This week's novel is The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, weird time travel by Stuart Turton.
Our narrator wakes up with amnesia, outside a dilapidated estate, convinced he just witnessed a murder. Over the course of the day, he learns that all the guests are gathered at the house for a big masquerade ball that night, no one wants to be there, and everyone has secrets. At the end of the evening, he goes to sleep, wakes up, and he's in a the body of a different person, reliving the same day again. He has eight days to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, and eight hosts from around the estate to help him get different angles on the mystery.
This book must have been such a pain to write. It's a big tangle of continuity, which can be altered from day to day if the narrator can manage it, but the problem with that is that if he alters it too much, he won't be in the right place to make things happen for his other hosts. Mysteries pop up and then get solved three days later, and then they turn out to be unrelated to the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle--even though they often solve a different murder. (So many people are murdered in this book.)
Maybe it was because I was in the midst of trying to tie together all the loose ends in my own novel, and trying to keep track of a million tiny threads, but I could not stop thinking about the process that must have been involved to write this. My novel had multiple charts of what everyone was up to from one day to the next. This must have had an Excel spreadsheet and a cork board with strings connections.
I got to wondering if it was good to see the evidence of that process, to see the hand of the author. It's kind of fun to think about, but it also causes me to feel pity and low level anxiety thinking about what he had to go through. Maybe this is not a problem other people have or that even I would have if I'd read this a month later. And the book was still exciting, and it was fun to play along with the mystery and fun to bask in the time loop.
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