Author: Robert B Marcus Jr and Ryan B Marcus
Publisher: Mockingbird Lane Press
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
"Not only does he steal my bike but he flaunts me with it." Doesn't make sense. Should either be "Not only does he steal my bike but he taunts me with it." Or, "Not only does he steal my bike but he flaunts it right in front of me." Or words to that effect.
This novel was a bit of an oddity. The blurb looked interesting, so it suckered me in and I started in on it hoping the story would be up to the promise, but in the end the promise was squandered and I grew bored. The first thing which struck me was the huge amount of white space on the page at the start of chapter one, and on every page afterwards - 318 pages, with roughly 65% of the page as white space! I noted this in both the Adobe Digital Editions version and on the iPad in the Bluefire Reader version (that latter you can see a sample of on my blog). I sincerely hope it doesn't go to print form in this manner - it would be a shameful slaughter of trees is it ever sold in volume. And here I thought that a physician's commitment was to first "do no harm". I guess that dictum doesn't include trees!
The novel is also first person PoV, the most detestable of voices, but as it happened, that wasn't so bad. The real problem here was the tedious repetitiveness of the events, with the story going nowhere. I had to put it down to attend to another commitment, but when it came to pick it back up just a few days later, I could not bring myself to do it. I really couldn't. I had no interest in pursuing it when there are other, exciting possibilities between the covers with another author - so to speak!
The story is that main character Richard is an ex-Marine (he played in the band) and is now in college pursing something - he has no idea what. So despite the fact that being inducted into the Marines speaks well of him, overall, he's pretty much a loser, and he doesn't make any effort to improve himself. His main problem, other than his girlfriend dumping him and his hots for his math teacher, Mrs Lynch, is a chronic lack of cash - or a chronic inability to budget the cash he has. Why he's so short of cash I do not know. As ex-military, he should be able to get assistance to attend school, but maybe that doesn't cover living expenses.
The thing is that I really didn't like him at all. He was not a likable person. He lied for no good reason. He abused his ex girlfriend's good will for no good reason. He was really just a jerk. I saw no reason to root for him at all.
One of his tasks in his lodging house is to walk the landlady's dog, I think to skim a little off his rent. I found myself skimming some of the huge info dump we get as this novel gets into gear. The dog has a habit of going into the room of a rather odd lodger known as the ghoul. Chasing the dog up there one day, Richard ends up passing through some sort of portal in this room, and suddenly he's still in Boulder, Colorado, but there is no city there, only grass, trees, a sheer mountain range, and oddly, a house on a ledge, some five hundred feet up the rock face, with a taxing switchback stone staircase to get up there. There's no one in the house and no people visible anywhere. I find it impossible to believe that the aging dog he was walking would take off hell for leather for the stone stairs carved into the cliff face, and run all the way up to the house, but this is what we're expected to believe.
When Richard finally manages to find his way back home, he uses this as an excuse to talk to the young and disapproving math teaching assistant (Mrs lynch) about time travel - without, of course telling her that he's apparently undertaken just such an adventure. He has no evidence and would sound like a madman, but the problem with that is that later he gets physical evidence that something warped is going on here, and yet he fails to avail himself of it. I guess Richard ain't too smart, which begs the question: why would someone like Mrs Lynch be even remotely interested in him - because that's painfully obviously where this was headed? A tedious trope "love" interest did not help my interest. Quite the contrary.
The problem for me was that this magical portal only led downhill - at least that's how the story went: back and forth, back and forth. Richard goes through the portal. He comes back. He's attacked by something. He goes through the portal. He comes back. He's attacked by something. Wash, lather, rinse, and repeat. All this travel, yet the story is really going nowhere. I had no interest in that and I cannot recommend this novel.
