Author Event: Andrew Fox - Ghostlands

Francesco Helios, agroundskeeper in New Shining Capital, runs a 'mower,' a seventy-ton levelingmachine that keeps the Lawn free of the bloom of mushrooming monuments. Like anunruly yard, structures shove their way up through the turf: the obelisk of theWasherman Monument, the temple of 'Old Frog Face,' and a thousand otherstubborn relics from a half-recollected past that refuse to stay mowed down. While Francesco is mowing, a ghostly woman appears on the Lawn. Unlikeother human ghosts reborn from the past, the woman recognizes Francesco. Shecalls him by a name he doesn’t recognize, but that resonates. Timebreaker. Soon Francesco is catapulted to dockyards cluttered with mushroomingbattleships and across the country to plains of ghostly buffalo, all with amadman on his trail who seeks to transform Francesco into a 'grubber,'dedicated to the eradication of CAHSPEI—Chronologically Anomalous Human-SeemingPhenomenon (Emergent-Insubstantial)—that is, to the murder of human ghosts fromthe past. Yet if the Timebreaker is real—and he is the one— then maybe even a lowlygroundskeeper can save his family from ruin, himself from oblivion—and, in theprocess, wrench humanity from the suicidal rubber room of rebounding time hismushroom-haunted world has become.