Ghostlands - Paperback

by Andrew Fox (Author)

Mushrooming Time

Francesco Helios, a groundskeeper in New Shining Capital, runs a "mower," a seventy-ton leveling machine that keeps the Lawn free of the bloom of mushrooming monuments. Like an unruly yard, structures shove their way up through the turf: the obelisk of the Washerman Monument, the temple of "Old Frog Face," and a thousand other stubborn relics from a half-recollected past that refuse to stay mowed down.

While Francesco is mowing, a ghostly woman appears on the Lawn. Unlike other human ghosts reborn from the past, the woman recognizes Francesco. She calls him by a name he doesn't recognize, but that resonates. Timebreaker.

Soon Francecso is catapulted to dockyards cluttered with mushrooming battleships and across the country to plains of ghostly buffalo, all with a madman on his trail who seeks to transform Francesco into a "grubber," dedicated to the eradication of CAHSPEI--Chronologically Anomalous Human-Seeming Phenomenon (Emergent-Insubstantial)--that is, to the murder of human ghosts from the past.

Yet if the Timebreaker is real--and he is the one-- then maybe even a lowly groundskeeper can save his family from ruin, himself from oblivion--and, in the process, wrench humanity from the suicidal rubber room of rebounding time his mushroom-haunted world has become.

Winner of the 2026 Ark Prize for best novel.

Author Biography

Andrew Fox's novel, Fat White Vampire Blues, was selected for the Lord Ruthven Award for Best Vampire Novel and his novel, The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, was selected by Booklist magazine as one of the Ten Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of the Year. Fox has taught children's theater, managed a statewide food assistance program, run a campaign against celebratory gunfire, and briefly sold Saturn cars. He currently lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and three sons while working for a federal law enforcement agency.