THE BORDER KEEPER

A journey into an underworld filled with gods and demons, beauty and danger.

The border keeper lives in solitude on the shadowline between Ahri, the realm of the living, and Mkalis, the spirit realm, until a man named Vasethe arrives and calls her Eris, a name she hoped had been forgotten. He’s come to travel into Mkalis. A woman he loved is dead, and Eris can guide him through the underworld to find her. He just has to follow a few simple rules—don’t eat or drink anything, and don’t lie. Even an accidental untruth can lead to brutal punishment. Meanwhile, Vasethe’s mortal body will lie sleeping at the border keeper’s house, where the Ageless are approaching the fence, testing the strength of Eris’ wards. The underworld created here is rich and strange, populated with children transformed into translucent crabs, armored, cloven-hooved bird-faced creatures carrying masked riders, and glittering parties where the wrong word can kill. But debut novelist Hall throws readers a little too far into the deep end, offering almost no details about who Vasethe and Eris are and what they want, which makes them hard to connect with. The bones of a great story are here, but too much becomes meaningful only in hindsight, when key information is finally revealed.

An intriguing debut from a writer with the skills to create weird and wonderful worlds, this one is almost great.