Bev Vincent

It’s been a while since I’ve added a new entry to this site. Busy times. Let me catch up on the major events.

First, there was a signing at Murder by the Book for the anthology The Eyes of Texas, edited by Michael Bracken. It contains my story “The Patience of Kane.” Several contributors were able to make it to Houston for the event. We had Texas BBQ beforehand and were bemused to see a car pull up with a skeleton in the passenger seat. (Picture 1 in the slide show). At first we speculated that it was someone’s ruse to be able to use the HOV lane. Michael Bracken won the moment by cracking about coming to the BBQ joint for the “ribs.”

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Then I went to my first Bouchercon, which was in Dallas. The hotel was just a conspiracy theory away from Dealey Plaza, often described at the convention as the most famous crime scene in America. Bouchercon is huge, something on the order of 1500 attendees. It’s a nice combination of professional writers and avid readers/fans. With up to 10 tracks running simultaneously, it was impossible to take in everything on offer, but I gave it my best shot.

The first evening, I attended a literacy campaign fundraiser where David Morrell interviewed James Patterson (Picture 2). One of the great things about the convention was that I got to meet in real life so many people who I’ve only communicated with by email or social media before. I won’t start naming names, because I’m sure to forget many. However, one unexpected gang of people who tracked me down were former denizens of the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.mystery — the early internet’s precursor to Reddit. The funny thing about this was that someone in New Zealand was texting me on Facebook to help me find this group of people who I used to communicate with 25-30 years ago. That was pretty cool.

I was sitting in the lobby one morning, perusing my program, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going next, when a woman of a certain age noticed the Mulholland Books satchel I was carrying. She asked me if Mulholland had a table or a stand somewhere. I explained that I’d gotten it at an event the previous evening. Then she introduced herself to me as Rex Stout’s daughter! (Picture 3) I have to say that was one of the highlights of Bouchercon for me. I started reading the Nero Wolfe novels in the 1970s, and I’ve been through them all more than once. I had the chance to express to her my fondness for those books, and she seemed to appreciate the sentiment. She added that, in addition to being a terrific writer, he was also a wonderful father. I also went to the Wolfe Pack session, populated by a group of people who are even more avid Nero Wolfe fans than I. That was fun, too.

I also got the chance to tell Lawrence Block how much I had enjoyed everything he’d written (Picture 4). He’s an interesting guy. On his panel he looked like he might have been in a bad mood, but then he’d lean forward to the microphone and say something astute, witty and delightful all at once.

I was also on a panel in which we discussed writing short stories, which was a lot of fun and well received.

Then, yesterday was our 24th wedding anniversary. We had a nice breakfast in a place we’d never been to before, then went on a long bike ride into parts of our community we’d never visited and, finally, had a marvelous seafood dinner at a restaurant that was on the lakefront, also new to us. (Pictures 5 & 6). The ambiance was terrific, a singer/pianist provided a soundtrack, the sun went down over the lake while we ate, and I couldn’t ask for better company!

I’ve been a fan of Elton John and his music since the mid-70s. I’ve seen him in concert numerous times (the first and most memorable was at Wembley Stadium in June 1984) and his music has been the soundtrack to much of my life. So, when my buddy Stephen Spignesi asked if I would be interested in contributing an essay to his book Elton John: Fifty Years On The Complete Guide to the Musical Genius of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, I said yes without hesitation.

The book, co-written with Michael Lewis, is now out and is available anywhere books and eBooks are sold, including at Amazon. My entry is called “This Essay Has No Title (Just Words and a Soundtrack)” after the similarly titled song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

On Monday, October 21 at 6:30pm, I will join editor Michael Bracken and fellow contributors Chuck Brownman, James A. Hearn, Scott Montgomery, Graham Powell, William Dylan Powell, and Mark Troy at Murder by the Book in Houston to sign and discuss the collection The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods. My PI story is called “The Patience of Kane.”

Last time, I wrote about my “accidental novel,” and I have made a lot of headway on the book since then. After gutting it to remove numerous chapters from ancillary characters’ points of view and salvaging the important material in them by representing them from the points of view of one of the three surviving POV characters, I rebuilt the book a chapter at a time and completely rewrote the final third. I now have a 70,000 word second draft that I will revise over the next couple of weeks before testing it out on a couple of beta readers and my agent. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this book. One thing I discovered, though, upon rewriting is how much has changed in Galveston since 2006-7, when I wrote the first draft. How many businesses are no longer there, thanks to a couple of hurricanes, for example.

