Mark Daley’s hometown is full of secrets, and he’s one of them! Starting his sophomore year at Woodvale High eager for a change, Mark meets the SK Crew, a group of five ridiculous juniors who show him a life he never thought he could have. But a day of deranged violence in the halls is only the first in a year full of signs that Mark’s past is coming back to haunt him, forcing him to split himself between everyday adventures with his new friends and beating back the darkness on Woodvale’s fringe.
Hiding in school events and hangouts around town, the forces of chaos keep getting stronger. The question is: how can Mark fight it if the chaos is already inside him, too?
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The culmination of seven-plus years of editing–including three that came after I ordered the first proof copy–this 700-plus-page omnibus brings together and revamps all the stories first published across Donovan’s Gauntlet, Blood and Brotherhood, The Arc of Time, Whys and Becauses, and The Bite of Chaos to cover the entire arc of Mark’s sophomore year at Woodvale High. I made a companion spreadsheet to keep track of the 131 total chapters and the various plots and subplots that progressed over time between them, and with everything laid out in one place for the first time, I saw connectivities and storytelling opportunities I’d never have seen otherwise. With the caveat, laid out in the book’s foreword, that this is a living document and may still see updates at some point down the line (I know how I operate by now), I believe this to be the best version of the stories I started in high school, and, having finished Epiphany, I have a better view on Woodvale and its residents than I’ve ever had before. You can still buy the series as individual volumes if you want–even Bite of Chaos–and they’re all available from Amazon with new, standardized photographic covers, or from Lulu with the original cartoon art for those who want it. I came out of Epiphany with a notes file two-thirds as long as the entire book, and I’m excited to see what I can jump off from them to write next.