FOUND TREASURES: Book Review
Much of the story in What Remains takes place—or finds its origin—in an antique store. I love antique stores because they represent a selective attempt to save the past. They are places devoted to curation. They don’t accept just any piece. Not everything is worth saving. Someone has looked at each item and decided, yes, this belongs on the shelf! It’s worthy of preservation.
But preservation isn’t only about old objects. It can also be about stories, ideas, and people worth bringing into your life.
That is the idea behind Found Treasures, a monthly column where I’ll share things I’ve enjoyed and believe deserve your attention. Sometimes the treasure will be a book or a film. It might be someone else’s newsletter, another creator, or simply a person I discovered on Notes whose posts I really like.
I wanted to use this opportunity to introduce you to one of my favorite authors. If you decide to give him a shot (either this book or one of his many others), I hope you’ll speak up and let me know how you liked it.
Paradox Bound by Peter Clines
I first discovered Peter Clines’s writing about a year ago. He’s writing appeals to me because he frequently has an interesting premise based on some type of mystery that involves a science fictional premise and enough action to be a low-key thriller.
The Fold was the first of his books that I’ve read. Turns out that book is actually the second one in a loosely-connected series that Clines refers to as The Threshold Universe. If you are a fan of cosmic horror, you have to read these books. The first book in that series is 14. There is a chronological order to them, but you can read them in any order. The only risk you run reading them out of order is that you might encounter some of the characters meeting one another after you’ve already finished a book where they had an established relationship… and that leads me to the book that I want to talk about today.
That book is Paradox Bound. It’s a story about the American Roadtrip with a twist. The roadtrips in this book aren’t the type that have been immortalized in songs about getting your kicks on Route 66 because these roads wind through American history itself, passing through different eras and occasionally crossing paths with figures who have become part of the country’s folklore and cultural mythology. These journeys don’t represent traveling through the American history taught in schools. Rather the characters in this novel are traveling through the history Americans imagine. It’s a story built around the mythology that has grown up around our roads, cars, folk heroes, secret societies, and frontier optimism. Most of all its about the American Dream. Clines manages to mix all of these elements together into a time-travel adventure that kept me turning pages until I reached the end.
Normally I’m not a fan of time-travel stories because there are so few people who can do them well. Too often they become preoccupied with temporal paradoxes or elaborate rules designed to keep travelers from accidentally changing the past. Clines largely sidesteps that problem by making things simpler: you can’t change history. If you travel into the past, whatever you do there was always part of the history that already happened. The book builds on what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call predestination loops.
The story begins when an eight year old Eli Teague meets a captivating woman whose car, a 1929 Model A Ford, has broken down by the side of the road. She’s dressed in clothing from the Revolutionary War era, carries old-fashioned weapons, and drives a car filled with technology that shouldn’t exist in 1929 or even in our own time. The encounter is brief, but it comes to be one of the defining moments of his life.
He sees her again five years later, and then once more when he is on the cusp of turning thirty. Eli has grown older. She hasn’t.
Eventually, he persuades her to tell him what she has been searching for all these years, and in doing so finds himself drawn into the hunt for the American Dream. Not the nebulous concept or fuzzily defined collection of ideals we usually mean by that term. In Clines’s world, the American Dream is a real artifact. It was once protected by a group of secretive guardians, but now it’s gone missing. And so Eli joins the Searchers who have spent years traveling through American history trying to find it… and that’s when the fun begins.
The premise may sound a little over-the-top—maybe even a little sappy—and, maybe it is. But that’s part of the fun. Paradox Bound takes an absurdly ambitious premise and plays it straight, turning it into a wonderfully uplifting and hopeful adventure that I think you’ll enjoy.
Next in Written Ward
Written Ward follows a four-week rhythm during each season. We are in Week Four.
- Week One — Original Fiction: A new installment of What Remains
- Week Two — Spoken Ward: A short story worth discussing, what caught my attention, a few questions for its author, and another story recommended by that author
- Week Three — Original Fiction: The next installment of What Remains
- Week Four — Found Treasures: A personal collection of things I’m glad to have found and people whose work I think deserves attention
That rhythm will continue throughout the season. I’ll announce the season finale and the following intermission in advance.
Next week, we’ll be back with another installment of my serial featuring Hank Shaw and Nate Parsons as they try to unravel the secrets of the antique stores they’ve inherited and the mysterious objects locked away in its cellar.
Thank you for reading and for joining us from the beginning.
If this installment made you think of someone who might enjoy a strange little shop and the things locked away in its cellar, please consider sharing it with them. Personal recommendations are how Written Ward finds new readers.
Until next week. Mind the rules!
I like the premise. The American Dream as a real object. It's almost like something that Eureka or Warehouse 13 would briefly store, then ship off somewhere else.