What About Tuesday

Independent comics creator Wilson (In the Fallout) steps outside of his graphic comfort zone in his first novella. An unnamed protagonist wakes up on Wednesday to realize “Tuesday never happened.” Nobody else seems to miss the absent time, but the narrator obsesses over it, eventually enlisting the help of Chet, a private investigator, and Dari, a college professor, to explain the strange phenomenon. Dari explains the entire mystery immediately, saying that it’s a natural part of the order of the universe. Chet, however, believes that there is a larger conspiracy to hide the truth. The rest of Wilson’s novella is an account of the narrator and Chet attempting to rationalize reality’s peculiarities. Unfortunately, there’s never anything truly at stake, for the characters or the reader; Wilson gives no compelling reason to care about what happened to Tuesday or what will befall the barely-defined heroes. Action doesn’t rise or fall so much as it limps, supported by smirking pop culture references. The book serves well enough as a character study, but as a science fiction story, it fails to say anything of substance. (BookLife)