The Fourth Wall

“Walter Jon Williams is a visionary of tremendous power and originality . . . He kills every damn time.” --Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dagmar Shaw is back in Hollywood, with a plan to lasso a series of emerging technologies into a revolutionary new form of entertainment. Sean Makin is a washed-up child actor clinging to life on reality television, until Dagmar offers him the chance to be a star. Sean’s past, however, holds the darkest of secrets, and now it looks as if that secret threatens to break loose in a new cycle of violence and murder. Sean’s determined to succeed, even if the path to stardom is splashed with blood. But the ultimate secret is Dagmar’s, and Sean has to decide how much to pay in order to find out what’s on the other side of the fourth wall. “ . . . the blending of mystery-thriller, SF, and traditional Hollywood-story elements is hugely successful. It’s one of those ambitious, genre-bending books in which you keep seeing, as you read, ways the story could fall apart under its own weight—but it never does. Surely the best of the Dagmar Shaw series and one of the author’s finest novels.” --Booklist (starred review) “This is an ambitious novel, blending elements of science fiction, thriller and Hollywood epic into one wildly inventive narrative. It’s the kind of genre-bender that you can spend a lot of time trying to describe, or you can simply say: go read it, right now.” --David Pitt, Winnipeg Free Press