(Word of advice: Do NOT let him touch your head!) A magical doorknob from the Tommy Taylor stories can actually open portals between worlds, and a secret cabal is intent on stopping Tom and his friends and shutting down their mysterious connections to the world of fiction. There’s a bad guy who turns anything he touches into fiction. There are objects with magical powers, because stories made them so.

Tom’s father guarded a powerful secret about the intersections between story and the real world, and the deeper Tom investigates, the weirder it gets. And that’s the most normal part of the story. So Tom flees to his father’s remote Swiss villa to hide away… and finds himself implicated in a grisly mass murder for which there is no reasonable explanation. Tom Taylor goes from adored to despised seemingly in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, the lead news story worldwide is Tommy-gate: Is Tom really Taylor’s son? What’s he hiding? And where is his father? Tom is a more or less shiftless adult, who makes a buck by hitting the convention circuit and signing Tommy memorabilia - until the day a young woman stands up in a Q&A session and asks “Who are you?” Lizzie questions Tom’s true identity, alleging that his documentation and early childhood are elaborate frauds - and the fandom erupts. A crazy statistic is thrown around in the very first book: Of all the people worldwide who can read, 40% have read at least one Tommy Taylor book. I loved the sound of the premise when I first heard of it: Tom Taylor is the adult son of the mysteriously disappeared author Wilson Taylor, whose beloved children’s book series about boy wizard Tommy Taylor is the top selling book of all time. What did I think? I’ll be honest: I think with The Unwritten, the law of diminishing returns was in effect.

Between Sunday and Wednesday, I gobbled up volumes 1- 10 of the trade paperback editions, and now I’m all caught up until the final volume is released in May. My reading obsession this past week has been the graphic novel series The Unwritten.

The Unwritten, Vol. 1 by Mike Carey