Zig Zag
José Carlos Somoza
Release Date: 4/10/07

Zig Zag, a scientific thriller about the consequences of manipulating time, traces the present and past of physics professor Elisa Robledo and the unnamed horror that haunts her. As she fights to be free of her personal demon, her colleagues are being brutally killed by the same evil.

The idea that we could view the distant past – without having to travel through time – sounds grand. Dinosaurs, Buddha, ancient man… on the surface, viewing the past seems so simplistic – we wouldn’t be physically in the past and our inability to interact, to touch it, would cancel the usual complications of time travel. Yet, through this seemingly one-way visual, the past might instead be able to touch us.

Our past never dies. That’s a statement most will agree with – memories haunt us and mistakes can come back to bite us in the derriere. However, the author, Somoza, takes the idea that the past can indirectly affect us and twists it to ask what would happen if the past could directly affect us. The answer is a thriller with enough theoretical physics thrown in to warp your brain.

The beginning is slow, carefully building the premise that calm, perfect surfaces are misleading and that horrors may lie beneath. The pace soon picks up as Elisa speeds towards an event that shatters her calm and kicks the story into high gear. Somoza writes in the tradition of classic suspense, always hinting at the terror that lurks around the corner, but never revealing it until the very end. All the while, he explores the questions of the nature of time, the nature of evil, and the nature of the divine, and how the three may be intertwined. None of our pre-conceived understandings of these notions survive Zig Zag’s ride intact.

Though entertaining, this is not an easy read – the physics involved are along the lines of Einstein’s relativity theory, and Somoza’s tale is as disturbing as it is fascinating. It is, however, a highly rewarding, intelligent, and thought-provoking read, particularly for the theoretically or philosophically inclined. Its ending is neither happy nor pat, but will leave your imagination churning long after the book is closed.

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