The Hour of the Gate

Marooned in another universe, a musician leads a motley army to save two worlds, in an entertaining tale by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author.
  Jon-Tom just wanted to go home. Trapped in a world where animals speak and magic is real, the American college student yearned for an ordinary dorm-room life. But here his music has magical power—even if he can’t control it—which may be able to save the world from the army of the Plated Folk, whose sinister queen plans on killing and eating every warm-blooded mammal she can get her pincers on and taking over their lands. The great battle is coming, and Jon-Tom, whose posse includes a wizarding turtle, a cowardly bat, and an otter with a filthy mind, must raise an army to fight it. To find allies they must make an impossible journey, across mountains and rivers no one has ever passed before. Survival will be a miracle—but Jon-Tom is no ordinary musician.

The New York Times–bestselling author of more than 110 books, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prominent writers of modern science fiction and fantasy. Born in New York City in 1946, he studied filmmaking at UCLA, and first found success in 1968 when a horror magazine published one of his short stories. In 1972 he wrote his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, the first in his Pip and Flinx series featuring the Humanx Commonwealth, a universe he has explored in more than twenty-five novels. Foster also created the Spellsinger series and has written dozens of bestselling film novelizations, as well as the story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An avid world traveler, he chronicles some of his own adventures in the wild in his memoir Predators I Have Known (2011). Foster lives with his family in Prescott, Arizona.