We watched a few interesting movies last weekend before having a turkey dinner to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving. First, we watched El Camino, the new Breaking Bad film. It moves Jesse Pinkman’s story further down the road, but it doesn’t reveal anything new about him. A number of flashback scenes allow other familiar (some deceased) characters to have a second bow. A couple of scenes go on a little too long. On the whole, it’s an interesting film, but I’m not sure it was a necessary film.

Then we watched the 2019 Shaft movie on a lark, expecting a popcorn movie and getting just that. It’s a throwback with serious dollops of misogyny and homophobia blended into its kick-ass action scenes. Fun, but if you scrutinize it too closely you realize just how ill conceived it was.

Finally, we stumbled upon a documentary called Cold Case Hammarskjöld, in which a couple of Swedes try to get to the bottom of the mysterious death of the United Nations Secretary General in 1961. His plane went down in the Congo and there have long been rumors he may have been assassinated. This daring duo spent years following leads, interviewing people, visiting the various scenes, getting mired in (possibly) conspiracy theories involving a secret mercenary organization in South Africa that may have been funded by MI6 or the CIA to destabilize African nations. It is presented in part by having the director/writer narrate the script to two different stenographers (even he admits he’s not sure why he did that). It all seems very amateur-hour/seat of the pants until at the very end they stumble upon two vast troves of information–one a person and the other a set of old records–that essentially break the story wide open. It’s a quirky film that requires some patience (it feels very long), but fascinating.

We made it through Tropical Storm Imelda unscathed, although the same cannot be said for many in the vicinity. We received somewhere between five and seven inches of rain, most of it on Friday, which isn’t all that unusual for us, but some communities less than an hour away received over 42″ of rain in a couple of days.

The Canadian in me remembers that an inch of rain corresponds to roughly a foot of snow. Imagine 42 feet of snow coming down in two days! 42″ of snow would be bad enough. There was some street flooding in our community, but I didn’t hear of any permanent damage nearby. Places in Houston and to our east and northeast saw damage at least as extensive as we had after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. There’s still high water in some places nearly a week later. Two of the most destructive storms that have happened since I moved here 30 years ago haven’t been hurricanes–they were slow-moving tropical systems that popped up just offshore and brought a ton of rain with them.

We saw the Downton Abbey movie on Sunday afternoon. We were going to go on Saturday but the only seats available on that day (the theaters near us all have reserved seating) were in the front rows and we had no desire to stare up Carson’s nostrils for two hours. If you liked the TV series, you’ll like this film. Everyone’s back, and there is mild drama and humor without much risk involved to anyone. I enjoyed the downstairs drama more than the goings on upstairs, but it was all good fun.

I seem to have tricked myself into writing a novel. Well, rewriting, in a sense. I was contacted recently to see if I had a novel excerpt for a collection, and my interlocutor suggested a book I wrote many years ago. I hadn’t given that manuscript much thought, and I was frankly surprised to be reminded that I had showed it to him!

So, I went back to it, peeling out a group of chapters to give him for this project. However, as I went along I realized I quite liked what I was reading. So I looked up the notes my agent had provided on it, and discovered that he liked a lot of it, too. Not all, however, which is probably why my work on it ground to a halt. We were involved with other projects by then and I guess I decided to let it lie fallow instead of digging in and doing the work needed to whip it into shape.

Well, I’m doing it now. It’s a complicated job because I am removing chapters written from the viewpoints of all but two characters. That means that all of the important information in those other chapters has to be conveyed by different means. I also plan to completely redo the last quarter of the book, as the original version was a little too Scooby-Doo for my liking.

Still, I’ve been trying to get to work on a novel for most of 2019 and it looks like by the end of the year–perhaps even by the end of November–I’ll have something that my agent and I can work on again. Fingers crossed.

Yes, I spelled it the Canadian way. I do that sometimes.

