vladimir, leader of the unicorns, is convinced the only way to defeat the Maugrim is to send it back into the shadows and destroy the thin place it traveled across. This is all well and good, except that Ewan may be the thin place across which the Maugrim stepped. Ewan knows the Maugrim must be stopped, even if it can't be destroyed. However, in doing so, Ewan may be forced down a path of self-destruction from which there is no redemption or return. That is, if the unicorns don't kill him first.