In the first book of The Veil, Oliver and his sister Colette disappear shortly before their father, the lawyer Max Bascombe, is murdered. In addition, children are found slain with their eyes plucked out.

Now, in book two, Julianna searches for Oliver with homicide detective Ted Halliwell. Near a house that is a portal to the legend world, Oliver fades through a shadow into nowhereland. With him are a man made of ice, a woman wearing a copper-red cloak and a man with blue feathers in his hair. Julianna and Ted are shocked to find corpses of winged dogs, tigermen and giant birdmen in the portal house.

This is the only the beginning of their odyssey into a world of myth—of The Sandman, of pixies, dwarves, minotaurs, sprites and griffins. As they chase Oliver throughout the legend world, he and his companions, the beautiful shapeshifting girl-fox Kitsune, Frost the iceman and Blue Jay the birdman, search for Colette and fight the Myth Hunters, who are hell-bent on eradicating all Borderkind creatures, those who can pass easily from the world of legend into the human one. Meanwhile, Colette is entombed in a dungeon lair of the eye-sucking monster The Sandman.

Carrying a magical sword, Oliver wonders whether he and Colette are human or Legend-Born. Are they meant to destroy the Veil, unite the two worlds and save the Borderkind? This is the cliffhanger that ends The Borderkind and propels the reader toward the third book of The Veil.

Foxy woman—I think I love you

Jimmy Hendrix sang about a foxy woman who drove him mad with desire. The words could easily apply to Oliver Bascombe, who's crazy about Kitsune, the shapeshifting girl-fox, but battles his lust because his human relationship with Julianne seems more magical. It's unusual for a fantasy adventure to delve deeply into the meaning of love, and this is just one example of the richness that permeates The Borderkind.

As Oliver carries a magic sword, lusts after a magical creature and battles mythical beasts, he longs for the simpler magic of the mundane world. Meanwhile, his sister Colette, imprisoned by a demonic monster and slowly dying, longs for her ordinary job at Billboard magazine. The reader is left thinking that our world isn't so bad after all.

Maintaining smooth transitions among many points of view, Christopher Golden proves himself to be a master of craft. His Stoker Award-winning skills are evident in the horrific scenes between The Sandman and Colette, and in general in all of the action sequences, which are under tight control: lyric, fluid and mesmerizing enough to warrant second reads.

In one Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure after another, albino giants chase Julianne and Ted, and Oliver and his friends brandish swords against armies and metal-toothed fur-and-claw beasts called Keen Keengs.

But the fantasy elements reach a pitch of hallucinatory trance toward the end of the book, when Oliver presses a seed from the gods of the Harvest into the ground and the world goes LSD: Giant monsters and hags roil back, shrieking and fading; cornstalks, sprouts and saplings rise up to fight the Myth Hunters.

It's tough to find anything negative about The Borderkind. The dialogue is robust, the characters well drawn, the prose clear. The plot is fairly standard for dark fantasy adventures, but the book is so distinctive and unique that it is well worth reading.