King of the Hollow Dark by Cat Hellisen

Cat Hellisen does something in King of the Hollow Dark that I feel we don't see often enough in the fantasy genre – a recognisably modern secondary world setting. No princess in need of rescuing, jousting, or castles here. Okay, so there is a mysterious city that at some point crumbles into so much sand... And many other strange sights and occurrences besides. As any veteran who's read many of Cat's books will attest to. 

We meet Georgina, or George, as she prefers to be called, who lives with her dad in an apartment and is desperately trying to live an ordinary life. The reason for this arrangement is that her mum was responsible for a ghost uprising a few years before, and was hauled off and executed by the Empress, who is not exactly the kind of person you want to cross. 

George is anything but normal, as she soon learns, and despite her reluctance to get involved with any of the necromancy that was the grist to her mum's mill, she finds that things change after she's separated from her body and winds up in the afterlife with a slight case of being dead. Except things there are not quite what she expected, and she gets tangled up in a plot to overthrow the Empress, whose actions are slowly eroding the barriers between the world of the living and the dead so that the Hollow Dark is doing a The Neverending Story-esque Nothing. And nope, we can't have that.

King of the Hollow Dark reminds me a lot in tone and theme to Neil Gaiman's The Sandman – it has the same eerie, dream-like quality as the characters journey across one surreal landscape after the other, and often find themselves in precarious situations. George and her friends fight against great odds to return the worlds to their balance, but to do so will also require a great sacrifice – and despite her great reluctance, George finds herself in the position of linchpin for the entire debacle. Because if she doesn't do anything to stop it, the Hollow Dark will devour everything. 

At times surreal and mysterious, this story is, much like Cat's other writing, incredibly lush and populated with delightfully awkward characters who somehow manage to band together to deal with their bigger problems. And their problems are of the rather large, world-ending kind.