BETWEEN EARTH AND EDEN

A man tracks his long-vanished girlfriend to the Bermuda Triangle and gets enmeshed in a cosmic conflict in Vesha’s SF romance.

Astrophysicist Barry Fuller is about to pop the question to his writer girlfriend, Victoria Britton, on a boat outing off the coast of Miami when they are beset by bizarre time dilations, gravitational anomalies, and a mysterious being who spirits Victoria off in a sinister black fog. Eleven years later, Victoria’s wealthy father, Joel, floats a theory that Victoria has disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle, citing letters Victoria has been writing him and a man dressed in a “tachyon suit” that emits a telltale black fog, whom Joel has managed to temporarily imprison. After a wild highway battle pitting Barry and Joel against the man in the tachyon suit, who keeps materializing and dematerializing (along with a man-eating alligator), Joel secures Barry passage on a United States Air Force flight that duly deposits him in the Triangle. Meanwhile, Victoria has indeed settled into the Triangle, an other-dimensional realm where the sea is up and the sky is down, residents don’t age, and museums and zoos contain everything from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Loch Ness Monster. It’s a dispiriting place with a stifling bureaucracy headed by the Oblivion department, which hunts down and kills certain “Chosen” inhabitants—among them Victoria, who adopts a disguise to evade capture. Rebelling against all of this is Ablis, a Luciferian fallen angel who wants Barry to figure out a grand unified theory of physics that will let Ablis free the Triangle from God’s unjust rules. Barry’s entry into the Triangle sparks turmoil and urgent questions: Will Victoria shake off the amnesia potion she took and remember Barry? Can Barry save her from the Oblivion department and master the use of a tachyon suit to return her to her Florida home?

Vesha’s yarn creates a sprawling, teeming fictive world that spans multiple universes and eons of history, but is populated by characters who are flawed and human-scaled—including a functionary with a secret heroin habit and an executioner who hates his job—despite their otherworldly powers. It’s also a bittersweet love story, structured around flashbacks to Barry’s and Victoria’s seven-year relationship, desolate separation, and star-crossed reunion. The novel has inventive action scenes that hang on the crazy powers of the tachyon suits, which hurtle through space and time—one of Barry’s jaunts takes him to Lakehurst, New Jersey just in time for the Hindenburg disaster—and pop in and out of existence while disintegrating physical reality. This causes frenetic mayhem that the author conveys in vivid, punchy writing (“The roar of crunching metal and the mad hiss of tachyons engulfed Barry as the man in fog ripped through the Mercedes and sliced it in half. Barry’s half fell to its side like a canoe and slid down US-41 shooting orange sparks in the air”). But these mechanics can also take on a haunting quality in Vesha’s darkly lyrical prose, as in the passage, “Half of the boat was gone, the other half vaporizing into a black mist. Victoria stood at the edge of the void with her mouth open; the dark ocean was visible through a hole in her throat.” The result is a captivating mix of thrills and pathos.

An entertaining fantasy that blends kinetic adventures, imaginative worldbuilding, and plangent emotion.