This novel is very different to the duology I've previously reviewed by Patrick Tylee. 'Wisdom' was a dense and fascinating science fiction novel and 'Rebellion' was a more focused sequel. This is as much fantasy as science fiction but arguably plays best as action. I would love to see it adapted to film, or better yet, a season of TV, but it would need a capable cast and yet more capable director to keep it from becoming intensely confusing. It's meant to be a little confusing as it starts, but it gradually clears up in prose as Tylee explains more details and introduces us to more characters. It could easily go the other way in a visual form.

We're with Michael Burns, a husband and father who's just gone through two traumatic incidents. For one, he's lost his wife, who died a hero saving her family, tackling some sort of human monster on the top of a building and dying with him on the ground six storeys below. Mike was there and it seems likely that his intense grief is combined with guilt, not only for surviving when Olivia didn't but for not being the one to stop this guy. He froze and she acted. He misses her intensely and it's a particularly powerful aching for another human being that elevates her in absentia.

For another, his daughter doesn't seem like herself and largely hasn't since the recent accident on the freeway when power lines fell onto their vehicle. She's Vivian Burns, who leads the burgeoning rock group Halfrek as Flame Burns as vocalist and guitarist, and sometimes she's still Vivian, even without any urge to make music any more, but sometimes she claims to be Kirk Hunter, a stranger who happened to be riding his Harley on the same freeway when the accident happened. At those points, she has his memories rather than her own. It's like they're sharing the same body.

Enter Dura, the only character with even a shot at explaining what's going on. He or she is a voice inside Mike's head, who claims to be an alien creature from a place of pure thought and is looking for Gren, who seems to be a sort of significant other who doesn't want to go home. Even early on, it seems pretty clear that Dura and Gren are the starting point for whatever's going on and that not everything in my summary above is true. Now, I'm not attempting to mislead you. Those are the experiences that Mike and his family experienced, with some details fleshed out by what has been officially announced. It's just not all true.

And that's because the military is covering things up for reasons not yet apparent. Certainly they have a serious interest in the accident, because they're asking questions of everybody there, not least Mike's son Derrick, who's taken from him by child services for no good reason other than he was in the accident and they clearly think he knows something. Mike used to be Navy and so has a solid understanding of how the military works and a willingness to ask questions. It soon becomes clear that it wasn't power lines that fell onto his vehicle, but a military jet whose pilot is the man who Olivia tackled off a building.

While that sounds like it might explain everything, it doesn't. We're under fifty pages in and that merely scratches the surface. However, I'm only going to add a few other details to avoid spoilers.

One is to emphasise that these alien creatures who only exist as pure thought can enter bodies of humans. We know that because Dura is in Mike's brain and Gren at least was in Capt. Kelvin Post's. However, there are degrees to what's known as displacement. Even with Dura talking to him from inside his own head, Mike is still fully in control of his mind and body. That doesn't seem to be the case with how Gren enters humans, which is far more invasive, to the degree that Gren is firmly in charge of host bodies. It doesn't take much extrapolation to realise that Kirk has been displaced from his body into Vivian's and, once we accept that, the rest of this orgy of displacement will be a lot easier to follow.

The other is that Vivian is a fascinating character. She wears prosthetics on her legs, not because of the accident but because she was born with meromelia. Her legs have always ended part of the way down her shins and she's grown up with those prosthetics. That she fronts a rock band that's growing nicely in popularity is empowering. What's more, Halfrek is so named as an abbreviation of Hall Freaks, because its members were all traditional high school outcasts: Flame wears these prosthetics, while one of her bandmates has Tourette's, another is blind and a third genderfluid. Those subcultures aren't explored here but that's worthy representation.

I liked this more than the 'Elmyrah' duology. It gets down to business quickly but in a substantially confusing situation. We're immediately thrown a bevy of wild glimpses and left to try to assemble them into something that makes sense. Dura helps but slower than we might like, as they clearly have an agenda of their own. That it seems to match Mike's is helpful but not guaranteed. Tylee is happy to present a puzzle and give us time to figure it out, while potentially confusing us more by having Dura's explanations veer into bringing Mike onto a plane of thought, where he's a tree and his dead wife is a horse. There's some serious ambition here and it paid off for me.

I'm sure this sounds like a whole bunch of high concept stuff introduced all at once, not dissimilar to the early chapters of 'Wisdom', but it really isn't. As I mentioned earlier, this is really an action movie or a sci-fi/fantasy. Once it gets moving, it veers into escapes and breakouts and car chases. Well, the car chase isn't much, but it does lead to a magnificent scene with Mike and his lawyer, a savvy lady named Eliška Carey. And when did I last see a hácek in an Arizona novel? Maybe one of Kevin Hearne's 'Iron Druid' books with a coven of Polish witches. Let's just say it's been a while.

What's more, while I presume this is self-published, because Camel Needle & Associates may only publish his books, it's well put together. That's a gorgeous cover, for a start, and one that's highly appropriate. The title, which initially seems awkward, quickly finds deep meaning on a few layers. The editing is strong and, while there's a lot of white space on pages where Dura and Mike talk in thought, we never have any doubt as to who's who. Dura's words are in italics and, when we get to a point where Gren joins in too, he or she is in bold italics. I'm not sure gender has any meaning in regards to creatures of pure thought, but I'll play safe. Frankly, the only self-publishing flaw is the smart apostrophes that are the wrong way round, but there aren't many of those.

Now I want to see this adapted. It would have to be done right or it would fail horribly. We have to be aware of who is whose body at any particular time, which is a clever trick for both the actor and director in every scene. These characters are admirably diverse, whatever criterion we apply. The best scenes are often ones where that diversity jars, like a young girl being trapped inside an old Native American man in a care home. Unfortunately, there isn't much opportunity for Tylee to do much in the way of adjustment, just some discomfort at a male biker suddenly having to deal with that time of the month. I'd love to see all those moments visually.

If there's a flaw here, it's the ending, but it's going to depend on your point of view. Once we have enough information to know what's really going on, we're likely to think that there's only a single viable ending and so this suddenly becomes predictable. I'm not going to spoil that ending, but it isn't quite what I expected or, I'd assume, what most readers will expect. The question is whether we're satisfied with the ending we get over the one we thought we'd get and I can see that going both ways. It's maybe less about whether it's a good or bad ending that's better or worse than we envisaged, and more about whether we see it as cheat or sweet.

If we see it as a cheat, we're going to believe that the book got away from Tylee, who couldn't find a way to wrap it up properly. If we see it as sweet, we're going to appreciate how he deepened an already emotional story considerably with a brave and powerful shift. To go back to visuals, it isn't the ending of either '2001: A Space Odyssey' or 'Brazil', but I'd guess that if you like those endings, you'll probably like this one too and it could play just as well on a big screen. Now, who's going to play the various members of the Big Mix Up Crew? Inquiring minds want to know. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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