A GRIPPING NEO-NOIR, PARALLEL-UNIVERSE THRILLER

I have written before about my fondness for Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel Replay, which pretty much invented the time-loop fantasy genre that most people tend to associate with the 1993 film Groundhog Day. I am always on the lookout for novels similar to Replay, but I rarely find good ones. Blake Crouch’s 2016 novel, Dark Matter, was one of the good ones. Instead of using a time-loop device, Crouch employs a parallel universe gimmick to allow his protagonist to explore different versions of his own life. In popular fiction, a parallel universe – sometimes called an “alternate universe” or the “multiverse” – tends to posit a reality where every choice a protagonist is forced to make alters the trajectory of his life, causing it to branch off from the lives that would have ensued had he made a different choice (while those other lives also branch off). If he is forced to make a choice between five different options, such as which college to attend, the multiverse theory suggests that there exist parallel universes, in each of which he will attend a different college and, therefore, experience different outcomes in life. One of the best-known examples of this storyline is Sliding Doors, a 1998 romcom starring Gwyneth Paltrow. The film shows how a relatively insignificant event – missing a train – dramatically alters the course of one young woman’s life. Stories like Dark Matter and Sliding Doors may not be direct descendants of Ken Grimwood’s Replay, but they play with the same basic idea – i.e., that sometimes seemingly insignificant events can dramatically alter the course of our lives; and somewhere, in various parallel universes, other versions of ourselves are acting out the consequences of having made different choices from our own. In this genre of fantasy tale, if we want to know how our lives would have turned out had we married Susan instead of Jill, we don’t need a time loop, we need to somehow access one of the parallel universes in which we married Susan.

In 2022, Hardcase Crime published, as a paperback original, a novel by Jason Starr called The Next Time I Die. I came across a copy in a used bookstore yesterday at around noon. By eleven p.m. I had finished reading it. Starr’s novel is an excellent example of the parallel universe genre of storytelling. But it is much more than that. It is also a great piece of neo-noir, a mystery story, a character study, a comedy of terrors, and a twisted tale like something from The Twilight Zone. Reviewers on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com have compared it to everything from Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life to the novels of Jim Thompson. I found it reminding me of Bret Ratner’s underrated 2000 film The Family Man, Grimwood’s Replay, the 2020 Christopher Landon film Freaky, the TV series Dexter and You, and a lot of other fine pieces of popular culture, including the aforementioned Sliding Doors, Twilight Zone, and Dark Matter.

Steven Blitz, the book’s narrator and protagonist, is a successful New York City criminal defense attorney. He has also been married for about twenty years to Laura, although in this venture he hasn’t been so successful. In fact, as the novel opens, Laura, rather angrily, is throwing him out of the house and demanding a divorce. Steven decides to leave and spend the night with his brother, Brian, hoping that by morning Laura will have changed her mind about divorcing him. While driving from his home in Westchester in a snowstorm, Steven narrowly avoids crashing his car into a tree. Shaken by the experience, he stops at a gas station to purchase some cigarettes, to calm his nerves. But his nerves are about to get a lot more frazzled. At the gas station, he sees an angry young man trying to force a young woman into his vehicle. Steven isn’t a do-gooder. He doesn’t want to intervene. He tries to convince himself that what he is witnessing is a lovers’ spat. But eventually it becomes clear that the girl is in real danger. Steven goes over to try to intervene and then things really go bad. The young man pulls out a knife and stabs Steven viciously in the stomach. As Steven lies on the ground bleeding out, he slowly loses consciousness and assumes that he is about to die. Fade to black.

But, the next morning, Steven wakes up in a hospital, not too much the worse for wear. He has no stomach wound whatsoever. A doctor tells him that he has suffered a serious concussion as a result of his car crashing into a tree. This, obviously, is confusing to Steven. He tells the doctor that he was stabbed at a gas station. He wants to know if the police caught his assailant and if the young woman escaped unharmed. The doctor assumes that this is merely the concussion speaking. He urges Steven to remain in the hospital until his memory returns. When the doctor leaves the room, a worried looking Laura enters, but a Laura who looks fitter and healthier than Steven can ever remember seeing her. What’s more, this Laura is accompanied by an eight-year-old girl named Lilly, whom Laura insists is their child. When Steven asks Laura about their fight the previous night, she insists that nothing like that ever happened. She, too, assumes that Steven’s mind is still suffering from the concussion.

