Customer Reviews

Time Adjusters And Other Stories

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There are writers and there are storytellers. My preference, as a reader, is for the former. I love finely crafted sentences, language, the art of literature. But once in a while it's fun to read something that is storytelling for the sake of storytelling, something that takes me back to my youth, a time during which I was hooked on pulp fiction magazines like Weird Tales, magazines on which the likes of Alfred Bester and Damon Knight cut their teeth. Magazines that I had to sneak into the house or face my dad's wrath because of his disapproval, or, as he told me later in life, because he feared I'd not grow to embrace the wealth of fine literature available from the likes of Joseph Conrad and others from his era.

Time Adjusters and Other Stories is a slim volume of nine short stories that range from hard science fiction to mystery to horror. Two - the title story and The House and the Baboon - are out there stories of time travel, but neither is bogged down by the science of time travel. Bucket Head is flavored with the silliness of a 1950s horror movie, while Cut Up (The Hidden Scroll) and Fear Flight fall into the mystery genre. Quack is just out and out irreverence, while The Little Robot and Miss Glenly's Dreadful Room (my favorite) are short morality plays, the latter taking a look at Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction - that a table can represent many things to many people; lunch at a bistro for one person, while to the restaurant owner it represents his livelihood. To yet another person it represents dinner with family and, by extension, their deceased grandmother whose memory is but a ghost in an empty chair.

Some are thought-provoking while others are just a fun outing; all can be read in a single sitting, in the evening with a glass of wine, or in the morning with a pot of coffee. No book appeals to everyone and Time Adjusters and Other Stories is no different; however, while its overall appeal to a large audience may fall short, I would wager, by the very nature of its variety, the nuts and bolts of its composition will appeal to a wide array audience.

Genres are classifications for describing the scope of a story but not every story or every book fits so easily into such a literary box. In Bill Ectric's collection of short stories Time Adjusters we are taken for a multi-genre ride through a series of unique tales that defy classification and opt instead to challenge the limits of the reader's imagination.

Sometimes it takes a haunted house, a dreadful room and a little robot to capture our attention with the promise of mystery but it's our child-like curiosity that begs us walk into those rooms unhindered by expectations. In the title track "Time Adjusters" and the story "House and the Baboon" we find ourselves bending the rules of relativity to witness events along the chronological spectrum. This visual bounce allows the reader to witness sequences out of order. It's fun to be a part of even when it's a little confusing to follow. These parts of the book as well as the science fiction-tinged stories "The Little Robot" and "Fear Flight" should appeal to lovers of pure storytelling.

My own interest was piqued with the author's Beat Generation style of writing that conducted the speed of the action, and the ease with which you could get carried away by it. These facets appeared strongest in the tales of "Miss Glenly's Dreadful Room" and "Bucket Head." Each was told from an adolescent perspective that was eager to be in the center of the action without caring how serious or unfortunate the outcome. The result was that I found myself close to tears in one and cringing with disbelief over the other.

The author told me ahead of time that people have had trouble writing reviews of this book and I can see why. The assortment of emotions and situations makes you want to focus on the one or two stories that touched you the deepest, but those one or two are probably different for every reader. One thing remains certain -- there is something in Time Adjusters for everyone who loves to read, no matter the genre.

What a trip..this collection of short stories is brilliantly bizarre and unique. What I enjoyed most about them, were the Beat references. One of the stories is about the scroll of paper on which Kerouac originally wrote "On the Road." There's also a short piece dedicated to William Burroughs. I've been a fan of beat lit for years, and it was refreshing to find someone who incorporated these things into his writing.

That said. This is a quick read..only about a hundred pages or so, but it will leave you laughing and shaking your head. It's completely out there, which is why I enjoyed it so much. The stories delve into a bit of everything, from time travel to killer baboons..and they're fun and entertaining. You can't ask for much more from a short story collection.

Two thumbs up.

Bill Ectric's stories work on more than one level. Each story is a lot of fun to read, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes weirdly intriguing. The characters and dialogue seems real. On another level, Ectric demonstrates a familiarity with various literary concepts, without ever boring the reader with his knowledge. For example, he makes reference to the "deconstruction" method of writer/philosopher Jacques Derrida, but he doesn't dwell on it; rather, he uses it in a story about a haunted house with books flying off shelves . . . but I don't want to say too much.

In another story, Bill Ectric features a college student who puts a cut-up message on a website. "Cut-up" is a style of writing where sentences are cut up and re-arranged to make new sentences. As Bill says on his website, cut-ups might be fun to do, but reading a cut-up poem by another person can be very tedious, indeed. It usually makes no sense. So Bill doesn't write the story as a cut-up. He writes it as a regular, straight-forward story wherein some gangsters read the boy's cut-up message and mistake the meaning - they think the student has found out about a murder they committed, so they set out to kill the boy!

I can see this book, Time Adjusters and Other Stories, someday being used in a classroom. After all, one story even mentions a grade-school favorite of mine - A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle (although I would not recommend this book for young children, especially the bizarre tale of The House and the Baboon).

Don't miss Bill Ectric's new book Time Adjusters. The writing is superb. The characters are different, neat, wierd. But above all, the thought-provoking content of the stories will set your imagination running wild. I loved it; you will too.