A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Charles Waters is a middle-aged accountant who's clearly autistic, though undiagnosed. He leads a solitary and uneventful life until he's given one month to live. He lives it and dies. Then he wakes up in the doctor's office, being given one month to live...

This is a fun and unusual riff on the Middle Falls formula, give Charles's very short time span in which to make changes. (The Universal Life Center, which annoys me as always, does eventually make some changes too, to give the poor guy a chance.) The story is about how Charles can live his life to the fullest and expand what he thinks are his limits without messing with his essential self. In this case, the key is friendship with a guy in his apartment building whose life is just as limited as Charles's was initially, but in a less obvious way. It's very sweet.

99% of the book treats Charles's unstated but obvious autism as just how he is, not something that needs to be fixed or makes him spiritually special or anything other than an important aspect of his character. There is one bit of dialogue that implies that maybe he's actually God (!!!), of course at the Universal Life Center, but that's never mentioned again and the Universal Life Center characters clearly have no idea what's really going on.

Content notes: Charles dies of cancer, but there's no real details.




Hart Tanner is an elderly con man, currently scamming and being the boy toy of even older ladies, until he dies a particularly miserable death. He wakes up a young man, before his life goes completely to shit, and quickly discovers that every time he dies, he wakes up at the same point. It's the perfect get out of jail free card! Except, of course, a life with no challenges or real relationships eventually gets boring...

The book doesn't go in the obvious direction of being about Hart growing a conscience, realizing how he hurt people, and turning over a new leaf; that does happen, more or less, but it's not what the story is about. Nor, when he meets up with his abusive mother, is it about forgiving and reconciling with her THANK GOD - how that does go down is very satisfying if you had bad parents. What's it mostly about is, as is usual with Middle Falls, creating and maintaining an important relationship. In this case, that relationship is mostly with a little rescue mutt named Mushu. There is dog death in the context of Mushu eventually dying of old age, but because of how time travel works, it's impermanent in a similar way to how Hart's deaths are impermanent. The whole story is really touching.

Both these books were very enjoyable and good examples of the series.

Content notes: Child abuse (mostly in the past), suicide (in the context of knowing you'll just immediately wake up in a new life), dog death (ditto, and peacefully of old age.)

Veronica McAllister lived a long but largely unfulfilled life. Her marriage was unhappy, and though she loved her two daughters, her awful husband got custody in the divorce and she ended up estranged. She dies at age eighty wondering if that was all there is...

...and wakes up in the 1950s, in her senior year in high school. Veronica has a chance to do everything differently. But if she changes things too much, will her daughters never exist? If she marries a different man, will that make her happy? Would riches? Would a career? Can she fix her relationship with her mother? Will she ever get tired of eating burgers at Artie's diner?

Veronica is a great character to spend time with. She's a very loving person who's conventional in some ways and not in others, not particularly curious about the whys of her time travel but mentally flexible and creative enough to try a number of different ways to get things right, and primarily interested in good relationships and personal fulfillment. She loves the 1950s in a lot of ways (though not the restricted rules for women) and is refreshingly non-neurotic.

Veronica's story actually made me cry at certain points - not because it's sad, because it's very moving. It's all about love and relationships - some romantic, some familial, some friendships.

I didn't get to this book for a while because we meet her briefly in Joe Hart, and she's completely uninterested in helping him out and is about to commit suicide! This turns out to be caused by extremely specific circumstances and isn't what she's like normally. And for anyone who's read others of these books, this one contains zero Universal Life Center.

I've hit a good streak with these books - this one promptly rocketed to one of my top favorites in the series. Shawn Inmon should write more from female POVs. He's very good at it.

Shawn Inmon's Middle Falls Time Travel series is a set of interconnected but basically standalone Peggy Sue Got Married/Groundhog Day type of time travel books: a person dies, then is reset into their younger self. If they die before they've done what they need to do (some kind of self-improvement/self-knowledge) they reset to the same time.

