Once upon a time, a successful author with a wife and son contracted leprosy and thought he lost pretty much everything thereby. Then he kept hitting his head and going to this mystical country known as the Land, where he raped someone (he thought he was dreaming/hallucinating) and thereby had a daughter who grew up to destroy half the laws of nature by trying to resurrect a depressed government official. Eventually the leper saved the Land from a wicked entity called, no joke, “Lord Foul the Despiser.” The leper did this by (a) getting ghosts to laugh at the Despiser and (b) using his white gold wedding ring to annihilate an evil emerald that was changing the color of the moon (among other things).
Then another woman, a doctor from our world, showed up and fell in love with the leper savior because her dad had killed himself laughing in front of her and she had euthanized her cancer-ridden mother while still a young girl. A lot of really tall people, Giants, who also liked laughing but for good reasons, helped the leper and the doctor a lot of the time, as did genius horses and horse-apostles and tree-apostles and pseudo-Spartans who didn't have to sleep if they swore a vow to the Land's original government. There were also candle-like critters and a world-eating worm, and a really, really unhappy woman sort of made up of other unhappy women (including the leper's daughter). And there were some cute beings known as ur-viles and Waynhim, the seeds of tree-ghosts though they resembled goblins. They absorbed the unhappy women's souls to become tree-apostles themselves, helping regrow the Land after the apocalypse worm drank the planet's blood. (Again, no joke.)
Also, the doctor adopted a kid who became autistic by accidentally joining the Despiser's cult in our world. He cured his autism in the Land using a door through his mind made of bones and a toy racecar. At that point, the queen of some fairy archangels showed up and tried to kill the autistic kid because unfortunately he also was able to use the remains of the laws of nature to build a prison for God, though he managed to avoid turning evil just in time to stop himself from building the prison.
The reason the terrible worm woke up and started eating the planet, incidentally, was because the doctor resurrected the leper savior after he died in book 6. She did this using a living stick and a white gold wedding ring and a crystal knife called, of all things, “the krill.” (The ring was originally the leper's.) Using these three things at once was such a loud use of magic, that's why the worm awoke. (Shattering the evil emerald and the entire surrounding landscape wasn't as loud as that.) The worm was going to eat the fairy archangels first but the formerly autistic kid saved them by building another door (this one out of good emeralds) for the fairies to go through to somewhere safe, so the worm went off to kill time (literally) instead (btw, the ring was able to do the same thing). The worm actually did end the world, but then the leper and the doctor and the kid rebuilt the universe (in a single sentence!).
Books 4-9 are like LOST mixed with LOTR. It gets really bad in 7 and by 8, every other sentence is a cryptic omen like “your fate is writ in water” and “do something they don't expect.” (Or worst of all, “be true.” That and the grass-stains on the doctor's jeans in books 7-10. Seriously, those fucking stains are a major prophecy for a minor event in book 9!) By pretending to try to drown the doctor the leper wakes her up from a trance she went into when she was almost eaten by the unhappy-women woman, which is one reason her fate is “writ in water.” Another reason is that a swamp monster teams up with the leper, and swamps are wet, so yeah.
Odds and ends: in book 5, the doctor tries to kill a pseudo-Spartan because she's in another trance and the guy reminds her of her euthanized mom. The peasants of the Land know the meaning of the word “frangible,” which pretty much means the same thing as “fragile” but pretty much no one (including the author of this series) likes to talk without using grandiloquent words (whose meretricious surquedry is the largesse of our language, more or less). One of the fairy archangels is fused with lava graboids he was holding back from burning the planet apart. This same fairy indirectly created some mermaids in ancient times (he was in love with one of the unhappy-women-woman women, and before she was eaten, she used the fairy's magic to make the mermaids). His grandson (by a grumpy pseudo-Spartan and a mermaid) works with and against the goblin tree-apostles in books 7-9. The leper's ex-wife from our world creates evil time-portals in books 7-9 also, until the leper and the genius horses and some exceptionally grumpy pseudo-Spartans euthanize her. The leper doesn't have to kill his ex-son, though: the Despiser punches the guy once in book 10 and that's it. I suppose this is poetic since the leper's ex-son one-punch KO'ed one of the coolest fucking characters in the entire series early in book 9. Then again, that badass was also mean to the goblin tree-apostles, eating some of them with his eyes during a battle between the lava fairy's grandson, some cave monsters under the leper's ex-son's control, and wolves possessed by a demon (who eventually possesses the formerly autistic kid in order to teach him how to imprison God).
“And they all lived happily ever after.” No joke.
