Josh Winning’s debut horror-fantasy, THE SHADOW GLASS is Dark Crystal meets About a Boy in London, a race against the clock to stop bloodthirsty puppets from taking over the world. Jack Corman is failing at life. Jobless, jaded and on the “wrong” side of thirty, he’s facing the threat of eviction from his London flat while reeling from the sudden death of his father, one-time film director Bob Corman. Back in the eighties, Bob poured his heart and soul into the creation of his 1986 puppet fantasy The Shadow Glass, a film Jack loved as a child, idolising its fox-like hero Dune. But The Shadow Glass flopped on release, deemed too scary for kids and too weird for adults, and Bob became a laughing stock, losing himself to booze and self-pity. Now, the film represents everything Jack hated about his father, and he lives with the fear that he’ll end up a failure just like him. In the wake of Bob’s death, Jack returns to his decaying home, a place creaking with movie memorabilia and painful memories. Then, during a freak thunderstorm, the puppets in the attic start talking. Tipped into a desperate real-world quest to save London from the more nefarious of his father’s creations, Jack teams up with excitable fanboy Toby and spiky studio executive Amelia to navigate the labyrinth of his father’s legacy while conjuring the hero within––and igniting a Shadow Glass resurgence that could, finally, do his father proud. In THE SHADOW GLASS, Josh has created a genre-bending adventure infused with the nostalgia and horror of Stranger Things that will appeal to the 80s kid in everyone. Both subverting fantasy tropes and paying homage to them, Jack answers the question, What happens when Bastian from The Never Ending Story grows up? Probably a lot of therapy. At once laugh-out loud funny and taking a candid look at the complex nature of grief, the reader will root for Jack to defeat his demons, both literally and figuratively.
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