Honours come in all sizes, big and small. It is an honour to be nominated for an award, or to get honourable mention. It’s also an honour to appear on Ellen Datlow’s recommended reading list, which she publishes in association with her annual Best Horror of the Year anthologies. I’ve had the honour of having stories mentioned on a number of occasions. This year, she included “Aeliana” from Shining in the Dark in her comprehensive recommendation list.

This weekend I put the finishing touches on a 7000-word essay that will be published as a magazine cover story sometime this fall. I can’t say where yet. I’ll read it over one. more. time. and probably make a bunch more changes to it when doing so, but it’s essentially finished, a week or more ahead of deadline.

This week, I’ll be celebrating my 30th anniversary with my day job. It’s hard to imagine that I’ve spent over half my life working for the same company, although it’s had a couple of name changes during that time. My father had over 45 years at his job, so I still have a way to go to catch up to that family record.

Usually it’s careless workers who cause problems with electricity or water mains on a Friday afternoon near our office, but last week it was just nature. A 30″ water pipe twelve feet below the surface of the boulevard by our building broke open of its own volition, eroding the ground under the road surface. The entire road, which is a major entrance/exit corridor for the community, was closed in both directions over the weekend. One direction was reopened after they confirmed that the road could still hold traffic, but the other direction is going to require a lot of work to get it back into service.

We watched a few movies on Amazon Prime this weekend. First, we saw Late Night, written by and starring Mindy Kaling, and featuring Emma Thompson, Amy Ryan, Hugh Dancy and John Lithgow, with some celeb talk show host cameos. Thompson has been the host of a late night talk show for nearly 30 years and her ratings have been on a steady slide for the past decade. Kaling’s Molly ends up being the first female in the writer’s room at a time when Thompson is on the verge of being replaced. It has a lot to say about representation. Pretty good.

Then we watched the Australian drama Ladies in Black about several women who work in a posh Sydney department store in 1959. The main character is a teenager on the verge of finishing high school who works at the store during the Christmas rush. It took me a while to realize that the actress who plays her coworker Fay was Rachel Taylor, who plays Trish Walker on Jessica Jones, and Julia Ormond is unrecognizable as the “continental” Magda. It’s a thoroughly charming film. Feel good all the way through.

Last night we saw The Hiding Place starring Kim Hunter (in her final role) and Timothy Bottoms. It’s based on a stage play and it feels like one, too. Hunter plays a mother who is (probably) exhibiting signs of dementia and Bottoms is her son. There have been other family members, but they’re gone and the story gets to the bottom of what really happened to one of them. Hunter (who played Zira in the Planet of the Apes films) is divine, but I had a hard time with the staginess of the direction. They did break free from the single-room setting on occasion, but they never found a way to break free from writing that works better in a play than a film.

Yesterday was interesting. I was interviewed by Anthony Brenzican a couple of weeks ago for an article he was writing about King for the New York Times. He used to write for Entertainment Weekly and is now working for Vanity Fair, but he had a few months between those gigs this summer where he freelanced, and this was one of his assignments. The article appeared in the New York Times yesterday, and I got mentioned and quoted a couple of times, as did Rich Chizmar, which was cool. It will also be in the Friday print edition of the paper.

My review of The Institute also went live yesterday morning. Then, last night I drove into Houston for a press screening of It Chapter Two. It was a the same multiplex as where I saw Chapter One a couple of years ago. The original screening then was cancelled due to Hurricane Harvey, and the rescheduled event was an odd late-morning thing with only a handful of reviewers in attendance.

Last night’s screening was in an IMAX theater, and the majority of the attendees were people who got there via Radio Now 92.1, which I confess I’ve never heard of before. So the theater was packed, which was nice. A row of seats in a prime location was reserved for press, which was also nice! There was a trivia contest at the beginning, and they gave out movie posters after the event. My review will be up at News from the Dead Zone tomorrow morning, but suffice to say I really enjoyed it, and I didn’t mind its 2hrs 48 min runtime in the least. In fact, I may go see it again this weekend when I can watch it without being in reviewer mode.

Over the holiday weekend, we watched a number of series and movies in between listening to music, reading and enjoying home-cooked meals. We started with an Amazon Prime series called Doctor Thorne, written by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey). It is based on a novel by Anthony Trollope, about whom we knew little, but we enjoyed the four-part 18th century melodrama, starring Tom Holland, enough to look for more. 

