Back Roads Kingdom in Bloomington, MN

"BACK ROADS KINGDOM steers us along bold and bracing roads paved with pure storytelling magic. Like all great writers, O'Neill is able to fashion his own tapestry from an existing landscape, making it his own and drawing us inside a mosaic unique to his vision. His writing is splendid, sumptuous and scintillating, chronicling a journey that takes on an epic nature of both physical and metaphysical dimensions. With echos of both THE TALISMAN and THE LORD OF THE RINGS series, BACK ROADS KINGDOM is not easily forgotten and not to be missed." USA Today bestselling author Jon Land Penny Lazarus has strayed from the straight and narrow. A year ago, her twin sister did just the same. She wound up dead, and Penny - seventeen, headstrong and reckless - wants answers. Now, cast adrift in a terrifying parallel universe hidden just off the West Virginia Interstate, Penny will stop at nothing until she finds them. In the alternate America known as the Back Roads, every individual's deepest desire emerges as a powerful supernatural ability - a Manifest. Penny's Manifest allows her to become invisible, intangible, ghost-like. She'll need it. Around every turn, new predators await: from man-eating mosquitoes to snake-handling zealots, from hex-casting Conjure Men to the slave-trading hell-on-wheels tyrant known as Emperor Sarin. Also, Death himself, who turns out to be kind of a jerk in real life. By her side, for whatever it's worth, is a fierce mountain-woman werewolf with a bloody past, and a tricky werefox thief who slowly but surely ensnares Penny's heart, entirely against her better instincts. What Penny hoped to find was the truth behind her sister's fate. But what awaits her at the end of the road is something much bigger - the dark secret of her own world-shattering destiny. Filled with sweeping emotion and dark humor, BACK ROADS KINGDOM is the first volume in a thrilling new fantasy saga, weaving classic American folktales with modern urban legends to create a wildly original coalpunk epic.