River of Blue Fire

The second installment of cyberpunk fantasy novelist Tad Williams's New York Times bestseller series. "Tad Williams is the brightest and best of the fantasists," the author says. The author of American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Otherworld. It is, in many respects, the most astounding creation in human history—a personal, multiverse created over the course of two generations by the brightest brains of the twenty-first century. But this most exclusive of places is also one of the world's best kept secrets, created and controlled by an organization made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals, a private cartel known—to those who know of their existence at all—as The Grail Brotherhood.

It's still unclear why they created Otherland, but that may not last for long. Because of the awful price they have exacted from mankind in the process, the nature of their crimes cannot be concealed indefinitely, not even by their highly organized worldwide conspiracy. And now the curtain of secrecy keeping the uninitiated out of Otherland has been broken by a tiny group of explorers. They are unable to return to their own physical bodies in the actual world because they have broken into the incredible worlds within worlds that make up this cosmos.

Additionally, when perils and events divide their party into tiny, dispersed groups, their only chance of coming together is to repeatedly visit the River that runs—in one way or another—through all of the worlds. But the odds seem to be stacked against them as they—as well as the one outsider they might team up with—become hopelessly lost in worlds where the only thing that can quench the fears of an Ice Age tribe is blood; where deadly insects outnumber humans in the wild; where a war breaks out between a man made of tin and straw; where cartoon advertisements come to life; where humans try to survive after an alien invasion; and where one of their number is actually The Grail Brotherhood's most terrifying weapon—a sociopathic killer who has never failed and whose current mission is to ensure that not even one member of this small invasion force lives long enough to reveal the truth about Otherland to the people of Earth.