The Glitter Cave: A Retro Sci-Fi Adventure of Portals, Peril, and Parallel Worlds

by Stephen Wright

What if the greatest adventure of your life was hidden in a dusty cave — waiting for you to step through?

Summer, 1965. Fifteen-year-old Billy Wilson just wants baseball, burgers, and lazy afternoons under the California sun. Instead, he and his best friend Bobby stumble upon a a hidden cavern filled with shimmering dust that opens into another world.

On the other side lies Altara — a realm of towering trees, glittering cities, and eerie echoes of their own world. A world at war. A world that sees them not as visitors, but as the key to survival.

Drawn into a growing resistance against a corrupt ruler obsessed with the mind-bending Fortune Stone, the boys must navigate danger, deception, and their own transformation. Billy soon faces a return to the safety of home… or risk everything to stop a power that threatens more than one world.

The Glitter Cave is a genre-blending, coming-of-age sci-fi adventure for fans of Stranger Things, Ready Player One, and the twisty thrillers of Blake Crouch and Dennis E. Taylor.

362 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 12, 2025

About the author

Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the author of four previous novels. He has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature at Iowa, Princeton, Brown, and The New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.