The good news is that my teen fantasy novel Shadow Walkers is finally released this week, and I’m pretty pleased with the result. Here’s the blurb:
Zach lives with his grandparents on a remote island in Puget Sound in Washington State. With only his little brother, Gilbert, to keep him company, Zach feels cut off from the world. But when Gilbert is kidnapped, Zach tries the only thing he can think of to find him: astral projection. Soon, his spirit is soaring through the strange and boundless astral realm—a shadow place. While searching for his brother, Zach meets a boy named Emory, another astral traveler who’s intriguing (and cute).
As Zach and Emory track the kidnappers from the astral realm, their bond grows, but each moment could be Gilbert’s last. Even worse, there’s a menacing, centuries-old creature in their midst that devours souls and possesses physical bodies. And it’s hungry for Zach.
Request it from your local library or buy it here.
The bad news? For the time being, we’re suspending publication of new content on TheTorchOnline.com.
Editing this site has been a labor of love — I love fantasy, and I obviously love sharing my (many) opinions. But it’s become a labor of love that has made it increasingly difficult to work on other projects — especially, ironically, as the site has grown bigger and ever-more-successful.
So we’re taking a break so that I and my co-Torchees can work on other things (including, in my case, more novels, and hopefully also some movie projects).
But I still believe in the concept of a website that is more than just content aggregation — more than just rewriting other people’s reporting. I’m proud that TheTorchOnline.com was devoted to original reporting and commentary, and I’m thrilled that we were able to do so many exclusive interviews (with Lucy Lawless, Dominic Monghan, Anna Torv, Morena Baccarin, Eddie McClintock, Lynda Carter, most of the cast of Legend of the Seeker, and many, many others), and I’m proud that we’ve been able to break many important stories (on Xena, Spartacus, Legend of the Seeker, Warehouse 13, Piers Anthony, and many other fantasy-themed topics).
I also think we helped, in our own small way, give the genre of fantasy some of the respect and credibility that it deserves (but still frequently doesn’t get. Did you notice that Spartacus didn’t even make EW’s recent list of the top ten shows on television? Ridiculous!).
With Heather Hogan’s hilarious “Facebook” recaps and my associate editor Tim O’Leary’s funny perspective on almost everything else, I also hope we sometimes made you laugh. (As much as I love fantasy, it’s possible that sometimes it takes itself a little too seriously…)
Will we ever be back?
We might be. As fantasy enthusiasts, we all know better than most how wonderfully unpredictable life can be. (Follow us on Facebook or Twitter for future announcements.)
In the meantime, thanks for reading and thanks for the support (one of my favorite parts of working on the site was the clever, insightful comments that often put my actual content to shame!).
Trust me, whether or not I’m editing this website, I’ll be carrying the torch for fantasy for many years to come.
Brent Hartinger, February 2, 2011









It reminds me of that moment in Dazed and Confused when Matthew McConaughey says, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That was unsettling to hear from him, and he was a hot dude in his 20s!
He was 247. She was 16. He kept telling her how much he loved her, and waited, patiently, until finally having sex with her on the night of her 17th birthday. You got that? He slept with her the moment she became legal. That’s just as creepy as all of those websites counting down to the day the Olsen twins turned 17.
In any case, ew.


There are many things I love in life. I love my parents. I love my friends. I love playing online Tetris for free. I love a tall, ice-cold pint of beer. I love that the space bar will pause Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix Instant viewing.
Michael Ende’s landmark novel, The Neverending Story, which was turned into a decent movie in the ’80s, is about a young boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux, who is neglected by his father and bullied by his schoolmates. He finds a book that transports him into another world called Fantasia, a world that is the embodiment of all the dreams and fantasies of the real world, which is being destroyed by an enemy called the Nothing.
While passionate, romantic love is a theme explored in virtually every genre imaginable, has there ever been a better representation of the honest, pure love between friends as there was in The Lord of the Rings? The entire sprawling epic that is Tolkien’s masterpiece essentially hangs on a single conceit: that we as an audience accept that Sam will do anything for Frodo.
Kahlan, a young woman who was torn between her sense of duty and her love for her companion, Richard, was in one episode magically split into two people, and through this spell we came to learn much about her and how difficult her burden really was.
One recent entry to the sub-genre is The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (Tor Books, $13.99).
Shadow Prowler, a translation of the first in a trilogy that is enormously popular in Russia, is the story of Harold, a thief in the medieval city of Avedoom who is way down on his luck. It doesn’t help that evil is clearly afoot in the land in the form demons on the loose and an eerie fog rolling in — the work of the evil Nameless One, no doubt.
1. Zombies: They Just Keep Coming Back
2. Steampunk: When Victorian Machines Attack
4. High Fantasy: Kind of at a Low Point
While the first book in the Rain Wilds chronicles was laden with character development and a sense of moving the pieces into place, Dragon Haven is where the real journey begins. Does the mythical city of Kelsingra even exist? Will the dragons and their keepers ever heal from their physical and emotional limitations? Who is the mole within the core group? Will they keep the traditions of their old society intact or form new customs?
That said, while they’ve never gotten much respect in critical or literary worlds, novelizations have their place in the greater world, especially among uber-fans of whatever show or movie is being novelized.