The Falling Crystal Palace

The residents of Sterling, Indiana don't know who they are.

Sixty-one year old Tory Stebbins runs an Identity Verification agency that can help. But, as her town implodes, so does her business. She has fewer clients, stiffer competition, and her methods have become mysteriously ineffective. Most alarmingly, she's now suffering from the same problems she's helped her clients with over the length of her career.

Just when her situation seems beyond hope, Tory receives a cryptic message from Hoppy Bashford, her best friend who, forty years earlier, disappeared. "I don't want to say it's a life or death situation," writes Hoppy, "but I want to say it's a life or death situation."

Tory's quest to find Hoppy leads her through the strange, shifting landscapes of Sterling, and the enigmatic quarry around which it is built, and ultimately to the Crystal Palace Resort, a hotel and waterpark with an infinite maze of hallways, rooms, and bizarrely themed attractions whose size and scope defy physics and reason. To locate her lost friend, escape from the resort, and find a cure for the identity-scrambling, reality-bending condition from which everyone in her world suffers, Tory must come to terms with who she is; she must determine her place in, relationship to, and path through the universe.

Carl Fuerst's The Falling Crystal Palace is a surreal, mind-melting epic tale that will leave a mark on you.