Sunderworld Books in Order

The Sunderworld series opens in present day Los Angeles with Leopold Berry, a seventeen year old who feels like a disappointment long before the magic starts. He is bright, awkward and deep in grief, caught between memories of his mother and the expectations of his strict father.

As a younger kid, Leopold discovered a stack of worn VHS tapes of a short lived fantasy show called Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld. The series became his private obsession and a kind of refuge, a place he could escape to when real life felt too heavy.

Years later, strange things begin to bleed into his everyday world. He sees a man drop a tooth into a parking meter instead of a coin, a glowing trapdoor open in the middle of a parking lot and a half mechanical raccoon with its tail on fire that will not leave him alone. Each new sighting feels as if someone has peeled a scene straight out of that old TV show and pasted it onto Los Angeles.

Leopold turns to his best friend Emmet for help, and together they start following the clues. What they find is that Sunderworld is not just a piece of television nostalgia but a real, layered realm connected to the city, full of broken magic, strange neighborhoods and people who remember a very different version of events.

Once he crosses that threshold, Leopold decides this is finally his chance to stop being ordinary. If he can save Sunderworld, maybe he can prove to himself and to his father that he was meant for something more. The story happily complicates that wish. Plans go wrong, his choices have real consequences and the people he meets are as complicated and scared as he is.

Stylistically, the series feels like a love letter to Los Angeles and to the kind of low budget fantasy shows that used to flicker on late night TV. Sun blasted streets, strip malls and back alleys hide portals, monsters and half forgotten bits of magic. The tone mixes humor and melancholy, letting big action scenes sit next to quiet conversations about loss, friendship and the pressure to live up to someone else’s idea of you.

More books are planned, and each volume promises new corners of Sunderworld to explore along with deeper fallout from Leopold’s early choices.

If you like urban fantasy with awkward heroes, weird monsters and a city that feels almost alive, this series is a welcoming place to start.