Book Review: Time Loopers: by David Hambling, Byron Craft, Matt Davenport, and John Delaughter

About:
Time Loopers: Four Tales from a Time War by David Hambling, Byron Craft, Matt Davenport, and John Delaughter is a science fiction book of five interconnecting short stories.  Mr. Hambling is an English freelance journalist and author. Mr. Craft is a screenwriter, published articles, and an author of Lovecraftian horror. Mr. Davenport is a published author with many sci-fi and horror books under his belt. Mr. Delaughter is a writer of horror and Lovecraftian anthologies.

 

• 264 pages
• Publisher : Mystique Press
  
• Language: : English
• ISBN-10 : 1952979900

My rat­ing for Time Loopers — 4
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Thoughts:
Books like Time Loopers: Four Tales from a Time War by David Hambling, Byron Craft, Matt Davenport, and John Delaughter are always difficult to write about since, usually, the quality and style varies between authors. This book, however, has all five stories which are well written and interesting. Even though they are written by the different authors, the stories are similar enough and in the same vain that it doesn’t really bother the reader.

The concept is fine, I’ve read similar books (sections written by different authors) and I realize it takes a lot of work and communication to make them work. The key, I believe, is to give the authors enough information to tie the stories together, but also much freedom to make them their own.

I really enjoyed four out of the five stories. One story was, for me, a little difficult to follow and somewhat convoluted, but overall it’s a very enjoyable book with great takes on time travel, as well as traveling between worlds.

The collection opens up with an introduction explaining the background, settings, and an idea what to expect from the rest of the book. The introduction is something which I really appreciated (even though I disagreed with the author’s assessment of the excellent movie Edge of Tomorrow), because it gave me a heads up of what to expect and not feel lost within the first several pages of the first story.

This is a book which is sometimes complex, but mostly full of fun and very interesting concepts. The writing is good despite, or because, the different styles. The book has a bit of everything sci-fi, horror, and even a group of alien gods, and it’s always interesting to have one book to check out how different authors tackle the same, or at least a very similar, subject.

Synopsis:
The book consists of five stories:

Time’s Revenge by David Hambling – The main character keeps living the same day over and over again, which he can reset with an app on his phone. The protagonist has lived the day so often that he goes through the routine of investing money, making millions in case he’ll make it to the next day. But he’s not the only one that can reset the day.

The Comatose Many by Byron Craft – A comatose man shows up in as mall town in the ‘50s, with an ID placing his birth 20 years in the future, as well as magical gadgets. The story explores the consequences of going back in time trying to prevent an event from happening.

Time Trapped by Matthew Davenport – Irene, a librarian, discovers a book of spells used to travel through planes of existence. She, of course, thinks it’s all fake until she transports for the first time with all the consequences, intended and unintended, it entails. Irene doesn’t only travel in time, but between planes of existence, taking over someone’s body and being manipulated by something, or someone, she doesn’t know, on missions she doesn’t understand.

The Terror Out of Time by John A. DeLaughter – This story tells of a billionaire, Dimitri-Laurent de Marigny, who is obsessed with the idea of eternal life. De Marigny sends an expedition to find the secrets of the 1920s the Dyer Expedition that returned from Antarctica, the few survivors talking about strange creatures, creepy fossils, and more.

A Stitch in Time – the epilogue which brings it all together. This short story is from the point of view of Art, one of the time travelers that appears in all the other stories. Art is trying to tie up loose ends from the mess left by the protagonists of the previous stories.

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Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I got this book for free.
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