IT HAPPENED TOMORROW

In Tanz and Greenberg’s novel, a tragedy prompts a man to distrust the nature of reality itself.

As the story opens, Tyler Blanton is feeling on top of the world in his Manhattan office: He’s signed a landmark (and lucrative) new account for his business, BLT Marketing Associates, and he’s purchased a diamond engagement ring for his girlfriend, Monique Devereaux, who’s recently received a promotion at her nightly news job—she’s getting her own segment, called “Nique’s Niche.” But his happiness is dashed in the sharpest way possible when he and Monique are caught in a terrorist attack, and she doesn’t survive. (“He felt a dark cloud engulf him as he saw countless bloody bodies strewn in every direction.”) Tyler is crippled with grief and shock despite being consoled by everybody in his life. He’s just starting to get over the worst of it when he sees that Monique’s TV station has decided to run her previously taped final “Nique’s Niche” segment about the New York state lottery. At first, this airing reopens the wounds of his grief, but then things get stranger; he’s sure her segment feels live, not prerecorded, and he tapes it for future reference. On impulse, he jots down her on-air prediction for the winning lottery number, buys a ticket, and promptly wins. But when he shows the taped segment to a friend, the presenter is different—Monique’s not there. In the course of this compellingly complex, mysterious narrative, Tyler’s experiences grow increasingly bizarre, leading him to leave New York, take up with a stranger, and eventually confront what’s really going on. Although the prose is sometimes stiff and the dialogue clunky, the authors keep enough plot twists coming to hook readers until the narrative reaches its satisfyingly tangled conclusion.

A complicated, occasionally stilted story of perception and reality.