Bullettime

By Nick Mamatas

DAVID HOLBROOK EXISTS EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

David Holbrook is a scrawny kid, the victim of bullies, and the neglected son of insane parents.

David Holbrook is the Kallis Episkopos, a vicious murderer turned imprisoned leader of a death cult dedicated to Eris, the Hellenic goddess of discord.

David Holbrook never killed anyone, and lives a lonely and luckless existence with his aging mother in a tumbledown New Jersey town.

Caught between finger and trigger, David is given three chances to decide his fate as he is compelled to live and relive all his potential existences, guided only by the dark wisdom found in a bottle of cough syrup.

From the author of the instant cult classic Move Under Ground comes a fantasy of blood, lust, destiny, school shootings, and the chance to change your future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781926851723

Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including The Last Weekend and I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and many other anthologies and magazines. Nick’s previous anthologies include the Bram Stoker Award-winner Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow) and The Locus Award nominees The Future is Japanese and Hanzai Japan (both co-edited with Masumi Washington). Nick’s editorial work has also been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. He resides in the California Bay Area.

Reviews for Bullettime

[dagon12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about BULLETTIME when I first finished it. So I gave it a bit of time to let it sink. Unfortunately, I'm still at that same spot where I can't determine if the book succeeded with me or not. I enjoyed the book and it made me think but I'm not sure what I felt after I finished it.The story is told by Dave Holbrook as he sits outside of time and watches himself go through multiple alternate realities. Most of these lives focus on his teenage years. Almost all lead Dave to an early death. And every one was miserable. He's picked on at school and his parents are no help to him. He self-medicates his way through live with cough medicine. Things start to look up for him when he meets Erin, a beautiful new student who finds Dave interesting. However, Erin is really Eris, the goddess of discord, who finds Dave interesting because of the chaos she can use him to create.The storytelling is not completely linear. Narrator Dave jumps across the different realities and picks up pieces from all of them. He's trying to find something positive since so many of his lives are pretty miserable. That search across the lives was captivating to me as a reader. Where were we being drawn? What redeeming factors would we find? At the same time, this is where I end up lost. There wasn't enough of a definitive ending with which to be satisfied. If Narrator Dave found one life that was true happiness, then it wouldn't have stayed true with the rest of the book. Finding that satisfying ending for Daves in multiple timelines is tough. Before you start to think you should skip the book though, at no point during the story did I ever feel like marking the book as Did Not Finish. It is a complex story and held my attention the whole way through. I'm not sure if it truly worked for me but maybe in a slightly different reality, it does satisfy me completely. Give the book a try and see where you land. After all, maybe the book was meant to leave the reader unsettled and thinking rather than satisfied and forgotten.