The Chalice

The haunted water of the Chalice is passport into unforgettable worlds. When our hero, Joe, enters, he finds Escarpa, a desert metropolis both unmistakable and unforgettable—and where sorcery is commonplace. There’s an infinite library. A pyramid that harbors an evil camel who’s already made one catastrophic appearance in Escarpa. Cell phones are charged with the arcane. Sex is a sacrament. There, Joe struggles to cope with the aftermath of a crisis that befell his marriage in his world. After being recruited to work for a secretive innovator of electronics that specialize in modern magic, he meets Vesper, a woman with whom the future looks bright. It’s complicated enough, but then Joe runs into his wife in Escarpa, and it revives memories from his marriage he thought he buried a long time ago. What really happened back then? What precipitated the bitter falling out with his wife? And, is there any magic left? Halstead has crafted a stunningly beautiful world that is both familiar and unfamiliar—and a love story that never loses sight of its mistakes and heartbreaks.