I found The Barchester Chronicles on YouTube, all 7 parts. It’s based on the first two of Trollope’s novels in that series, and stars Donald Pleasance in a rather sedate role as a minister who is also the warden of a care home for a dozen elderly men. He gets blindsided by a group of reformers (including his potential future son-in-law) who attack him as part of a barrage against the Church of England. Two episodes are based on The Warden and the other five are based on book two, Barchester Towers, about a new Bishop coming to town, along with his sniveling aide, played by Alan Rickman. The Bishop is played by Clive Swift, familiar to us primarily as Hyacinth Bucket’s beleaguered husband from Keeping Up Appearances.

Going back to the Julian Fellowes thread, we watched Gosford Park and then another film he wrote called The Chaperone, starring Elizabeth McGovern, a woman of a certain age who accompanies a 16-year-old dance student to New York for several weeks. While she’s there, she tries to track down her birth mother. This is in the 1920s–she was a product of the Orphan Train Movement that saw her adopted by a family in Kansas.

We also started on another series called The Aristocrats. Lo and behold, who should show up playing the family patriarch but…Julian Fellowes. And the King of England? Clive Swift!

One of the (many) great things about KillerCon in Round Rock, TX (near Austin) is that I can drive to it in under three hours. Traveling long distances isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be…and was it ever? We didn’t have to worry about delayed flights, missed connections, lost luggage or any of the other myriad potential problems associated with flying to a conference.

My wife has family in Round Rock, so she came with me to KillerCon. When I was off attending readings, panels and other Con events, she visited. So that was nice–we had breakfasts together each morning, then went our separate ways for the rest of the day.

I only decided to attend a week ago, just as I did in 2018, so I wasn’t on any of the scheduled programming events. That doesn’t mean I didn’t get to participate, though! While I had entertained thoughts of participating in the short fiction contest (judges supply five words and contestants have 20 minutes to write a 200-word short story using them all), my role changed when I was asked to be a judge. About a dozen people wrote some very good stories using our five words, then read them to the audience.

My judging duties were expanded when Brian Keene suggested that John Urbancik and I join three others to judge the gross-out contest, figuring, I guess, that there would be some entertainment value in having two of the unlikeliest people judging some of the grossest stories you’ve ever heard. It turned out to be a lot of fun. I don’t think I could ever write something as gross as what we heard, but they are entertaining even as you groan and moan.

I brought books to sell and sign at the mass autograph session and unloaded most of what I brought, to my surprise. Having one of those Square attachments for my iPhone so I could take credit cards helped a lot.

People attending from out of town were taken aback by the heat. It was as high as 102° during the daytime, with “feels like” temps near 110°, which is hot even by Houston standards. Even so, every now and then I felt the need to escape the air conditioning and bask in the warmth, like a lizard on a rock.

There were other things going on in the convention center. On Friday, there was a very misleading sign advertising McAllister’s Deli on the second floor, which had a few of us venturing upstairs to discover…no deli–the company was having a corporate meeting. And here we thought our food options had expanded! We didn’t have a mariachi band traipsing through this year, though, like we did in 2018. Also no memorial service attendees, who last year had to walk past the five-foot black cardboard coffin that contained donuts.

KillerCon is small and intimate. There’s never more than one thing going on at a time. Panels alternate with readings. The biggest drag about the con this year was that the hotel bar was closed the entire weekend. Apparently they didn’t have a bartender, which was poor planning on their part. With a hotel full of writers, they could have earned megabucks from the bar proceeds. It also meant that there wasn’t a centralized place to go to hang out with people between program events. Hopefully they’ll have that rectified by next year.

Hearty thanks to Wrath James White and his team of volunteers for putting together such an awesome con deep in the heat heart of Texas.

After I got home, I finished watching the final season of Orange is the New Black (they stuck the landing, although I was hoping for a different outcome with Zelda), and signed ⅔ of the limitation pages for LetterPress Publications’ edition of Revival. The box weighs in excess of 60 lbs, and there are nominally 1500 regular pages plus 52 lettered pages. Of course there are extras for damage and spoilage, so I signed at least 1000 pages yesterday and probably another 250 this morning. I timed myself for three minutes, during which I signed 38 times, so my optimal rate is about 13 pages per minute. I hope to be done this evening so I can ship the box to the next (and final) contributor in the morning.

