Make Believe — Geoff North

When Brinn Addam's mother passed away, the fifteen-year old girl said goodbye to her imaginary friends. Two years later her best friend begins receiving messages from Brinn's mother. The imaginary friends return -- and they aren't pleased.

Brinn can bring make-believe characters to life. It's an ability her uncle, Neal Stauch, possessed as well. The little boy died accidentally three and a half decades before, but the world he created carried on. It's a dying land populated with troubled characters desperately searching for a new creator -- a modern-day keeper with the same incredible genes capable to start their world over again.

From Neal's forgotten world comes a rag-tag bunch of washed up figures a generation out of time -- rusted robots consumed with guilt, disillusioned super-heroes too far gone and far too fat to fit their spandex costumes, a homicidal lawman out of the Old West, and a Bible-quoting scientist abandoned in a distant galaxy. They ask for her help, and Brinn begrudgingly agrees, aided by her own band of imaginary twenty-first century creations -- a sword-wielding barbarian woman, a sex-starved wizard boy, and his vampire girlfriend.

But Neal's imaginary world is populated with other survivors. They have changed even more drastically. And they want what the little boy had -- what his present-day niece still has -- and they'll kill to get it.

Make Believe is intended for a younger audience, but adults will enjoy it as well. It is a coming of age story blended with horror, science fiction, and fantasy, set in a post-apocalyptic world.