About this ebook
Finding a salmon swimming in his backyard barely registered as unusual for Jonah Hutchins. After all, he already had a troll lurking in his basement and a harpy roosting in the trees out front. It wasn’t even completely outlandish for the salmon to tell him that the puddle he occupied and others nearby were portals to other dimensions—or that there was something that could be a demon in the puddle with him.
But then the demon ate Jonah’s parents, and “normal” went right out the window.
Jonah and his sister, Debbie, won’t let themselves become orphans so easily. Gathering Jonah’s strange friends, they plunge through the puddles into the other dimensions beyond them, setting out on a quest to save the worlds, stop the demon, and rescue Jonah and Debbie’s parents. (Digestion takes a while, after all.) Along the way, they’ll make new allies—including a massive plastic dragon and a grandmotherly, octopus-headed prophetess. The group will travel to Toy Land, where cardboard forms the ground, and spilled water is akin to nuclear doomsday. They’ll visit a proto-universe that doesn’t exist yet, a house that never seems to stop expanding, and a dark, crumbling world that wants to swallow them whole. They’ll encounter the bizarre, the terrifying, and the wondrous. But will they be able to summon the power necessary to save all the worlds from the dark, vicious threat that seeks to consume them?
The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle is a madcap whirlwind of a book that is as funny and heartwarming as it is scary and jaw-dropping. This portal fantasy is about the family we find along the way (human or otherwise), standing strong against impossible odds, embracing your true self (no matter how offbeat), and the world-shaking power of the imagination. It’s like The Chronicles of Narnia meets Coraline, Locke & Key meets A Wrinkle in Time, The Girl Who Drank the Moon meets Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, or The Graveyard Book meets Impossible Creatures. This book is for fans of Gravity Falls, Studio Ghibli films, and found-family stories as much as for lovers of Lovecraftian sea monsters, ghastly oddities, and quirky humor. It is whimsical, weird, and a nonstop thrill ride you will not soon forget.
Welcome to The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle. Are you ready?
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About the author
Byron Leavitt is a creator of weird fiction who lives to cultivate wonder. He wrote all the story content for the hit board games Deep Madness and Twisted Fables by Diemension Games, plus either wrote or co-wrote all eight books for the story-driven game Dawn of Madness, which one reviewer called “the best narrative I’ve ever read.” Byron also wrote the books Deep Madness: Shattered Seas and The Art of Deep Madness, as well as the true story Of Hope and Cancer, about his battle with stage-four Hodgkin's lymphoma. He’s currently working on many more projects, including the long-gestating epic dark fantasy novel Alayaka and the science fiction novel Under the Iridescent Sea.
Byron lives in a centennial Swiss-style house in Tacoma, Washington, with his wife, Sarah, his daughters Aurora and Eden, many jellyfish babies, his butler, Egad, several gremlins, and the Gargoyle Baby. When he’s not writing stories, publishing books, or making games, Byron also serves as a copywriter and editor.
You can learn more about him on his website at https://byronleavitt.com/ and on his Substack newsletter at https://byronleavitt.substack.
