Matheson’s Other Kingdoms has been hailed by the Associated Press as “Believable as well as compelling…Matheson himself is a literary faerie of sorts, his trick being his ability to coax us off a story’s familiar pathway to take us deep and deeper into his world.” (You can read an excerpt here.) This romantic fantasy from the creator of Somewhere in Time concerns 18-year-old Alex White, who in 1918 travels from the trenches of World War I to the seemingly placid setting of Gatford, a pastoral English village. But Alex will also take a journey into the faerie realm known as the Middle Kingdom.
Like What Dreams May Come, this novel includes a bibliography, although unlike the afterlife, wicca and faeries were not lifelong interests for Matheson, who found his material at the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles. “I had looked for a research subject for about a year,” he recalls. “I had two groups of books, one about backpacking, so I used [that] first for Hunted Past Reason [published by Tor in 2002]. I had piled up a lot of books about the Middle Kingdom, and I also had a number of books about World War I trench warfare, so I just decided to combine the two.”