The books I've read so far are all interestingly different despite the same basic premise, the same setting, and all being clearly written by a very earnest middle-aged straight white guy with more kindness than sophistication. The kindness is a big draw. His characters do things like volunteer at animal shelters and go on the road to give talks on safe sex and work on their relationship with their brothers, and this is all just as important as stopping a serial killer or saving John Lennon.

Characters doing clever things with time travel is rather hilariously not Inmon's strong suit. They vary in terms of how good they are at making use of future knowledge, but I have so far read three of these and in terms of them doing things that are entertainingly clever to the reader, there is very little of that. Even when they use their knowledge smartly, they use it in obvious ways: investing in Microsoft, driving a boy home so he won't die in a drunk driving accident, using their future knowledge to convince people that they know the future so they'll believe a warning. At one point, a character reveals that she has been plotting for ages to put away a criminal. When her cunning plan is finally revealed, it's to... report him to the police.

But the series isn't about doing neat things with time travel. It's about the choices people make, and how hard it can be to do better, and that there's many paths to becoming better and leading a better life.

(The frame is a generally terrible but thankfully minimal cliche bureaucratic afterlife. One book has an angel named Semolina.)

I've been reading the series out of order, which was a good idea for me as I finally got around to the first book and found that he improved a lot as a writer as he went along. I don't think I'd have continued if I'd started there.

His first book actually is a more conventional time travel story, and it's the worst one I've read so far. At age fifteen, Thomas Weaver tries to drive his drunk older brother home from a party; since he doesn't really know how to drive, they get in a crash and his brother is killed. (Note how Inmon doesn't go for the more usual "brother drove himself home" - his characters tend to try to help out, even if they do it badly.)

Everything goes wrong from there, until he's a fifty-year-old unemployed alcoholic living with his mother and commits suicide, only to wake up fifteen again...

This book has a lot of problems, including a rushed ending (Inmon later does very long endings that are slow but satisfying), a way-too-graphic serial killer plot, and Weaver making a million inexplicable, unmotivated choices because Inmon doesn't know how to plot yet.

He already knows that one of his classmates grows up to be a serial killer, so he follows him into the woods and finds his lair of animal torture. Thomas's older brother spots him and says that he always thought that guy was creepy, why was Thomas following him? For literally no stated reason, Thomas lies about everything rather than telling his brother. He could have thought that maybe his brother is fated to die and is afraid that getting him involved in a serial killer plot might cause that, but he doesn't. Later, he sees the serial killer kidnap his dog, but covers up the whole thing plus the dog rescue, even lying about it to his mother who definitely would have believed him, again for literally no stated reason. (Actual reason: once the cops get involved, the serial killer is arrested and that plot line ends.)

Spoiler for how he saves his brother. ( Read more... )

Rebecca Wright is much much better, with a satisfying messiness about the odd turns people's lives take and not everything wrapped up neatly. Rebecca is an emotionally isolated, status and money-driven real estate agent in a loveless marriage, with a nanny actually mothering her kid. Her one genuine and loving emotional relationship is with her younger brother Duncan, and even that doesn't really blossom into intimacy until she finds out that he's gay when he gets AIDS and comes home to die.

She dies of old age, loveless and in poverty. And opens her eyes with her husband screaming that he's leaving her...

Rebecca proceeds to fix up her life, focusing on making tons of money in real estate. Inmon used to be a real estate agent, and you can tell: everything about her job is very plausible and fun. But she still lets the nanny mother her kid, and her attempt to save Duncan fails because he doesn't believe in her warning. She dies again, rich but unhappy. And opens her eyes with her husband screaming that he's leaving her...

This book took a number of turns I didn't expect. While her child is important, the really crucial relationship turns out to be with her brother. A lot of the book is the Rebecca-and-Duncan story, a lot of it a road trip including a lengthy and successful commercial for the Florida Keys, and when it finally does get back the "letting the nanny raise your kid" issue, it goes in an unexpected and delightful direction.

( Read more... )

If you're curious about these books, The Changing Life of Joe Hart or The Empathetic Life of Rebecca Wright are good places to start.