Tumbling After - Hardcover

Witcover, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006105285X ISBN 13: 9780061052859

Publisher: Eos, 2005

Synopsis

The long-awaited second novel by Paul Witcover, acclaimed author of the remarkable Waking Beauty, is a stunning and provocative masterwork ofingenious imagination -- part-coming-of-age story, part contemporary fairy tale, part technological nightmare, and a brilliant dark vision of dystopia.

Twelve-year-old twins Jack and Jilly Doone are closer than most siblings -- uncannily linked, sharing thoughts, sensations, and emotions as if one person -- as they enjoy a mostly parentless August at the Delaware shore. But in the fury of an onrushing hurricane, a frighteningly close brush with death awakens an awesome power in Jack that changes everything ...

On an alternate Earth -- transformed centuries earlier by the Viral Wars into a savage battleground where the "normal" followers of the emperor Pluribus Unum clash unceasingly with warriors of five mutated elemental races -- a young aerie named Kestrel sets out into the perilous Waste with four companions, trusting their fates to the great and powerful Odds. Taking the next all-important step in every "mute's" odyssey to adulthood and duty, Kestrel dreams of glory and sacrifice, and of single-handedly bringing about the total extermination of the hated "norm" enemy. But even his ability to soar high above his world will not help him escape the treachery of those he dares not trust, and his psionic powers over the winds cannot blow away the strange and shattering destiny that awaits him at journey's end.

A different yet oddly synchronistic fate looms for Jack Doone in this endgame summer of frightening discovery and forbidden experimentation. Suddenly cursed with the uncontrollable power to alter reality -- to "do over" events and change the flow of his life and the lives of those around him -- his day-to-day existence has become a twisted version of the "Mutes and Norms" role-playing game devised and orchestrated by his uncle Jimmy. And now the twins' survival may come down to a single roll of the cosmic dice, as Jack finds himself devastatingly alone for the first time, his cherished Jilly's protector in a terrifying battle to determine the real, armed with no weapon but memory.

A staggeringly original work that blurs the lines between reality and the fantastic, between the accepted and the taboo, between fantasy and science fiction, Paul Witcover's Tumbling After is proof positive that intelligence and invention still reign supreme in the thrilling literature of speculation.

About this title

About the Author

The author of Waking Beauty, Paul Witcover has also written a biography of Zora Neale Hurston and numerous short stories. He is the co-creator, with Elizabeth Hand, of the cult comic book series Anima and has served as the curator of the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series. His work has also appeared on HBO. He lives and writes in New York City.

Reviews

Adult/High School-This clever, ambitious fantasy opens with adolescent twins Jack and Jilly playing on a beach. When the boy goes swimming, the undertow pulls him down. Suddenly, he is standing on the beach-shaken, scared, but okay. Yet he knows that he died in that ocean, and he questions his own sanity. Before long he learns that he and his sister are part of a dangerous contest occurring on a galactic scale with beings that can bend and alter reality to their will. Readers enter a parallel story through Mutes and Norms, a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style game designed by Jack and Jilly's uncle. The hero of this tale is Kestrel-a half-man, half-bird hybrid who is on a quest with other mutants traveling through a wilderness. What starts as a coming-of-age exercise quickly turns into the twins' dangerous fight for their lives. Kestrel begins to discover the full extent of his unique powers and uses them to protect himself and his comrades. Although the two story lines never connect directly, Witcover inserts many parallels between them. Jack and Kestrel also have similar personalities. Themes of power and responsibility echo back and forth between the two tales. With a colorful world and a fresh approach, this book will satisfy readers tired of the standard formulas of quest fantasy.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Witcover’s second novel (1997’s Waking Beauty is his first) succeeds at all levels. It’s an ingenious coming-of-age story, a technological nightmare, and a comment on dystopia, game-playing, sexual awakening, and multiple realities. Though it hints of Philip K. Dick and other SF writers, Tumbling After is wholly original. Set in parallel universes, the novel boasts compelling settings and believable characters whose fates slowly merge. Witcover, who writes with authority and elegance, also mines psychological undertones, including the twins’ sexual tensions. SF fans should not miss Tumbling After; it will "repay thoughtful readers looking for something beyond the usual trite and overworked trappings of much fantasy" (SciFi.com).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Two coming-of-age stories—that of pubescent twins Jack and Jilly Doone in 1977 America and that of Kestrel, a mutant 17-year-old of the distant future—converge in Witcover's compelling second novel (after 1997's Waking Beauty), which blends postapocalyptic SF with Philip K. Dick–like speculation on reality. In Kestrel's world, survivors of a viral war are divided into super-teched humans and super-powered mutants who battle each other endlessly. In the Doones' world, Jack seems to gain the power to alter reality after nearly drowning. The twin's Uncle Jimmy, a game designer, has devised "a role-playing game developed both to cash in on and undermine the success of Dungeons & Dragons." Jimmy's game scenario, in which he immerses the twins as pre-market testers, mirrors Kestrel's world. Jack's "power" begins to take over his life. Is he suffering from a breakdown fueled by sexual awakening, the new game and his preternaturally close relationship with Jilly, or has he somehow become involved in a multireality war fought for "the right to determine what is and isn't real"? Kestrel, meanwhile, is involved in just such a war. The increasingly disquieting parallel stories amount to an audacious toss of some complex dice, but the result is a winning, entertaining cross-genre roll. Agent, Chris Schelling at the Ralph Vicinanza Agency. (Mar. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

