PASSE-PARTOUT

Debut author Sanders offers a dark novel about a bizarre adventure through space and time.

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning, and Paul Fischer has quite a headache. Fortunately, his job at a store in an area called Monument Place tends to be easy; indeed, he rarely sees a customer, but Paul’s boss, Albert, is usually pleasant enough. On this particular day, however, Albert appears to have attempted suicide by ingesting rat poison, so Paul must call an ambulance. The narrative then shifts focus to a reclusive man in the countryside named Amos who lives at an undefined time in the past, many years before Paul was born. He makes his living by shaping metal items with a forge and bartering for essentials, and he likes to spend his spare time heating a pin and using it to write small words on parchment. As the book alternates between Paul’s and Amos’ eras, things get worse for everyone involved; for example, it’s not long before Paul witnesses his father’s suicide and a hooded figure assaults Amos. It becomes apparent that the two timelines will collide when a woman named Isla appears in Amos’ reality and in one of Paul’s dreams. Overall, Sanders’ narrative is an intricate and ambitious affair. However, some of the details can be taxing. Readers are told without a hint of irony, for instance, that Amos’ forge “believed that God made it to swallow fire and burn the souls of the living and it hated that the man tamed it.” The extremely earnest tone can be distracting, and some lines of dialogue feel rather silly, as when one character, while attempting to take over Amos’ strange parchment task, whispers aloud, “Do I let the pen move me?” Nevertheless, extremes are the name of the game in this story, which is authentically harrowing; at one point, for example, Paul watches his father’s violent end, which only hints at the trouble to come. Readers will also find themselves uncertain about where these events are leading. The final destination seems unlikely to be pleasant, but it remains mysterious throughout.        

An unpredictable, if occasionally over-the-top, fantasy tale.