“Just a story? Tell that to the Greeks who fought at Troy. Tell the women burned as witches. Tell the martyrs of all the religions... Stories are the only thing worth dying for!”

Tom Taylor’s learning that the hard way. His life was screwed the second his dad’s fingers hit the word processor. His father was the uber-popular wordsmith who created the Tommy Taylor books, a series of children's novels starring a boy wizard that became more popular than any piece of fiction ever written.

So what’s the problem? The books got so popular that fans started confusing real-life Tom with fictional-life Tommy, turning Tom Taylor into the lamest Z-level celebrity imaginable. And as much as Tom was angry at Dad for abandoning him once his novels were completed, he finds one more reason for his resentment: Tom Taylor isn’t even Wilson’s biological son.

So who is he? The more whacked-out opinion is he’s the fictional character from the books made flesh. But if that sounds ludicrous, why is there a mysterious cabal stalking him? How are they using the power of stories to fight a secret magical war? And how can Tom—whose never even had a marketable skill, much less a talent—travel within the most famous stories ever told? To learn who he really is, Tom must answer all those questions while rubbing shoulders with the cast and characters from Frankenstein, Moby Dick, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and more.