When Jack's twin, Jilly, dares him to ride the waves despite an approaching hurricane, he nearly drowns. He remembers Jilly dragging him out, but she can't recall him nearly drowning. Jack has just discovered his power to change the immediate past. Witcover thereafter mixes Jack's story with that of the mutant airie, Kestrel, who has joined in a traditional pentad pilgrimage--a pentad consisting of one representative each of the five mutant races that ceaselessly battle humans. As Jack struggles with his power and growing disparities between his memories and apparent reality, Kestrel struggles with his pentad's interactions and the possibility that a human infiltrator has set the group up for destruction. Kestrel and Jack both approach disaster--and collision. The horror of Jack's realizations about his bizarre capability combines with Kestrel's part in the mute-human war to take on train-wreck momentum. A nifty take on parallel worlds and superhuman power. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Tumbling After

By Witcover, Paul

Eos

ISBN: 006105285X

Chapter One

Jack and Jill

I caught it! he thinks. I actually caught it!

As the wave swells beneath him, Jack looks out over thewindswept, all-but-deserted beach (where his sister Jilly standswatching, dwindled to doll size) and surrenders to the same mix ofelation and terror that makes roller coasters irresistible. The cry thatbursts from his lips is the primordial cry of the ocean: raw, fierce,and proud. Jack's up so high that he can see over the crest of thedunes to the houses beyond -- even to his own house, where theantlike figures of his father, Bill, his older sister, Ellen, and UncleJimmy are hard at work taking down the porch screens. It seems entirelypossible that he might fly to them, joining the gulls anglingthrough the air on the knife-edge gusts and thrusts of wind precedingBelle like the outriders of an advancing army. Look! Up in thesky! It's a bird; it's a plane; no, it's Super Jack!

The ocean yaws and pitches. The next thing he knows, he'sfalling. The surf is miles below. He screams, desperately trying toright himself, or the world. At the same time, he catches sight ofJilly. She's up to her waist in the surf, arms rigid at her sides, gazing at him with an expression of fearful excitement, her mouth open asif she's shouting at the top of her lungs. But he can't hear her. Thenhe can't see her anymore either, because the wave curls behind himand slaps him down. There's no time to register the pain of strikingthe surface in the pummeling he receives beneath it as the wave rollshim toward shore. Jack tumbles like a sneaker in a washing machine,slammed into the bottom again and again until his body isnumb and all sense of direction fled. His lungs burn with the needfor air. A directionless roar envelops him.

He struggles against the current, but the incoming surge passeshim off smoothly to the outgoing tide, which drags him back theway he'd come ... or a different way, he can't tell. At last he goeslimp, thinking to conserve his strength. He's wishing he hadn'tcome down to the beach with Jilly to look at the storm-tossed surf;more than anything, he's wishing he hadn't accepted her dare toride one of the enormous waves. "In or else, Jack," she'd taunted."You're not chicken, are ya?"

When will he learn? Why does he let her talk him into thesethings? Bill's going to kill him ... assuming the ocean doesn't dothe job first. He'd give anything to go back and change the momentwhen he'd pulled off his shirt and run headlong into the water. Itseems like ages ago; another life altogether. Pinpricks of light areflaring and dying in the dark of his inner vision, illuminatingshapes he doesn't want to see: immense, unmoving forms that alsotake notice of him somehow, as if the flashes by which he sees themare lighting him up as well, bringing him fitfully, like a flickeringghost, across some invisible threshold and into the range of theirperceptions. He senses a sluggish stirring in the depths and imaginesa scaly arm or tentacle reaching for him as he might reach toswat a fly. He strikes out blindly.

The current falls away as if grown weary of the game. With thelast of his hoarded strength, Jack kicks and claws his way towardwhat he hopes is the surface.

All at once, there's air to breathe ... if you call it breathing.Sputtering, half-blinded by spume and spray, he flounders, legschurning, arms splashing. Shards of leaden sky shatter across his eyes, but no glimpse of shore obtrudes to guide him, no hint ofwhere he is in relation to the land. For all he knows, he's been sweptmiles out to sea. His straining toes brush no bottom. Wherever heturns, a wave is waiting to slap him in the face. He wants nothingmore than to strike back, bursting with a rage that rises up in himlike the wave he'd caught, or that had caught him, and, like it,crashes down. It pours through and out of him, leaving himdrained, empty, tossed about like a cork. It's all he can do to keep hishead above water.

Dazed and half-drowned, Jack finds himself recalling the expressionon Jilly's face, the naked avidity with which, having set theseevents in motion, she'd watched them take their course, her insatiableeyes drinking in his spill like she thirsted for it, and it's thismemory, rather than his current predicament, that swings open,wider than ever, the floodgates of his fear: his deepest, most secretand spectacular fear. Not of dying. No, it's the prospect of losingJilly that truly terrifies him.

But that can't happen. He won't let it. He opens his mouth to callher name. Water rushes in. He swallows it like a stone. With a last,stinging slap, the ocean slams over his head, severing his sight fromthe sky. Sinking into those sisterless depths, he feels himself breakingapart, all the bits and pieces of Jack Doone dispersing in differentdirections like minnows fleeing a predatory darkness.

Continues...

Excerpted from Tumbling Afterby Witcover, Paul Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Eos
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006105285X
• ISBN 13: 9780061052859
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304