'The Tale Is...'

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory." -- Neil Gaiman
The map is A Cold Coming, a novel by W. Jeff Bishop that comes out in February, 2013. But is it the territory?