The Glittering World

by Robert Levy
338 pgs

Michael "Blue" Whitley is a New York chef and restaurant owner. Despite his seemingly innate ability to create delicious food at his restaurant, he and his restaurant are struggling financially. He's heavily in debt and in desperate need for an influx of cash. Fortunately, one is within reach. Blue's grandmother recently passed away and left him her house in Nova Scotia.

Ignoring his mother's objections to him traveling to Canada to see the property he grew up in and overseeing its sale, Blue decides to drive up there with three of his closest friends. Blue hasn't been there since his mother took him and moved to the United States when he was five years old.

Arriving in the small community of Starling Cove where his new property is located, Blue and his friends quickly learn that there is something inexplicably different about the town. They learn that Starling Cove is an old hippie commune. One to which artists and social outcasts have flocked to for generations. There have been numerous instances of children who have gone missing from Starling Cove over the years. Some of whom never returned, but others did. Some of them walked out of the woods years later, naked and speaking incoherently about the "Other Kind," strange life forms that live under the mountain and the lake.

Blue learns that he was one of those children who returned, and he soon begins to feel drawn back to the woods.

The Glittering World is the debut novel by Robert Levy. It's strength is its creativity. The "Other Kind" are a unique variation of the mystical fae creatures present in fairy tales and other stories. But overall the book falls short. The story itself never struck a chord with me. I might check out whatever Levy writes next out of curiosity, but if it's more of the same, I'll be moving on.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