among others. He is the author of over twenty novels, including The Deep Woods and Heirs of Grace, and scores of short stories. His work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and other nice places. Since 2001 he has worked for Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, where he currently serves as senior editor. He lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife and son.
Pratt's latest novel is Prison of Sleep: Book II of the Journals of Zaxony Delatree.
[Writers Read: Tim Pratt (October 2019); Writers Read: Tim Pratt (April 2022)]
At Tor.com the author tagged five "books and stories that got me hooked on the concept of the multiverse in the first place, and the ones that expanded my idea of what multiverse stories could accomplish," including:
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter StraubRead about the other entries on the list.
Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer’s mother is dying of cancer in a crumbling East Coast hotel when Jack meets a strange old man at an amusement park. The man tells him there’s a way to save her life: go on a quest across the country, and across realities, to obtain the Talisman. During the course of his journey, Jack has to“flip” back and forth between the long roads of the United States and a parallel universe, The Territories, a magical version of North America populated by monsters, mutants, wolf-people, and “twinners” of some people in our reality—his mother, for instance, is a queen over there, and she’s dying, too. This is a long, weird, occasionally heartwarming (but mostly heart-wrenching) coming-of-age story, as Jack proceeds along the “road of trials,” making allies and enemies along the way. The most mind-blowing part comes at the very end, when Jack begins to flip rapidly through alternate realities, revealing that our world and the Territories are just two of a possibly infinite number of possible realities. (King went on to explore that idea alone in his multiverse epic Dark Tower series.)
--Marshal Zeringue