Although written some years after the other two novels, the setting once again features a mix of fantasy and steampunk elements but unlike the others, the protagonist in The Stone Giant is the roguish Theophile Escargot.
There Theophile Escargot, a Rip Van Winkle-like malcontent, has series of comic misadventures while attempting both to impress a pretty barmaid and to revenge himself on an evil dwarf who cheated him out of a bag of marbles.
Escargot had purchased a bag of odd marbles from a bunjo man (a kind of gypsy/hobo); the dwarf first swindles them from the hapless divorcé, then humiliates and terrifies him for laughs.
After obtaining a settlement from his ex-wife, Escargot leaves for the coastal town of Seaside where he hopes to find Leta at the annual Harvest Festival.
A series of misadventures leads him to the submarine of a piratical elf; winding up in sole possession of the vessel Escargot travels through an undersea passage into the land of Balumnia, a sort of siamese-twin world.