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This short, but beautiful, fantasy work takes up only 68 pages, but tells a deep story about a world that can only be entered through the deep forest, and only a very few have ever been invited. Brian, an eleven-year-old living with his father who spends all his time in the deep woods beyond their home, meets a girl who knows far more about the woods than he does, and can lead him to places that no one else could ever find, just as she had done for his father years before.

The World More Full of Weeping is an elegant piece of prose that fans of the author's first novel, Before I Wake, will want to enjoy. It's the outside of a story we've seen the inside of often before, the child who goes into the forest to discover an enchanted world within. But this story takes place on the edge of that forest, as his father reaches out and within to make sense of what's happening, remembering when he was young and something wonderful in the woods reached out to him.

There's also an essay included, "Places and Names", in which the author confronts a truth about his own writing that he only learned from his readers, that the sense of place in his works, especially in his first novel, Before I Wake is as important as his plot or character. Authors, he discovers, are often the last to know what went into their works.