"Eli Teague lives in Sanders, Maine,
the town that time forgot. A chance encounter with a Model A Ford and its
driver when he was a kid sets Eli on a collision course with all of America's
history. That is, if the faceless men don't get him first. Eli’s willing
to admit it: he’s a little obsessed with the mysterious woman he met years ago.
Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s
driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War era clothes, wielding
an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal
strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of
gunfire and a squeal of tires? So when the traveler finally reappears in his
life, Eli is determined that this time he’s not going to let her go without
getting some answers. But his determination soon leads him into a strange,
dangerous world and a chase not just across the country but through a hundred
years of history—with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at
stake."
I did enjoy Peter Clines Paradox Bound (and I’ve always loved time travel
stories) but it does comes off like a pitch for a multi-season SyFy TV show
that will be cancelled before it can complete its arc. Much like The Fold,
Clines borrows lots themes from other popular culture books, TV, and movie...and, of course, previous time travel stories –or history travel
here. Beyond the obvious references to Back to the Future franchise (especially
the third film, and mainly due to John Henry's train, the Steel Bucephalus, there
are other references along the way) the book also seems also to allude classic
Doctor Who with the books MacGuffin, the American Dream. Eli is told the American
Dream is a physical thing, forged by the
Egyptian god Ptah at the behest of the Founding Fathers, and stolen at some
point in history (early 1963 apparently). It is much like the Key To Time arc
that the Doctor went on during TOS 16th season anyone who can get
their hands on the American Dream has unlimited power to mold the future. So
if thousands of people believe in the same thing, the Dream will do what it can
to make it happen. This is also
why it went missing. Since thousands of people were looking for it, it had to
go missing in order for it to become true, thus creating a predestinational
time loop, since no one would be looking for something that
wasn't missing.
Through this history travel, Harry and Eli
are perused by The Faceless Men, who are chasing the Searchers (who are
everyday people from different timelines who are also search for this object.
Here the book adds shades of River Song from modern Doctor Who, as these
Searchers don’t tend to meet each other linearly). With utterly featureless
faces, they wear masks and use hypnotic badges (or as I called them, perception
filters) to make sure no one notices that the person they're talking to has no face. Originally
tasked with protecting the Dream, after failing to keep it safe, they has
doubled-down on their secondary job - keeping history intact from accidental incursions created by the Searchers. There is
a Biff like bully that has been terrorizing Eli since childhood and who is
recruited (not by choice, though) into the Faceless Men.
As with all time travel tales, you need to have the hero
(or heroine) make some leaps in logic and a lot of those leaps comes that
toward the end. Some of the conclusions Eli reaches are a bit farfetched, especially
considering he’s only been doing the time hopping business for a very short
time and people like Harry (and others) have been doing it for years.
It’s a fun book and would probably make a good weekly TV
series for those who only mildly enjoy science fiction. It’s no Quantum Leap,
but it will hold your attention.
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