Author:
Corey McCullough is an independent copy editor, proofreader, ghostwriter, and author. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his amazing wife Vanessa and their two beautiful daughters. His favorite pastimes are reading, writing, playing video games, spending time with his best friend (Vanessa), and, most of all, being a dad.

A teenager’s wish to escape his stressful life just came true — with otherworldly consequences.

Nothing is going right for Justin Holmes. Like many seventeen-year-olds, he sometimes wishes he could just run away and leave everything behind. But he gets more than he bargained for when he storms out of the house after an argument with his father and accidentally steps into a parallel universe of swords, shields, magic, and monsters.

Suddenly, Justin is desperate to find a way back to his ordinary life in small-town America. His search for answers takes an unexpected turn when a strange old man and a powerful mercenary recruit him to rescue a kidnapped princess. But their rescue mission quickly takes a disastrous turn and becomes a life-or-death flight deep into the unknown wilds. Justin and his unlikely allies are on the run from dark forces wielding deadly, arcane power — demonic beings that seem to have suddenly arrived from somewhere beyond this world . . . just like Justin.

Justin may not be a fighter, but he is intelligent and strong-willed. He soon realizes that nothing in this world is what it seems. Even his allies’ mission may have all been a ruse . . . to get to him.

Ancient secrets are revealed that could shake the foundations of this alternate world . . . and might unlock Justin’s portal home.

The Fallen Odyssey is a contemporary portal fantasy novel for college and “new adult” audiences. It is the first of a trilogy but can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel. If you like epic, serious fantasy about dangerous quests in magical worlds, check out The Fallen Odyssey.

The Fallen Odyssey

Justin's body stood frozen in place, but he was adrift on an ocean, pummeled by waves of confusion, anxiety, terror, regret, and uncertainty. His mind was a net, capable of holding only one of them at a time before it slipped through to be replaced by another. Amid the turbulence, one thought broke through and took precedence above the rest.


The Kharon. The spiritual realm Avagad had used to forcefully communicate with him-first in the Drekwood and multiple times after that. According to Cyaxares, it was the same process used by the Nameless One, the god-king of the demons, to enforce his will on his servants. And Justin was in it. How long he had been in the Kharon-and how much of his experiences had been illusions-were questions he hardly dared ask. This strange dreamworld was a place where terrible deceptions could be enacted, where illusions became real, and reality was subjective.


Chapter 149: Across the Styx (Part 1)