There's this house, The House of Mysteries, perched on an intersection between "our" world and The Dreaming. All sorts of people visit this house. Most can leave, but a few special souls cannot unless The Coachman comes for them. Dundundun.
Then there's this girl, Fig, who stumbles into The House while trying to escape from the terrible Pair of the Conception. Why is she pursued? Fig has no idea. But The House ... oh, The House is very familiar. Probably, because Fig has been drawing it over-and-over again since forever! Dundundun.
Why The House? And why Fig? Who knows? This is the first volume of seven so there's a lot of set-up and introduction to an array of colorful (if not entirely original) secondary characters, but there aren't a lot of answers.
Fig's story is interesting, if not exactly compelling, and the stories the secondary characters tell are well done, but they so clearly stand apart from Fig's story that they feel more like filler than anything else and I found it hard not to get impatient with their teller's. "Yes, yes, you wore the wrong shoes to work ... less about you and more about The House, m'kay?"
