Bullettime [Paperback]

Nick Mamatas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2012

David Holbrook is a scrawny kid, the victim of bullies, and the neglected son of insane parents. David Holbrook is the Kallis Episkopos, a vicious murderer turned imprisoned leader of a death cult dedicated to Eris, the Hellenic goddess of discord. David Holbrook never killed anyone, and lives a lonely and luckless existence with his aging mother in a tumbledown New Jersey town. Caught between finger and trigger, David is given three chances to decide his fate as he is compelled to live and relive all his potential existences, guided only by the dark wisdom found in a bottle of cough syrup. From the author of the instant cult classic Move Under Ground comes a fantasy of blood, lust, destiny, school shootings, and the chance to change your future.

Product Details

• Paperback: 225 pages
• Publisher: ChiZine Publications (August 14, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9781926851716
• ISBN-13: 978-1926851716
• ASIN: 1926851714
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,261,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nick Mamatas. Author of two novels; Move Under Ground (Night Shade 2004, Prime 2006) and Under My Roof (Soft Skull Press, 2007), two collections; 3000MPH In Every Direction At Once (Prime 2003) and You Might Sleep... (Prime 2009), and the novella Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001).

He is also the editor of the anthologies The Urban Bizarre (Prime 2003), Phantom #0 (Prime 2005), Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake, Lethe 2008), and Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow, Tor 2010).

Nick also co-edited the magazine Clarkesworld for two years, which was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Stories from Clarkesworld have been collected in a pair of anthologies: Realms and Realms 2 (Wyrm Publishing 2008 and 2009).

Nick's own short stories have appeared in literary journals such as Mississippi Review online, subTERRAIN, and Per Contra, slicks including Razor and Spex, and fantasy and horror magazines and anthologies including New Dark Voices 2, Poe's Lighthouse, ChiZine, and Lovecraft Unbound.

His fiction has been nominated for the Bram Stoker awards three times, the International Horror Guild Award, and Germany's Kurd-Laßwitz Preis. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Smart Set, H+, Clamor, In These Times, various anthologies. With Kap Su Seol he translated and edited the first English edition of a firsthand account of South Korea's Kwangju massacre--Kwangju Diary (UCLA Asian Pacific, 1999).

Nick now lives in the California Bay Area, where he is editor of tradebooks for VIZ Media and edits both Japanese science fiction novels in translation and books associated with Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars if you thought your high school experience sucked... August 7, 2012

By Molly Tanzer

Format:Paperback

In BULLETTIME, as in Sensation (Spectacular Fiction), Mamatas explores the notion of human agency through an unusual, detached, fallible, inhuman but all-too-human narrator. In SENSATION, that narrator is a collective arachnid consciousness that observes the course of human events while waging a war against their enemies, a species of predatory wasps. In BULLETTIME, protagonist David Holbrook narrates the story of his own life--indeed, all of his possible lives--from within the Ylem, a place beyond reality, trapped there by Eris, goddess of discord.

Most of David's lives center around his having been a bullied teen in a rough New Jersey high school, where he is beaten up and mocked by day, and must, at night, deal with his awful father and alcoholic mother. He survives the madness by guzzling cough syrup and not caring about much. The various Davids within the novel snap or don't snap, sometimes prompted by Eris (who torments David while manifesting as "Erin," just another student at David's school ... albeit a wild, teasing, instigating student), sometimes by ineffective authority figures who fail in myriad ways to make David's terrible life any better. All these realities end up with David dying before the age of 41.

The book is a breathless, dizzying read, at points funny, emotional, poignant, sexy and un-sexy, tense, awful, and queasy-making, but mostly very very sad. It feels simultaneously up-to-the-minute and dated, which lends the narrative a timeless quality. Both main characters, David and Erin/Eris, are fascinating to watch, even though at no point can the reader possibly believe their relationship will end in anything other than mayhem and horror. Reading BULLETTIME feels like receiving CPR while you're conscious. It's 100% worth picking up.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Brutal and Brilliant August 16, 2012

By Drax

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Nick Mamatas' brutal and brilliant new novel BULLETTIME should be shelved in every High School library in America. It won't, which is a pity. Though not intended or marketed as YA, one can all too easily imagine the ruckus this little book would ignite among librarians and administrators, as it contains many core elements usually found in YA novels, only ramped up to a level of nightmare that is very real and painfully familiar to angst-ridden teens: David Holbrook is ignored by self-pitying, ill-equipped parents who allow him to be bullied at school, and worse. David copes by slugging down buckets of cough syrup, enduring his daily beatings and humiliations in a sluggish dextromethorphan haze, and it is during one of these trippy, unhappy mornings when he meets Erin / Eris, a new girl / old Goddess who both dazzles and offers new torment to our luckless (and doomed) teenaged protagonist. The reader learns in short order that David truly * is * doomed, for via the all-encompassing scope of the Ylem, "the canvas places are painted on," David is able to "live every decision and detail of an infinite number of me," zipping back and forth from first to third-person narrative, zooming-in then back out on all the possible trajectories and conclusions of his life--all of them bad. While Mamatas gleefully delivers scenes of unrelenting teenage hilarity and horror, the book is at times a sober meditation on the nature of predestination and possibility, and though often cruel, it is a book not entirely devoid of hope. Some early reviewers complained that the supporting characters were superficial and one-dimensional; I found this not to be the case. Mamatas understands too well the engines and forces that have shaped David's parents, for example, but he does not confuse that comprehension with sentimentality, the easy escape of lesser scribblers. Mamatas is concerned with the very serious matter of lives too brief and deaths very final, and the author seems willing to risk appearing callous rather than offer flimsy reportage of the human condition. BULLETTIME is not a happy read, its laughter at times too black even for the gallows, but it is an energetic and vital book. Highly recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest, sad, and gripping September 2, 2012

By Laurel VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

BULLETTIME is narrated by Dave Holbrook, outside of time in the Ylem, watching Dave Holbrook the teenage boy as he traverses the multiple paths Dave's life might take -- all of them miserable and leading to an early death.

He's a scrawny kid, with messed-up parents, constantly picked on at school. He copes (sort of) by downing lots of cough medicine. He seems likely to bumble his way sadly through high school until he meets Erin, a beautiful girl who finds him very interesting. Except she's actually Eris, the goddess of discord, and the reason she finds him interesting is because of the mayhem he may cause. We all know the most dramatic way a picked-on teenage boy can act out, and Erin is relentless in manipulating Dave toward a violent breakdown.

Honestly, Dave is kind of annoying, but his situation is so painful and hopeless that you can't help but feel sorry for him, especially since he doesn't really feel sorry for himself. This is just the way the world works. He doesn't have any way out. Everything he tries, in all his alternate lives, still leads to one kind of misery or another.

Even though we know the ending(s) almost immediately, the story is compelling, because obviously Ylem-Narrator-Dave is looking for something as he watches himself. He's trying to find some sort of meaning or resolution along the infinite paths. He does find something, at the end.

I was a little concerned that this book would be too brutal, or too gory, or too depressing, but it's not. It's very matter-of-fact about a difficult life, with a lot of sympathetic insight, dark humor, and the faintest hint of hope.