The Fold by Peter Clines
Mike, a quiet but brilliantly intelligent man, is asked by an old friend Reggie, to go and investigate a DARPA research team who are doing some ground breaking and highly secretive work under his umbrella. The time to renew their funding has come and he wants reassurances that they are worth the investment and that what they are doing is almost definitely not going to result in the destruction of the planet. When Mike arrives he discovers they have created a ‘fold’ in space-time that allows them to teleport from Site A to Site B, called the Albuquerque Door. It promises to change the future of mankind and after many human trials the team have every confidence that is completely safe, yet all is not what it seems, the machine seems to have a few bugs and there are some people who are definitely keeping secrets. The story is engaging and walks the great science fiction line of possible if improbable in terms of the advancement of certain technologies and the theories behind them.
Mike has an eidetic memory which is explained as ‘complete, instantaneous recall of anything I’ve ever seen or heard’, which is pretty handy for, say, re-watching an entire movie in your head when nothing better is available, navigating your way through a dark room that you have only seen once before, or absorbing every detail of a secret experiment should you feel so inclined. I really liked Mike and found him to be a very complete and relatable character despite his almost superhuman powers of deduction and intellect and it’s a testament to Clines skill that he pulled this off. His name is derived from Mycroft Holmes, the smarter, lazier, embarrassing, prankster brother of Sherlock Holmes. He describes the feeling as having a head full of ants that he keeps behind a wall and when he sets them loose they weave all the information together and show him things other people might have missed. He is constantly working to hold them back as every piece of information draws new ants out that want to make connections and once he turns them loose they can be tough to ignore.
There are a few things that helped set him apart from your TV detective like the Mentalist and one of them was that being highly intelligent, he realised that highly intelligent people are often quite unhappy and as a teenager made the decision to stop absorbing every little thing he could. He knew that once he had taken something in there was no way to get rid of it and that if he became aware of more of the intellectual world his ability to exist happily on the same plane as other would be diminished. With complete and total recall he also relives memories from his past with the intensity and vividness they would have if they had occurred just minutes before meaning there are many scars that can simply never be closed. This was a bit of a theme within the book and scars featured quite prominently as both a means of identification and a source of reason for the gouging of a door through the skin of reality that may not be healing as cleanly as they thought.
This is very much a book of two halves and I had echoes of the movie Dusk till Dawn floating through my head as the pace and story line changed tacts rather abruptly and took a turn I was not expecting. Before you worry, it’s not Vampires, but it is something, and this brings in some more of the horror elements that are so often good in a ‘you don’t know what you’re messing with” sort of book. The conclusion really does blow the world wide open in terms of possibilities for where Mike is going in the future, which I was really pleased with. He was my favourite part of the book and there was just something about him that felt very fresh and original.
I only had one minor complaint during the book and that was that I figured out the twist before the super smart protagonist which, I felt, rendered his intelligence a tad diminished. There are a large amount of scientists running around during this book and they also seem a bit slow on the uptake, and whilst this is in part explained by the events that are taking place in their research, I felt they should have spotted the warnings or clues that were left dangling.
The Fold by Peter Clines is a smart, exciting and very interesting read that's hard to put down and will leave you wanting more. It’s almost everything you want from a good sci-fi romp and I encourage you to pick it up. I will certainly be checking back in with Mike when I get the chance. 4 Stars.
The Fold is published by Crown Pubishing
