Your Thoughts on Time Travel in Books?

Checked out the Glowing Girls or the Luminous Girls from the library and it's an interesting story. You slowly begin to realize that the serial killer character, Harper, is time traveling to get his victims--all women from different time periods in about a 70 year time span and in the same location. The location happens to be Chicago, so that's compelling to me, but the time travelling aspect is less so.  His mode of recovery is this old house where he goes as a haven. He goes in the house, and time stops, and then he can think himself into another decade, with the limitation of those 70 years--he can't move beyond the 1990's, I guess probably because the author decided not to also try to figure out what kind of cars we're driving in 2090. And then there's this one victim, Kirby, who survived his attack, and has become a cop or a private investigator who is  highly motivated to figure out the identity of her would-be killer. How, though, will she make this leap in logic to determine that he's able to time travel to get his victims? How will we, as readers, do the same?

I have another book in my queue, The Time Traveler's Wife, and that will be a similar trope, and I can recall reading and liking Jack Finney's book, Time and Again, and let's not forget about the movies that do this, like the classic Somewhere in Time, probably one of the worst acted movies from the 80s that, if it had time traveled to present day, would never made it to the big screen, but would've been instead a Lifetime original movie. That's the one where Christopher Reeve falls in love with a photograph of an woman from another time and then figures out a way to rub a penny and get back to where she lives. She miraculously falls in love with him, but the problem is that he can't stay in that time period, and so there's this scene where he gets sucked back into his present day, in an effect that's like one you've seen in a Tidy Bowl commercial where he sort of swirls away down a hole with Jane Seymour screeching, Richard! as he's pulled down the time drain. I couldn't find that scene, but here's a different one. In the end, I believe he dies from starvation or heart disease or something and he meets her in heaven.

But my point is that I am not into time travel, even in a book that is well written like the aforementioned one. Sci fi general has not ever appealed to me, I guess because I have trouble predicting what will happen when I don't know the exact rules.

In any case, enjoy this scene from Somewhere in Time


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