Every few (or several) months, I update the online version of my Cemetery Dance column News from the Dead Zone. The latest post went live on Friday, with a summary of everything coming in September, in the final months of 2019, and beyond. There’s a lot! I’ll have a review of The Institute up during the first week of September.

The same week, I’ll review It Chapter Two. I just arranged to attend a press screening a couple of days before it premieres. The last time I went to one of those, for Chapter One, was in the days after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. The west side of the city, where the screening was held, was like a ghost town, with military-style helicopters flying overhead. It was quite surreal. Almost post-apocalyptic.

I’ll also have something cool to do with Doctor Sleep, but I’ll hold off on announcing that until closer to the date.

This weekend, I’m going to KillerCon in Austin, my second year attending this intimate convention. It’s close enough to drive to, so that’s a big plus. It’s not exactly my genre (the focus is on extreme horror), but I know many of the people attending. Maybe I’ll try my hand at the Creative Fiction Contest, where we have to write a 200-word or less story using five keywords.

We’re in the midst of a heatwave, with daily temperatures flirting with or exceeding 100° and “feels-like” temps upwards of 110°. Like Friday at Necon, in other words.

When we got back from our mile-long round-the-block walk on Saturday evening, I thought the house seemed a little warmer than usual. We typically keep it at 77° during the day, when one or more of us is upstairs working, and 78° during the evenings when we’re both downstairs. The display showed 81°–even though the set point was correct.

I went back outside and checked the compressor unit. It was running. Checked the circuit breakers: ditto. Went back to the A/C unit and noticed snowballs accumulating on the hose into the house. That’s not right, I though.

When I went back inside, I realized no air was coming out of the vents. The poor A/C was working up a storm outside, but the blower motor in our attic had gone kaput, so there was no distribution. This was after 8pm on Saturday, so we decided to wait to call for service. I put in a call yesterday morning, requesting someone for today, figuring we could suffer through one hot day rather than make someone come out on Sunday.

By late afternoon, it was 85° in the house. Now, that’s only 7-8° hotter than normal, but we were sweltering. When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for supper, I said, “Go somewhere that has air conditioning!” Of course, the place we chose had it cranked up so high that we were chilly.

So, we got through a day and a half with only ceiling fans to stir the warm air. Oddly, it felt like the time during Hurricane Ike when we were five days without electricity, although that was in early September and not in the midst of a heat wave, so we didn’t suffer as much.

We’re now back up and running and in a while the A/C, which has had a two-day break, will get us back down to normal temperatures and all will be right with our world.

We watched Tolkien on Friday night, the biopic of the author of The Lord of the Rings. It dealt primarily with his experiences as a young boy, orphaned after his mother died of diabetes (his father died in South Africa before they moved to England). His care and education was left to a catholic priest. Tolkien managed to scrape up enough scholarships to get into Oxford and served on the continent during WWI before being invalided out. The movie ends at the point where he has decided to start writing The Hobbit, which I found disappointing because that was where things got really interesting from my point of view. Maybe they’ll do a sequel!

Lots of miles covered during the month of July. I was in Texas (of course), Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Washington D.C. (airport), Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Jersey (airport).

This time last week, I was at Necon. I believe it was my 13th time attending. Something like that. Had a hassle-free journey. In fact, thanks to my trips to Japan earlier this year, my airfare cost a whopping $12 for the round trip and on the leg from IAH to Dulles I was in first class. Metal cutlery and ceramic dishes and everything. First time I’ve ever been in Boarding Group 1 instead of 6 or 9 or 42.

It was sweltering hot when I landed in D.C. but in Providence it was only 65 and it started raining heavily when I turned of 195 onto Highway 24. I stopped at the same small-town liquor store where I go every year, in Fall River, MA. Always the same people working at the place. I wonder if they recognize me and think: must be time for his annual binge! It’s a more convenient stop for me than 1776, the liquor store in Bristol, RI, for which Necon weekend is probably their Black Friday.

The weekend alternated from cool and rainy on Thursday to sweltering hot on Saturday. I had a panel on Friday where we discussed books we’d read recently. It was good catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while. I didn’t go to Necon last year. Hank Wagner and I spent a lot of time talking, and nearly 80 minutes discussing Season 3 of Stranger Things for our Dead Reckonings tag-team review, which I now have to transcribe into something sensible.

