Galveston is set, like a number of Stewart's novels, in an alternate, near-future America in which magic -- real magic -- has invaded the world, with devastating results. According to the novel's overarching premise, magic began "leaking" into the atmosphere during the latter half of the 20th century. In 2004, it reached critical mass and exploded across the planet. The result was a radically restructured world in which technology lost its hold, ghosts walked, and a transformed host of monsters, mutants, minotaurs, and angels proliferated. On the island of Galveston, they called this moment of magical transformation "the Flood."

Stewart has set the bulk of his novel some 25 years after the onset of the Flood. At this point in history, two different Galvestons exist -- uneasily -- side by side. The "real" Galveston is a once grand city that is struggling to cope with the primitive conditions of the post-Flood world. For years, it has been held together by the desperate efforts of Jane Gardner, a once formidable woman who is dying, slowly, of Lou Gehrig's disease. The second Galveston, a city within the larger city, is a region ruled by magic. It is governed by a sardonic god of revelry named Momus, whose kingdom has been frozen into a surreal, eternal Mardi Gras. These two realms are kept apart by Galveston's "angel," Odessa Gibbons, who ruthlessly protects her city from the magical incursions of Momus's world.

Two very different figures dominate the narrative. One is Sloane Gardner, Jane's only daughter. Sloane is a good-hearted, if ineffectual, young woman whose desire to save her mother's life catalyzes Galveston's central events. With Odessa's help, Sloane constructs a magical mask that allows her to assume a more assertive, hard-edged personality, an alter ego she comes to think of as "Sly." Wearing the mask, she enters Momus's territory, determined to enlist his aid in restoring her mother's health. Innocent and overmatched, she fails completely, losing herself in the endless revelry of Mardi Gras. She returns to the real world, several days later, to find that her mother has died.

Sloane's story intersects with that of Josh Cane, a bright, embittered, congenitally unlucky young man who serves as a kind of de facto doctor for the poorer residents of Galveston, and who has nurtured a futile, lifelong passion for Sloane Gardner and the world she represents. When Sloane disappears into Momus's domain, Josh -- the last person seen in her company -- is accused of her murder, placed on trial, and convicted on the basis of fabricated evidence. Together with his childhood friend, Ham Mathers, he is exiled to the wastelands outside of Galveston. Confronted, and nearly killed, by a combination of venomous snakes, deranged cannibals, and tropical storms, he relearns the lesson that his father -- a flamboyant poker player -- taught him as a child: Life is fundamentally unfair.

Sloane and Josh's stories are played out against the larger story of Galveston itself, a violent, divided city on the verge of apocalyptic change. In the wake of a string of man-made and natural catastrophes -- the murder of Odessa Gibbons, the arrival of a hurricane that nearly levels the island -- the barriers that separate the two Galvestons slowly give way. As the city, overrun by magic, struggles to redefine itself, so too must Josh Cane and Sloane Gardner redefine themselves, creating viable identities that allow them to function as useful members of their new -- and unimaginable -- world.

The governing metaphor of Galveston is poker, a "man's game" in which chance, rather than merit, predominates. Stewart's characters, major and minor, are all, in their fashion, victims of chance. Caught in the machinery of large, impersonal forces, they are made to suffer intensely and are subjected to a series of devastating, often irrational, disasters. The result of all this is a dark, troubling book about loss, luck, and the random cruelty of the universe. It reminded me, at times, of a different sort of book with a similar world view: Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy, an equally memorable examination of the inevitability of grief, loss, and painful change. Like Joyce, Stewart is a lyrical, often very witty writer whose work is rooted in an unsentimental sympathy for his beleaguered, all-too-human heroes. In Galveston, he has created a unique, intensely personal portrait of a unique, intensely imagined world. As Momus tells us, in a somewhat different context, "it just doesn't get any better than this." Read this remarkable novel, and you'll see what I mean.

--Bill Sheehan