phatdoan

What would it be like if Michael Crichton had teamed up with Nora Roberts to write a science thriller set just a couple of years in the future, and then brought in Ray Bradbury to tweak the ending? I suspect the by-product of that collaboration might be very much like this book. The late Ken Grimwood is not a household name. I’ve had his third novel, Replay, on my “to read” list for a while. That one won a World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1988, and has a pretty strong cult following. Diehard Replay fans seem to also hold this, Grimwood’s 1976 debut novel, in high regard, so I decided to check out the earlier work first. Our heroine is Elizabeth Austin, a woman in her mid-to-late- 20s who has suffered from epilepsy ever since she was a young girl. Elizabeth’s occasional seizures are resistant to conventional medical treatment, and interfere with just about every aspect of her life. She has an understanding employer (not necessarily a given in 1976), but is concerned about driving a car, swimming, holding a baby…any activity where a sudden seizure could cause serious problems. After years of just dealing with it, her doctor suggests that she may be the ideal candidate for a radical and experimental new brain surgery that could cure her completely. She eagerly pursues this opportunity, which is where the echoes of Michael Crichton come in: the procedure involves electrical stimuli to various unmapped regions of the brain. These stimuli result in a defacto cure for the epilepsy, but also produce unusual side effects. One particular trigger, for instance, causes Elizabeth to have visions (or perhaps hallucinations?) of day-to-day life as though she were experiencing it in a different body, in the distant past. This part of the story is where some of the more florid, Nora Roberts-esque, prose comes into play. This is an engaging thriller. The hardcover copy I read only topped out at 233 pages, but it still felt a little bloated in parts, like maybe there was some filler to get it to that page count, or as if it could have used some crisper editing. But for a first novel, especially one that’s over 30 years old, it was very easy to stay with, right up to the ‘gotcha’ ending.

2023-02-05 04:36