The rain moved into hail, peppering the windshield and body of the truck, reminding me of stones thrown against metal fences, of pellet guns fired into graineries [sic].

Time travel is always an intriguing topic in fiction, and since we haven’t figured out how to actually do it yet, we have infinite options as to how to imagine it. H. G. Wells created his time machine. I built tunnels between worlds in a couple of my novels. Craig Terlson, in his novel, Bent Highway, imagines it as something like a road trip with Hunter S. Thompson, as filmed by some French New Wave director.

We first meet our hero, whose name is only given as “M.”, as he’s sitting in a diner, heating up a teaspoon preparatory cauterizing an arm wound with it – a wound he can’t remember receiving. We gradually learn that he’s engaged in a cross-country road trip, but from time to time he loses consciousness – seeming to slip through cracks in the earth – and awakens somewhere else – in someone else’s car, or in a bar, or in a brightly lit room. Sometimes he’s with a mysterious tall man, and sometimes he’s with a beautiful, white-skinned woman. Sometimes people attack him with cars or guns or knives. Gradually we – and he – realize that he’s been at this for some time, but keeps forgetting the incidents, which he doesn’t experience in strict chronological order. He learns that he has a dangerous enemy, and that he needs to be in just the right place at the right time in order to erase and overwrite some event from his past, to save the world.

The classic time travel conundrum of “What will happen if I meet myself in the past?” is handled offhandedly here – M. not only meets his past self, but an infinite number of his past selves, captured at each moment in his life.

Craig Terlson’s characteristic vivid writing style is showcased once again in Bent Highway. “The morning sun drilled a perfect hole in the cerulean sky,” is a good example. Unfortunately, the effect is marred from time to time by numerous typographical errors.

Sadly, the book is a cliff-hanger, and I don’t believe the sequel has appeared yet. I hope it does.