Everyone believes that Raziel’s parents are long dead. Everyone but Raziel. He knows the flying city that took them is real. He is sure that if he can just find it, he can find them too.

The first step to finding them is getting answers from a creature living in an ancient, abandoned fortress just a few miles away. To get to it, Raziel will need a way past the high walls and the knights that guard his town, through the twisting forest paths, and to defend himself against the monsters lurking among the trees.

Answers to questions that have tormented him for years are just within reach. Or so he thinks. The fort is not the mere ruin he thought, and Raziel is not the only one seeking it.

Someone from his home has made a deal for terrible power, and his master is neither kind nor forgiving. They want the creature defending the fort dead, and if Raziel is going to find his answers, he will have to face them, a horde of monsters, disbelief from the adults around him, and his own inner demons.

But Raziel won’t let any of that stop him. After all, it wouldn’t be fun without a challenge.

Dreams and Shadows is a brilliantly crafted modern tale from acclaimed film critic and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill—part Neil Gaiman, part Guillermo Del Toro, part William S. Burroughs—that charts the lives of two boys from their star-crossed childhood in the realm of magic and mystery to their anguished adulthoods.

There is another world than our own—one no closer than a kiss and one no further than our nightmares—where all the stuff of which dreams are made is real and magic is just a step away. But once you see that world, you will never be the same.

Dreams and Shadows takes us beyond this veil. Once bold explorers and youthful denizens of this magical realm, Ewan is now an Austin musician who just met his dream girl, and Colby, meanwhile, cannot escape the consequences of an innocent wish. But while Ewan and Colby left the Limestone Kingdom as children, it has never forgotten them.

In a world where angels relax on rooftops, whiskey-swilling genies argue metaphysics with foul-mouthed wizards, and monsters in the shadows feed on fear, you can never outrun your fate.

Dreams and Shadows is a stunning and evocative debut about the magic and monsters in our world and in ourselves.