He understands that the device doesn’t move the matter, but collapses reality around them, so that by stepping through the portal, the space inbetween has been folded, not the people themselves moved. He asked to join a project as a kind of auditor, and while he initially is hesitant, a budget hearing where he learns about the scientific discoveries being made convinces him to join.Īt the meeting he learns that a team of scientists has designed a kind of teleportation device. Anyway, we meet Mike, a high school English teacher finishing up the school year, on the day he’s approached by an old friend who works for “the Government”. Set in the same universe as 14, so if you’ve read that one, you can already guess a few things about this one. It’s worth me not telling you what exactly. And they find some things out, that’s for sure. He begins to find that by talking to them all, there’s some connections between them and some weird coincidence. He meets his neighbors and they also seem interested in the same things as him but are guarded. This book swims in that cosmic horrory way of doing things. It shares that with House of Leaves, which is masterful at deeply unsettling if not straight up terrifying. I have to say though it’s not like terrifying in the most straightforward of ways, but deeply unsettling. He moves in and begins to find it just as as weird and disturbing as you’d hope for as a reader. I didn’t know anything about this book going in, so I was pleased with the way it trickles out the mystery. Anyway, he goes to check it out and as he’s looking at it, someone is moving out and says something like “Good luck, buddy!”. I once paid 375 a month for an apartment, but that was in a small town in upstate New York.

I also have learned that Peter Clines likes to have a guy in one job be mysteriously good at things to where someone says “Wait, what did you USED to do” or something like that.ġ4 begins with Nate being told about a too-good-to-be-true apartment in Los Angeles. The built-in story beats and pacing are already all here. The books kind of already read like someone who tried to get a job as a screenwriter but then turned to novels. It would make a solid multi-season tv show, where there’s some good juicy roles here, there’s a lot of variety and suspense built into it, and there’s some solid connectivity between the books, but also distinction both in the plot and the storytelling. I am reading the four books of the Threshold series and I am convinced of a few things.

Fourteen peter clines