A QUESTION OF TIME

Dark fantasy about a deformity in time in the Grand Canyon, by the author of the Berserker and Lost Swords series, etc. Saberhagen begins his time-warp tale by anchoring it solidly in gritty 1935, with down-and-outer Jake Rezner coming across a young woman artist in the Grand Canyon with whom he falls into an affair. It happens that Camilla's the bait for her master, Edgar Tyrrell, a sculptor who is now among the nosferatu, or vampires. Tyrannous Tyrrell has kept Camilla wrapped in a time warp—in which he has a mine from which he digs strange little white nodules. He- -or his divorced wife Sarah—is selling his sculpture piecemeal in the 1990's, now that he's a famous ``dead'' eccentric. Jake finds himself in bondage to Tyrrell, who is building himself a psychic empire based on the time warp. Meanwhile, in 1991, aged Sarah hires the Keogh psychic detective agency to recover her missing grandniece, Cathy, who is lost in the Canyon. Bill Burdon, who works for Keogh, himself gets lost in the Canyon and runs across Cathy, who's camping out in a geologic time-fault in One Million B.C. Bill makes Polaroids of her when she refuses to return with him. Then, trying to find a way out, he discovers the famous Tyrrell house—in 1935!—in which live young Sarah and little Cathy. Later, he shows the aged Sarah pictures of herself and Cathy he's taken in 1935—as well as shots of Cathy in a much earlier period. How will Jake and Camilla, in the Canyon of saber-toothed tigers and strange bears, escape from deathproof Tyrrell, who sleeps days in an impregnable cave and sups on Camilla's neck on various evenings? Will Cathy be brought out of the Miocene? Time in a spaghetti tangle. Starts well, ends comic-strippy.