Books: Forced Perspectives By Tim Powers (2020)

 

“In book one, Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine had come together and been driven to cross over from ordinary reality into a nightmarish afterlife known as the labyrinth, a world populated by deceased or never-born spirits. They managed to return and close the gateway between these two worlds, but they also returned with the unique ability to perceive time differently.

Former Federal Agent/LA cop Sebastian Vickery is hiding out Barstow, while Ingrid Castine is back on the East Coast trying to live their lives. But both are still sensitive to the ghosts that haunt the modern Los Angeles highways, byways, and secret nooks and crannies, and are soon reunited and as they are plunged into the supernatural secrets of the vast city and its history—from the fallout of Satanic indie movies of the Sixties, to the unquiet La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, to a haunted sunken city off the coast of San Pedro seeking to rise again.

They may be old hands at dealing with the spirit world, but they have never been in a pursuit so deadly with the stakes so high. For, if a ghost-addicted Silicon Valley guru has his way, the lost souls of a million Angelenos could be drawn into the creation of a predatory World God guaranteed to bring about the end of life as we know it. And Vickery and Castine are all that stand between it and California-sized destruction.”

Forced Perspectives is the second of three tales featuring Vickery and Castine. Once again, author Tim Powers gives us another frenetic urban fantasy that blends Egyptian mythology, alternate Los Angeles history, and modern technology. One thing about Powers books is they can become a travelogue –all the locations, street and freeway names are real. One could navigate around LA using a Tim Powers book.

Anyways, if you like secret histories, like why Cecil B. DeMille really buried the Pharaoh’s Palace set after he filmed The Ten Commandments in 1923, stories filled with ghosts and Catholicism, and other supernatural high jinks, then this is the book for you! I felt the second book was a bit better than the first, the characters are fuller the set pieces more developed with Vickery seemly falling in love with Castine (though I’m not sure she is yet), but it does go on a bit too long. Still, Powers continues to bring a lot of weirdness with a ton of enjoyable quirks to this series. I’m still not wholly keen on this sub-genre, this Urban Fantasy arena, but at least I like these books.