Just finished reading an awesome novel featuring:
- A recently unemployed journalist who goes back in time
- A musician father in the past
- Time travel that works by just thinking hard about a specific date
- An inability to visit the same date twice
- Being ghost-like and invisible to most people while back in time
- Always traveling to the same “clock time” and location you left from
- A mysterious doctor associated with a creepy hospital
- Chapters named after song titles/lyrics
No, I didn’t reread Timely Persuasion again. The above bullets also describe Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski. But the similarities are both striking and amusing. Not sure whether I should chalk it up to great minds thinking alike, 100% coincidence or something in between. This quote from the book summed up my opinion and made me laugh out loud:
“Two events could be a coincidence. Not all of this.”
Apophenia aside, the two stories are very different beyond the areas where music & time travel particulars intersect. Expiration Date plays out as a fast paced hardboiled detective novel bouncing back and forth between the 1970s and the present, with cliffhangers at the end of most chapters that leave you longing for more. I absolutely devoured it, being sucked into the “just one more chapter before bed” trap that hasn’t happened in a long time. Best book I’ve read in ages, with an ending that was both satisfying and clever.
Highly recommended, even if TP did nothing to inspire it.
