Zig Zag by Jose Carlos Somoza is ambitious - a thriller, science fiction, horror novel with a secret island laboratory, time travel, and supernatural murders. Heavy on the quantum mechanics, it's an intellectual adventure in the style of Michael Crichton.
It was certainly original.
Elisa, a sexy Madrid physicist, was once part of a team of researchers lead by a famous Spanish physicist. They were flown to a mysterious island in the Indian Ocean and worked in a lab splitting time strings - not just theorizing, but proving that light streams record pictures throughout time that can be accessed - virtually showing you any split second throughout history. The project has flaws, the lab explodes and everyone is removed, ordered to never speak of the incident. Ten years later, several of the researchers are being killed in bizarre and violent ways and Elisa begins to panic. Her solution: return to the destroyed island lab where it all began. The only explanation too unbelievable: a hyper dimensional villain is disrupting time.
This borders the line between an exciting science adventure and, at over 500 pages, becoming boring. I want to like this, but there are massive flaws hard to overlook. Elisa and the female characters are portrayed as sexy to an embarrassing degree, near the end turning into nymphomaniacs, for some reason. Most of the characters are poorly written, perhaps that's the translation from Spanish. He has a habit of jumping from scene to scene, but instead of a cliffhanger I lost the thread and the momentum, leaving me flat. I would like to read a thriller with these elements, but this wasn't it. There are interesting moral consequences, results of disrupting split time streams, that are given the briefest coverage - coupled with an overload of military, science, history, and religion that bogs it down.
So, no, it wasn't very good. I wish it was.
2006 / Hardcover / 502 pages
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