The final novel in the New York Times bestselling series: Will literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next find her happy ending?The Dark Reading Matter is a theoretical realm that suggests that the observable bookverse can only account for 20 percent of the calculated total readable mass. Out there somewhere, possibly, is a larger and more expansive and unseeable "Dark Bookverse" that contains millions of deleted novels, slush-pile manuscripts, lost poems, forgotten pop culture references, long unheard oral tradition, stories and ideas that were still in people's minds when they died.
The Goliath Corporation hopes to exploit the Dark Reading Matter for profit, and Thursday Next is once again pitted against a familiar foe. A visitor named Roger Thatt who purports to be from Fourth Wall Publishing has some peculiar ideas of his own that require careful thought. Is Thursday and everyone she knows living in a simulation? Was her world created from scratch Last Thursday as Roger supposes, and are the books she reads the only direction in which books can be read?
With existential questions the least of her troubles and a family to take care of, Thursday must defeat the Goliath Corporation, ensure that a tear in the fabric of the Bookworld does not suck all literature from hers, and conclude her own series so she can enjoy a comfortable retirement, while dodging the threat of the worse fate imaginable for a story: The Scooby Doo ending.
The final novel in the New York Times bestselling series: Will literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next find her happy ending?
Swindon-based Literary Detective Thursday Next is embarking on her eighth and final adventure, Dark Reading Matter, and she is well aware of the fact. The problem is, others are too. Old foes and new are plotting a terrible revenge: to disrupt the narrative and make Dark Reading Matter not just unreadable but unpublishable. Thursday can’t let that happen and needs to use all her guile and narrative trickery to unmask the antagonists.
It won’t be easy. The Martians have broken out of their HG Wells novel and threaten both the real world and the Bookworld. Agents from a higher reality want unfettered access to the Dark Reading Matter, the realm where deleted books and unrealised literary ideas end up. A Gateway to Hell has opened up at Wantage’s Shakesmania, the nation’s second-worst Shakespeare theme park, and the cosy world of Enid Blyton has been hijacked by Ultra Right Wing Nationalists. With Reality Field Distortion experiments going haywire, a partially redacted donkey, a Bookworld on the brink of losing its imaginative energy to Big Tech and a murderous stamp collector with Philaticide on their mind, Thursday has to navigate a tightrope of borderline unusable narrative devices to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion.
It’s a tall order, but Thursday has a secret weapon: Her own adaptability, her husband, Landen, a host of stalwart friends and ultimately the most loyal compatriots she can call upon: her readers.