I was also the “fake nominee” for the Necon roast. Apparently Mike Myers had a blistering speech to roast me, so imagine his chagrin when the victim turned out to be him! I was half-prepared for a double-fake out, but I was reasonably sure I was safe. If Brian Keene had been there this year, I would have been less confident.

I had to get up at 3:30 am on Sunday to get to PVD for a 6 am flight. Those early morning flights always seem to be a good idea when I reserve them. On the plus side, I was back home by about 11 am, and the flight to IAH was almost half an hour early arriving.

Three forthcoming publications I can mention: I have a story called “The Patience of Kane” in the anthology The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods, edited by Michael Bracken from Down & Out Books, due to be published on October 21, 2019. I have a sort of review slash essay about the Angel episode “That Old Gang of Mine” in Outside In Gains a Soul, and my short story “Game Seven” will be published in the anthology Across the Universe later this year. This latter one is kind of fun: the anthology speculates possible alternate realities where the Beatles aren’t the Fab Four but instead something else. In my tale, they’re from Liverpool, NS and play for the Liverpool Beatles hockey team.

I also received my copy of Cemetery Dance issue 77, which contains my 40th News from the Dead Zone column. This one has been a long time coming and I was amused to see that I stated with near certainty that by the the time it appeared, we would still be waiting on It Chapter 2. True, but only just!

The other night when were getting ready to turn in, the outdoor A/C unit (like the one pictured here) came on. It’s been hot lately, so that didn’t come as a surprise, even in the late evening.

What was surprising was the clattering noise it made. It’s not a quiet appliance, but it usually doesn’t clang. Once upon a time many years ago, in a similar situation, the A/C came on, sounding like an F-14. After a minute or so, my wife said, “I wish it would stop making that racket,” which it promptly did a few minutes later…and forever. Dead unit.

Fearing the same situation, I got dressed, found a flashlight and went outside to investigate. The unit is in a small passage between the wall of our house and the fence that ensures we are good neighbors. There’s barely room to squeeze past it to get into our back yard. The noise was still occurring.

The top of the unit has a grating to keep falling branches and leaves from landing on the fan at the top that pulls air into the system. I could see something spinning around like a marble in a roulette wheel and figured it was a pine cone or branch segment that had somehow squeezed through. Upon closer investigation, I realized it was a mouse who had made the worst decision of its life. Round and round it went; where it would stop, no one knows. Before coming out, I had reset the A/C temp so it would click off, but that takes a couple of minutes, so it was still running. Eventually, Mr. Mouse ended up–thanks to centrifugal force–lodged between the wires of the grating.

And then there was a splat and some piece of its innards went flying against the wall of our house. Luck of the draw–it could have hit me, which would have been bad. Then I pried the remains out of the grating and let them fall to the ground for some scavenger to take care of.

I told my wife later that I knew the last thing that went though its head…the fan. (groan)

Music video of the day: Sheryl Crow, featuring Joe Walsh. That’ll get your foot tapping.

I’m enjoying the second season of Dark, the German crime/sci-fi series on Netflix. It’s one of the most confusing shows I’ve ever seen. The time travel element means that two and sometimes three different people play the same character as kids, teens, adults, elderly people, and part of the challenge is mapping who is who. I was so lost when I started watching S02E01, I stopped after 10 minutes and found a couple of videos that recapped the first season, which I watched over 18 months ago. I still felt confused, but after a couple of episodes I think I had it under control.

One of the series’ most interesting concepts is the notion that something can be sent from the future into the past, so that it ends up in the future, where it can be sent back into the past…and it’s never really been created. It’s called the Bootstrap Paradox, and it has been featured in time-travel fiction before, but it’s quite cleverly implemented here. Also, because certain characters are jumping through time in 33-year bites, you end up with the situation that a boy can go into the past and get stuck there, so he grows up and ends up fathering a friend of the boy who was with him when he vanished. Or an old woman who visits her father during a period when she is still a pre-teen. It’s all very twisty and clever, and it’s not obvious any more who is doing the right thing to prevent an apocalyptic event.