The Middle Reaches

The Middle Reaches begins with Cycle One: Shadow Man. Five friends who’ve lost touch–Ambrose, Celia, Leslie, Nick, and Pedro–get together after their tenth high school reunion and rekindle memories of an otherworldly place, The Middle Reaches, where they spent time as kids and where their high school friend, Sheldon, disappeared. They return, “follow the creek,” and journey into a realm of sex, violence, and creatures hungry to keep them there forever. As death hounds them, dark secrets emerge, adding emotional strain to the madness that threatens from their surroundings. They don’t know where they’re going, but they soon realize they can’t turn back, and something waits for those who survive at the end of the journey, and whatever it is, it yearns.

Shadow Man does present a complete journey through The Middle Reaches, revealing its secrets up until the last page, but it is an introduction, not a standalone. It drops threads for narrative elements that will become central as the story develops. The discussion of Carcosa and the reference to the King in Yellow, perhaps more than inventions of Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, points toward what will become the epic’s broader scope. The lawsuit mentioned in the opening pages is fundamental to the grand finale.

Characters in Shadow Man also briefly refer to events and characters in Cycle Two: A Rift in Time and Space, which… sort of… takes place a decade or so before the characters from Shadow Man had their teen experiences in The Middle Reaches. Cycle Two introduces Bobby Lightfoot, a boy lost in The Middle Reaches and tormented by a fiend called The Man in the Grinning Mask. Heather, Bobby’s former babysitter, and her friend Janet are lured into The Middle Reaches by Max, a charming young man hiding the things he is beginning to learn about himself. Stalked by psychopaths as well as the region’s many other monsters, these travelers follow paths that cross Cycle One’s. Familiarity with Cycle One is crucial for understanding what is and isn’t typical about what Bobby and the others experience as they go farther and deeper into the darkness of The Middle Reaches and places beyond The Gate encountered at the end of Shadow Man.

Characters in A Rift in Time and Space discover what those in Shadow Man only glimpse: time and space do not behave in The Middle Reaches like they do elsewhere. Spaces and moments far apart can converge. People on different timelines tend to meet. You might meet someone who was a boy many years ago… and still is.

Cycle Three: The Flood continues with the journey of Cycle Two‘s survivors (not that dead and alive mean what they used to), and new travelers collide with some familiar from earlier cycles as they all journey deeper into the horrors of Carcosa, exploring the roads to Lake Hali and the Palace of the King in Yellow. A lawsuit in the earthly realm over the ownership of the land between the two Acton Ways, the entryway to The Middle Reaches, manifests in Carcosa as a struggle among gods and ghosts, a struggle that could unleash an apocalyptic Flood. Vengeful ghosts are gathering. Gods are playing politics. And there are so many monsters….

In The Flood, the full cosmic scale of the dark fantasy epic finally becomes clear as elements of the first two cycles integrate. Apocalyptic possibilities glimpsed through A Rift in Time and Space become real stakes. Time and space are falling apart on grand levels and on the levels of the unfortunate individuals being shredded by grotesqueries spilling into the earthly realm from realms unfathomable.

The Middle Reaches concludes with Cycle Four: The Army of Ghosts. As chaos and madness spread, gods, monsters, ghosts, and humans battle for the fates of both the earthly realm and the realms beyond. Characters from all four cycles–dead and alive–have important parts to play as legal maneuvering, physical slaughters, supernatural blowouts, and other pyrotechnics that transcend time and space put all of existence on the line.