The Cursed Cloak of the Wretched Wraith
Zenith Maelstrom is running out of time. It’s only been a month on Earth since he was ejected from the horrible bag, but in GrahBhag, years are passing . His sister, Apogee, and best friend Kevin are still trapped there, and with the horrible bag locked away, Zenith has no way to return.
That is, until a new portal opens up and provides him passage back to GrahBhag. Once there, Zenith learns that Apogee and her band of rebels are desperately fighting the dark forces who still worship the Wraith, and as the final battle nears, the literal fabric of the stitched-together world begins to rip at the seams. If Zenith is going to save his sister, his friend, and maybe even GrahBhag itself, he’ll have to dive deeper into the secrets of this terrifying world than he ever has before. For the Wraith still haunts GrahBhag, and time is not on Zenith’s side…
Rob set a unique writing challenge for himself for each book in the Horrible Bag series.
With The Horrible Bag of Terrible Things, the challenge was to form a real, cohesive world from the grab bag of ideas Rob had bouncing around inside his head. It soon became clear that reality as we know it should be thrown out and absurdity should reign. Calling this new fantasyland “GrahBhag” gave Rob the freedom to populate it with an earwax-eating gargoyle, an eight-foot-tall living ragdoll, and as wide an array of bizarre inhabitants as his warped imagination could conjure.
For The Twisted Tower of Endless Torment, Rob’s chosen challenge was to depict the absurdity of GrahBhag’s approach to crime and punishment. The land’s most notorious prison needed to reflect this absurdity in its surreal structure. Rob turned to the artwork of M.C. Escher for conceptual inspiration, hoping to elicit the same mixture of curiosity, wonder, and delight from readers that Escher’s optical illusions inspire in its viewers.
The challenge Rob set for himself with The Cursed Cloak of the Wretched Wraith was the most difficult of all — to borrow concepts from quantum physics and use them to create extraordinary characters and un-natural disasters for GrahBhag. Back when Rob was still in school, science was his least favorite subject. He would have preferred battling an otherworldly fiend like the Wraith to studying biology, chemistry, or physics. But the story present-day Rob needed to conclude his GrahBhagian trilogy demanded that he become acquainted with quantum physics. If only grown-up Rob could travel back in time and tell his younger self to study more science!
“The heart of the story is Renzetti’s immersive world, populated by otherworldly characters like the quippy Schrödinger’s Cat and Zenith’s likable, trusty, and quirky gargoyle sidekick, Kreeble. What stands out most among the fantastical elements is the fierce love between Zenith and Apogee and their deep appreciation for the many creatures in GrahBhag… A rewarding ending to an imaginative, wholly original series.”—Kirkus Reviews