The Fetch

July 3, 2006
Humphreys melds real and unreal elements to powerful effect in this chilling first volume in the Runestone Saga. Fifteen-year-old Sky is seeing things: a spectral figure on his lawn, a talking fox, a mink wrap that comes to life to address him. Of course, this could be nothing more than hallucinations from his lifetime of sleepwalking, or it could have something to do with the large chest in the attic that belonged to his late Norwegian grandfather, inside of which he finds a secret bag filled with runestones. Grandfather Sigurd, it turns out, was a psychic, able to send his "fetch," or phantom body-double, ahead of himself. An experiment with a Ouija board whisks Sky to the place where Sigurd is still very much alive; he tells Sky he must "experience the meaning" of each runestone in order to learn his destiny. Sky embarks on a lengthy journey as Bjorn, set 1,000 years in the past, but his time-traveling comes at a hefty price: he returns to find he has no reflection, and a beheaded berserker from that trip to the past now stalks him in the present. In an interesting twist, Sigurd emerges as a figure unworthy of Sky's trust. The sleepwalking element (Humphreys himself is a sleepwalker) effectively filters everything through the eyes of a protagonist who can never fully trust what his senses tell him. Ages 12-up.