Eventually, Steven figures out that two of his parallel lives must have gotten crossed up with each other. The Steven who died at the gas station has somehow found himself in a parallel reality where Steven never made it to the gas station because he lost control of his car on the snowy roadway and crashed into a tree. But this Steven’s life – indeed, his entire world – is vastly different from the one that our narrator remembers. For one thing our narrator had no children. What’s more, when Steven tries Googling information about various subjects, he discovers that Google doesn’t exist. He also discovers that 9/11 never happened, Tom Brady was never drafted into the NFL (no one Steven mentions him to has heard of Brady), and that COVID-19 isn’t a thing (the story takes place in early 2020 when, in the narrator’s original timeline, everyone in Steven’s social set is talking about both the pandemic and the Presidential primaries). In this parallel version of Steven’s life, Al Gore is the president and is furiously trying to keep a nuclear war from breaking out between India and Pakistan, Donald Trump was jailed in 2014 on a rape charge and has never entered politics, and Blockbuster still exists and has become a financial juggernaut due to its decision, circa 2000, to branch out into streaming television. Netflix is a relatively weak competitor about to get bought up by Blockbuster (this is good news to Steven because, in his own universe, he invested heavily in Blockbuster in the late 1990s and lost his shirt; in this universe, his investment has made him a millionaire). Steven does some more research on a search engine called Excite and discovers that his original reality began to diverge from this new reality sometime around the year 2000. All of the historical events that Steven can recall from before the year 2000 appear to have happened just as he remembers them. The Super Bowl and World Series winners all line up with Steven’s memories. But after 2000, the world began to change in a number of ways, both small and large. Steven remembers that, sometime around 2000, his father advised him that, if a car should start to skid, the driver should (somewhat counter-intuitively) turn into the skid and not try to pull out of it. This is exactly what Steven did as his car skidded for the tree. As a result, Stephen avoided a crash. Parallel Steven’s universe must have branched off before his father could pass on the advice about skidding cars. Thus Parallel Steven crashed into the tree. He wasn’t seriously hurt but somehow the two Stevens switched bodies at the moment of the original Steven’s death.

Confused? Then you must not be much of a pop-culture fan. Anyone who’s seen Freaky Friday or any other body-switch movie of the past fifty years has seen this type of scenario played out before. But Starr works enough variations on the theme to make The Next Time I Die feel fresh and fun. Steven Blitz knows that nobody is going to believe his parallel universe story so, if he doesn’t want to end up in a booby hatch, he needs to simply take over the life of his alter ego. But that is easier said than done. Back in his original universe, Steven was the defense attorney for a notorious murderer named Jeffrey Hammond, an eccentric artist who tortured and murdered several young men in order to inspire some of his dark and disturbing paintings. In this new universe, Hammond has never been caught. Thus Steven and Hammond are the only ones who know about Hammond’s murders. Steven doesn’t know if he should try to tip the police off to Hammond’s guilt or simply keep his mouth shut. In this parallel universe, Steven himself is no saint either. After Laura drives him home to the house that he and Laura and Lilly all share, she instructs him to pay the babysitter, 20-year-old Kaitlin, and then come to the kitchen. When Steven and Kaitlin are alone in the hallway, Kaitlin leans in and plants a lascivious kiss on him, with plenty of tongue. At first Steven is horrified, but when he sees the look on Kaitlin’s face, it becomes clear to him that parallel-Steven was having an affair with her. The next morning, on his train ride into New York City, Steven will discover that Kaitlin isn’t the only woman with whom he is having an extramarital affair.

All of this happens fairly early in the novel, so I haven’t spoiled too much of the plot for you. One of the things that make this story so interesting is the fact that, over its scant 250 pages, Steven gradually becomes aware that, in this universe at least, he is most definitely not a good person. He is still Steven Blitz, but a handful of minor choices made earlier in his life have caused this version of him to become downright villainous. Pop culture is full of bad men who narrate their own stories in amusing ways. Dexter Morgan is a prime example of this. So, too, is Joe Goldberg, the main character in You. Though both are psychopathic murderers, one big difference separates Dexter and Joe. Dexter’s voice-over narration reveals that he has no delusions about the fact that he is a psychopathic murderer. He owns that fact. Joe Goldberg’s voice-overs reveal that he has never come to grips with his own evil. Whenever he murders someone he usually chalks it up to an unfortunate necessity forced upon him by the victim, or else just a really bad piece of luck. Steven Blitz is sort of a cross between Joe Goldberg and Dexter Morgan. When he discovers that his alter ego is a villain, he doesn’t try to correct his ways. He simply leans into the discovery, and makes excuses for himself in much the same way that Joe Goldberg does.

The Next Time I Die is a wild trip and I am not the only reviewer who read it in a single day. Plenty of amateur reviewers on Amazon.com and Goodreads.com claim that they read the book in a single sitting, and I find it easy to believe them. It is a short and compelling novel, damn near impossible to put down once it has cast its spell on you. It unfolds over the course of just a few days, so it never quite acquires the heft or depth of Replay, but it has far greater velocity and enough plot twists for a dozen pop fiction novels. Professional reviewers have compared it to the work of Richard Matheson, Philip K. Dick, James M. Cain, Rod Serling, and many other masters of the mysterious and the macabre. One blurb writer compared it to Christopher Nolan’s Memento. With recommendations like that, you’d think the book would be bound to disappoint. But Jason Starr’s novel deserves all the praise it has gotten. Parallel universe stories don’t get much more gripping than The Next Time I Die. At least not in this universe.