While I was in New York, after the reading I did with the ever-lovely Cat Valente, I noticed that she had an ARC of The Habitation of the Blessed which looked, well, lonely. Deeply lonely. Unloved, even, an abandoned little slip of a book, begging for someone who would love it. I volunteered.

"If you take it, you have to talk about it," cautioned Cat. I said I understood, for that is the Rule and the Law of the ARC: if you take it, you have to talk about it. That's the bargain you make when you open the covers and release all that new book smell. I took the book.

Now I am talking about it.

The Habitation of the Blessed is the first book in the three-part Dirge for Prestor John, a historical figure who may or may not have been an early example of the Internet hoax. "Dude, let's tell the Church that we have all this neat shit, and watch them freak out!" Oh, they were wacky in the "here there be dragons" days. But The Habitation of the Blessed takes the approach that, in fact, Prestor John was a real man; his land contained all the things he claimed it contained; all those wonders once were true things. So where did they all go?

If you're familiar with Valente's Orphan's Tales books (In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice), the structure of Habitation will be familiar to you; told through three written memoirs and the reactions of two monks, it nests stories inside of stories, moving back and forth through time as the threads wind slowly together. This is not a book to be read in an afternoon; the density of its mythology is too great for that, and you'd miss a lot if you tried to rush. Valente has always been a fan of ornate and graceful language, a tendency which she honed with Palimpsest, and Habitation is no different; it's sort of like what you'd get if a medieval bestiary and a poet's dictionary decided to tryst in a seedy fairy tale bar, and then left the baby to be raised by the goosegirl who lives in the shed out back.

In case you can't tell, I liked the book.

Now, there are flaws. Depending on your familiarity with the source material, you may find yourself turning to your dictionary or even Wikipedia to check linguistic and historical facts. Parts of each storyline are omitted due to a fabulous, totally in-universe complication; this helps to reinforce the reality of the world, but is also a bit frustrating, because dude, missing story. But Valente never leaves out so much that you can't fill it in yourself, and as every horror movie, ever, has demonstrated, the monster you imagine is always more fantastic than the monster that you see.

Because this is the first book of three, it doesn't resolve so much as "find a convenient point and stop there for a little while, you know, to rest, maybe have some tea." You don't walk away with a complete story sleeping in your heart. And yet...

You walk away having seen something beautiful. Valente loves this story, and it shows in every word. She takes risks, and, for the most part, the risks pay off. I highly recommend The Habitation of the Blessed. It is beautiful, and strange, and a chronicle of something very dear that we know, inevitably, must be lost to us.

Read it, and rejoice, and learn, and grieve.

Here we are at the middle of October, which means it's time for one more rest stop; one more pause along the road that runs from Sparrow Hill to the Last Chance Diner. Unbelievable as it is to say this, there are only two more stops after this one, only two more pauses before Rose Marshall finishes this leg of her journey. Strange, isn't it? It feels like we could have kept on driving for the better part of forever. But we can't. The trip is almost over.

Issue 58 of The Edge of Propinquity is live, and with it, the tenth of the Sparrow Hill Road stories is available. "Bad Moon Rising" lets us see how Rose Marshall spends her Halloween nights—and here's a hint: she doesn't get many treats to balance out her tricks. It's a chase in a cornfield, and a game that not everyone survives playing. Come along for the ride?

There are a lot of stories trapped and tangled in the twilight. This is only one of them. But it's the one I have to tell.

Welcome to the ghostroads.