JASPER DASH AND THE FLAME-PITS OF DELAWARE

Metafiction at its most weirdly satisfying. Anderson began his Thrilling Tales in 2005 with a slight not-quite-200-pager called Whales on Stilts, then followed it the next year with the rather longer Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. Each was populated by the trio of Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, star of his own adventure-book series (that no one reads any more), Katie Mulligan, star of the Horror Hollow stories, and Lily Gefelty, “who observed things constantly and thought complicated things about what she saw.” This far longer tome finds Jasper returning to save the mountaintop monastery where he learned martial arts in deepest Delaware. There is no way to summarize a plot that includes shards of and snarks at Eragon, Tom Swift, chick lit and sports novels, Galaxy Quest and Indiana Jones movies and so on. Extremely funny, it’s for adults, who will get at least half the references, and for children, who will get the other half. Cyrus’s illustrations are integral and pretty darn amusing, too. (Fiction. 9-14)