One hundred very short chapters, told in an utterly original first-person voice, propel readers through a narrative that is by turns gripping and darkly humorous, bleak and chilling, tender and transporting.

What if the football hadn't gone over the wall? On the other side of the wall, there is a dark secret. And the devil. And the Moon Man. And the Motherland doesn't want anyone to know.

But Standish Treadwell—who has different-colored eyes, who can't read, can't write, Standish Treadwell isn't bright—sees things differently than the rest of the "train-track thinkers." So when Standish and his only friend and neighbor, Hector, make their way to the other side of the wall, they see what the Motherland has been hiding. And it's big...

Kip from Midwest Centerville, USA, works the summer before college as a pharmacy soda jerk and wins an authentic stripped-down spacesuit in a soap contest. He answers a distress radio call from Peewee, a scrawny, rag doll-clutching genius aged 11. With the comforting cop Mother Thing, three-eyed tripod Wormfaces kidnap them to the Moon and Pluto.