Fleming presents a lushly illustrated SF story of visions and possible futures.

Steve, a man in his late 20s, begins to experience something strange: At night, while sleeping, he suddenly feels a surge of energy coursing through his entire body. Slowly, over the course of years, this experience not only repeats, but gradually intensifies, until his original sensation of teetering on the edge of his bed evolves into full-blown out-of-body experiences (OBEs). “As I grew more adept at these out-of-body experiences, the process became increasingly seamless,” Steve reflects. “It always began with a surge of energy waves pulsating through me as I lay in bed, but gradually, these waves became a catalyst for an immediate and effortless flight around the room.” This is not the extent of the phenomenon, however; as Steve becomes more familiar with these weird interdimensional journeys, the journeys themselves become more complex. His OBEs don’t follow a linear timeline, at least at first—he can find himself far in the future, or in his own present day, or in the past, often occupying the bodies of other characters and caught up in the events of their own timelines. A few threads unite some of these mystical journeys in time; Steve sometimes finds himself bonded to an interdimensional creature-killing being he calls Rage, “the embodiment of this lethal purpose, yet he relied on me, anchoring him to the realm of the living.” Other times, his voyages are fairly tepid, as when he finds himself driving with his friend John in an SUV across Earth-like terrain that, as his instincts indicate, is in fact not on Earth. Over time, the dramatic import of these OBEs increases.

Fleming has made the wise decision to supplement his episodic narrative with an arresting array of over 100 full-color illustrations. Some of the images explicitly depict events being described, while others signal or allude to those events—this approach makes the book visually compelling. The adventures themselves are likewise evocative, although they’re hampered a bit by the story’s fragmentary nature. Once Steve’s OBEs have developed a certain level of complexity and he’s encountering alternate realities (rather than simply floating around his room), readers get tantalizing hints of the grander, more unified novel this might have been. There’s some development of Steve’s relationship with his astral mentor, Three Twenty One, for instance, but it’s nothing close to what many fantasy readers will want. This vagueness is even more evident in a sketchy storyline that develops later in the book about an ominous future event called the War, in which 80% of the Earth is devastated, leaving only a handful of survivors, some of whom Steve meets in his travels. Every time one of Steve’s otherworldly interlocutors shows him some shard of a dark future involving menacing aliens or the War and the wrecking of humanity, the heralds remind him that these scenarios are only possibilities. “Always remember: the future you’re witnessing is only one probable outcome,” one such interlocutor tells him. “You must forge your own path, create a future free from the shadows of war.” Charmingly, many of these highly charged fantasy encounters end with Steve snapping out of his OBE and simply stating, “I was back in bed.”

A fascinating and visually striking series of extradimensional adventures.