Publisher: Inanna Publications (June 18, 2022)
Category: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Crime, Suspense, Supernatural
Tour Dates September 7-Oct 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1771338783
Available in Print and ebook, 298 pages
Description Loneliness of the Time Traveller by Erika Rummel
“It is a dreadful thing to be possessed, to be invaded by a spirit woman who commands your body and soul and looks out at the world through your eyes. It happened to me in 1778. Pray it will never happen to you.”
Adele’s diary tells the story of her domination by an incubus Lynne, a serving girl in a London ale house who died a violent death and commandeered Adele’s body for eight years. Can Adele be held responsible for Lynne’s crimes? Will the evil spirit return and renew her tyranny over Adele’s mind?
Lynne has moved on into the 21st century, but the transmigration has left her emotions flat. Lynne is eager to go back to her first life and experience once more the passion she felt for her lover, Jack. To do so, she needs a channel to the past: the manuscript of Adele’s diary, if only she can find it.
A time-slip novel set in contemporary Los Angeles and 18th century London, The Loneliness of the Time Traveller is a story of love, crime, and adventure combined with fantasy, a little bit of Jane Austen-style irony, and a healthy serving of social criticism.
Excerpt Loneliness of the Time Traveller by Erika Rummel
A CAUTIONARY TALE
It is a dreadful thing to be possessed, to be invaded by a spirit woman who commands your body and soul and looks out at the world through your eyes. It happened to me. Pray it will never happen to you.
I am free now, delivered from the tyranny of my incubus, but for a long time my conscience was troubled by the things she made me do. That is why I have drawn up this account of my life, as a warning and a reckoning. What attracted that evil spirit to me? Was it my illness or the medicine I took or the nurse who cared for me? Was it the arrangement of the furniture in my room or the pictures on the wall that beckoned to my ghostly twin? And how do I guard against another assault, for that is my greatest fear: that she will return, seize upon me once again and wreak havoc. The first time she transformed me. The next time she will erase me. It will be death, or worse than death, for no one will notice that I am gone. They will say: “Adele has changed a great deal. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. She was always a little contrary, but never quite so brusque, so demanding, so calculating. I liked the old Adele better.” That is what they will say when they meet Lynne, a dead woman walking and looking exactly like me.
I was seventeen when Lynne took possession of me, and in the grip of a severe illness brought on by the shock of my father’s death. The doctor who attended me could not name my ailment. He could only take my pulse and prescribe ineffective potions. All he saw was a catatonic patient, a silent sufferer lying on the bed, eyes shut, body limp and still. He did not see Death reaching out for me with skeleton hands or the spirit of Lynne wrenching me from his icy grip. True, she rescued me from death, but only to make my body a mule to carry her and my mind a vessel to fill with ideas of her own.
At first, I thought I was suffering from nightmares. Lynne’s memories rushed into my brain -- cloudy scenes of a world peopled with the most abject creatures, beggars and pick-pockets, gentlemen of peculiar tastes, easy women and their procurers. In my fevered mind, I saw a young woman standing in the doorway of a tumble-down tenement. She was with a man, a rough character with a shaved head and dressed in a ragged black coat reaching down to his ankles. His left cheek was disfigured by a scar in the shape of the letter J.
He unbuttoned his coat and turned to her.
“Get down,” he said.
“That will cost you extra,” she said.
He took her by the shoulders and forced her to her knees. “You are Jack’s girl, aren’t you?”
“What’s it to you? Are you going to pay me extra or not?”
“I’ll pay you, don’t worry.”
He fumbled with his breeches and she leaned forward into the folds of his coat.
He started panting.
“I’ll pay you alright,” he said and grabbed her by the hair. He wrenched back her head. I saw a glint of steel, a rapid movement of his hand, then a gash of crimson blood from her throat.
She struggled up and in her death throes tore at the man’s coat. Her nails left a trail of bloody scratches on his naked thigh. With her last breath she called out Help me! I don’t want to die.
The murderer pushed her to the ground and escaped into the foggy night. For a moment his victim lay motionless. Then I saw her rising up from the blood-soaked ground as if lifted by an invisible force, and suddenly she was at my side, joining me in the battle against Death. I was swallowed up in a storm, gusts of wind beating down on me mercilessly, filling my head with a blinding swirl of, I know not what, dried leaves, grating sand, dust thick like flour. But then the tempest passed, and the doctor, who had given up on me, became hopeful again.
I myself had no understanding of what had happened to me, that I had been invaded by an incubus. I knew I had defeated Death, or rather we had defeated death because I sensed a living otherness within me, feeling her thoughts and memories mingling with mine in a fever dream. I tried hard to put those dreams and visions out of my mind, but to no avail: they stuck and demanded their rightful place alongside my own familiar thoughts. Shreds of sentences and odd phrases began to ring in my ears, as if a ghostly twin was growing within me and taking up more space every day.
© Erika Rummel, The Loneliness of the Time Traveller
Review Loneliness of the Time Traveller by Erika Rummel
Review by Suzie
“Thoughts are visible to me, whether they come out as
words or remain tucked away in people’s minds. I see them swirling around their
heads, little puffs of vapour merging with other people’s thoughts, turning
into clusters, becoming trends.”
Erika Rummel's science fiction/suspense novel, 'The
Loneliness of the Time Traveller,' is unlike any other book that I've read. The
perfect blend of both genres, this novel is a wild ride from start to finish
and left me turning the pages as quickly as I could!
The main character, Lynne, is a transmigrant, a
creature that survives by taking over the body of a dying person and living
their life. Lynne has been doing this for hundreds of years, after her first
life (where she was a serving girl in a bar) ended in a very bloody way.
Soon, she found a young woman named Adele who was
dying from a fever. Slipping into Adele was easy for Lynne, and she spends
eight years living inside of the girl as she grows into a woman. Adele
struggles against Lynne's control of her body, and faces terrible
circumstances, many of which stem directly from choices that Lynne has made.
Years later, after Lynne leaves her, Adele writes a
memoir about her experiences with what she believes to be an evil spirit that
possessed her body, and hundreds of years after that, Lynne finds herself
desperate to get her hands on the original manuscript of this work, in the
hopes that touching Adele's handwriting on the page will transport her back to
a time when she could be with the lover that she left behind.
This is a science fiction novel that raises some questions about real life issues, as any great science fiction should. Rummel's writing is superb. She brings you into the thoughts of the mind-reading, body-possessing Lynne in a way that makes you feel as if she has been inside your body, too! Five stars for this whirlwind ride!
About Erika Rummel
Award winning author, Erika Rummel has taught history at the University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo.
She divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles and has lived in villages in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria.
She has published eight novels and more than a dozen books on social history of the Renaissance. A recipient of international fellowships and literary awards, she was honored in 2018 with a lifetime achievement award by the Renaissance Society of America. Buy Loneliness of the Time Traveller by Erika Rummel
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I am so glad you enjoyed 'The Loneliness of the Time Traveller'! Thanks for hosting!
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