My Travels With a Dead Man - Book Review

Steve Searls supernatural thriller, My Travels With a Dead Man, begins with a gripping scene of a young woman, Jane Takako Wolfsheim, having a severe seizure in a park. A man who appears as a vagrant gives her assistance and uses her phone to call “911.”  Jane is rushed to a hospital, and after a considerable struggle, she is well enough to be released. She wonders who was the poor man who saved her, but the top of her list is to find a job. In a terribly humiliating interview with a former partner of her father’s, she lands a job. A chore given to her by her disgusting boss creates a strange coincidence that puts her in contact with the man who had saved her life. His name is “Jorge Luis Borges.” The name is synonymous with a famed writer, but he assures her that he is not that - “Jorge Luis Borges.”

Love blooms between the two of them, along with a fantastical series of events.  They travel to Japan, and more strange happenings occur, and Jane wakes up in Costa Rica without any recognition of how she got there or why she was there.  She is also told that the trip to Japan never occurred.

Jane has trouble processing all that is happening and to make things worse, she is suddenly arrested for the murder of her parents. Did she kill them and repressed her memories of the deed? This is a book that will keep you hooked. I started reading it and found myself reading late into the evening as Searls led me through doors into mind-bending scenarios. The events that occur are shrouded in mystery, and you have to continually question what is real and what isn’t?

Or are all these events happening but in different realms of consciousness. Did Jane kill her parents? Did she travel to Japan? Who really is “Jorge Luis Borges?” Who is Basho? Searls’ novel is a kaleidoscope of altered states that makes you seriously question if parallel universes and counterfactuals exist. Searls offers up trips and dreams, stories-within-stories, and virtual realities in a richly-imagined world, with a cast full of diverse characters.

I loved My Travels With a Dead Man is a series of dark, strange, eerily odd encounters. It grabbed me and kept my interest right to the last period. It was suspenseful, disturbing, and sometimes even poignant.  If you are a lover of supernatural thrillers, this is a book for you.