The parable that the author of international bestsellers, Englishman John Connolly, tells us is quite in the spirit of his famous detective stories about Charlie Parker. Everything is on the edge here - reality, fantasy, mysticism, fairy tales, whatever. The world into which a twelve-year-old English boy finds himself, as well as the world from which he comes, is equally entangled in the ominous web of war. Here, we have the Second World War, there are wars for power between the terrible Crooked Man and lycanthropes - half-wolves, half-people. The sun itself in the world of living fairy tales prefers to shine at half strength, and the semi-darkness that fills it is populated by embodied nightmares from the dreams and fears of our world. And in order to survive in this kingdom of shadows, and even more so to win, you need to do the impossible - change yourself...