In "Misery," Stephen King compares the euphoric feeling writers experience in creative bursts to "falling into a hole filled with bright light." Avid readers also know that feeling: A good story temporarily erases the world.
British novelist Jasper Fforde -- pronounced "Ford" -- has expanded on King's simile in a wonderful seven-book series of novels featuring Thursday Next, an agent who operates both in the "real" world of Swindon, England, and the parallel BookWorld, where characters like Hamlet and Miss Havisham live, enacting their stories each time someone reads them.
A rare talent, Thursday can enter BookWorld, where she makes sure plots remain stable and characters do their jobs. In the first Thursday book, "The Eyre Affair," her pursuit of the villainous Acheron Hades inadvertently alters the ending of "Jane Eyre" to its current one.
The newest installment in this comic, detective, sci-fi, literary series is "The Woman Who Died a Lot." It again pits Thursday against Goliath, the monolithic corporation seeking world domination, and its nasty agent, Jack Schitt.
Someone is activating Thursday and Jack robots called Day Players -- lifelike, sentient, simultaneously scary and comical -- that actually replace the real person until the robot is "killed." See the title.
Other threats: an approaching asteroid. And God, making his existence manifest in a string of "Smitings." Fforde has fun with this. One character asks, "Didn't [Richard] Dawkins shoot himself when he found out?"
On a smaller scale: Harassing Thursday's daughter is a libidinous but brilliant high school classmate named Gavin, a character whose fate intersects with Thursday's son's. Add some time travel, genetically engineered dodos, a helpful Neanderthal and you have some conception of the savory narrative gumbo that Fforde keeps bubbling merrily away.
And then there's "Dark Reading Matter," the focus of Thursday's next adventure, the vast invisible world populated by the imaginary friends of the dead and containing the texts of unpublished and lost stories (Melville's "The Isle of the Cross" among them). Goliath wants all.
Enormously knowledgeable about literary history, Fforde scatters nuggets for nerdy readers like me. In her previous adventure, Thursday dealt with a character named Mediocre Gatsby. Here are references to an actual lost work by Homer, a crack about the Hamlet Syndrome, a character named Millon de Floss, a mention of Room 101 from "1984."
By the end, all of Fforde's myriad particles of plot, accelerated by his immense skill and narrative sense, collide, producing pyrotechnics and a passel of new particles to propel his next tale.
I love the Thursday Next books, and when a new one appears, I don't fall but leap into this bibliophile's Wonderland.
Daniel Dyer is a critic in Hudson, Ohio.