The Memory Tree

John R. Little

Nocturne Press, February 2007

ISBN - 0-9776560-5-5

317pp, trade paperback, $17
 
 

      In February 2007, Sam Ellis has everything--a loving, devoted wife, a nice home, a seven-figure income. But he's facing a dead end. At fifty-two, he is an overweight, out of shape smoker. And he thinks he is experiencing a heart attack. He collapses at work and spends a week in a coma. But he's not in a coma. He's back in the town of his childhood, Nelson, Montana, and the date is June 1968.

      America is different in 1968. Richard Nixon is running for President, the Vietnam War draft was beginning, and the Detroit Tigers had a bid for the World Series. People in Rural Montana left their doors unlocked and lived their lives in quiet, relative peace. Even so, people still faced the harsh realities of alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, rape, and even death.

      We all have a time in our lives we wish we could revisit in order to stop ourselves from doing the one thing that altered the course of our lives, to stop an event or events that stopped who we were or were becoming and changed us forever into someone else. But if any of us were able to go back and change those events, would we still grow into the same people we are in the future? How would our current lives change?

      We don't learn the how's of Sam's time travels, but we do learn the why's during his several journeys back over a six month period. Oddly enough, the 2007 Sam himself isn't so much changed as are some of the lives he touched when he visited the past. These lives are changed for the better. And when Sam settles into his "new, future self", he finds he has full memory of both lives--both the corrected and the uncorrected timelines. He also finds his life enriched and touched by those he was able to help in the past, by the changes he was able to make.

      John R. Little is a dark fantasy writer with numerous short stories published in magazines such as Post Mortem and Weird Tales. He is hard at work on his next novel, 10 Days. The Memory Tree is his first novel. Little maintains a website at johnrlittle.com.

      I usually don't care for first-person narratives as the point of view and the overall tone get in the way of the story. But The Memory Tree is different. The narrative is written almost like a long journal entry, or a series of journal entries. The story is fast-paced with short chapters broken into small capsules of time. The realistic themes in the underlying plot are well-handled, not overwhelming the reader while at the same time giving enough detail to illustrate a concise depiction of the action. Little's command of prose is tight and straight-forward; he writes exactly what he means, leaving almost no room for speculation except for the questions found within the narrator himself.
   
  I wouldn't be surprised to find The Memory Tree on different nominee lists for 2007 Best First Novel.