Earth Jumped Back now available for pre-order.
Earth Jumped Back by Philip Reari
An ocean portal transports two anxious college students back to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill where they befriend their youthful professor, confront crippling personal and societal problems, and help resolve a mysterious murder 50 years later.
College junior Ethan Trousock has his own problems: professor Bourman's history exam, parental aging, dating dry spells. The devastating oil spill that blanketed his university's coastline half a century before and led to the birth of the modern environmental movement is ancient history. Until one night when an ocean portal transports him back to 1969.
Denise Pirouet, an overwhelmed student reporter, has a front row seat to the ominous undercurrent unleashed by the inky, oil-laden ocean, including a pernicious bombing at the Faculty Club. Ethan befriends Denise and her boyfriend, whom he suspects he recognizes from the future. As campus unrest mounts, culminating in a bank burning and a violent standoff with the national guard, Ethan and Denise become linked in unexpected ways that will only become clear 50 years later.
“Earth Jumped Back is an audacious novel of time travel and terrorism, of environmental peril and uncanny nostalgia. With shades of DeLillo's debut, and sometimes reminiscent of Vonnegut, Philip Reari's alternate history of Santa Barbara and the 1970 Isla Vista riots is convincingly evocative, compassionate, and finely written - a fantastic Californian kaleidoscope.”
- James Reich, author of “The Moth for the Star"
“A wonderfully weird adventure through time, disaster, and youthfulness. Philip Reari weaves an energetic story that at its core probes our connection and responsibility to our environment and to each other.”
- Irina Zhorov, author of “Lost Believers”
“Earth Jumped Back is an engaging time-travel yarn strung between the massive Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the bustling University of California of 2023. Philip Reari has a keen eye for the foibles of college idealists of both decades, and for the cynicism of their faculty counterparts.”
- T. Jefferson Parker, three-time Edgar Award-winner and New York Times bestselling author
Eat Your Damn Vegetables
by Philip Reari
Blight, Space Tourism, Crypto-Judaism, Kidnapping, Jackalopes, and a Hint of the Unfathomable
When investigative reporter Justine Reconaire gets too close to discovering why a mysterious blight devastated green chile crops across New Mexico, her life is endangered by billionaire entrepreneur Gareth Bryne. Meanwhile, Bryne’s spaceport in the heart of the state is targeted by an anarchist, anti-space tourism group known as the Icarus Society. Justine’s friend Bartel Menardo unwittingly becomes the centerpiece of Justine’s rescue effort while simuteneously steering his ex-girlfriend Aurora, who reappears after two years, away from the most extreme elements of the Icarus Society.
Over the course of the weeks-long search for Justine, each of the protagonists makes decisions they would’ve recently considered highly uncharacteristic, reevaluating their lives as new and surprising circumstances arise. Set in the near future, New Mexico’s unique landscape and architecture bind the accounts of the novel’s four separate narrators together as they navigate derelict ghost towns, expansive cave networks, seedy Albuquerque neighborhoods, and luxurious estates in search of Justine and, at the same time, a larger sense of purpose.
“The story is about various nefarious schemed hatched by an evil billionaire who hates New Mexico and will do any evil thing imaginable to make the state less wonderful. It's up to a secret collective of would-be domestic terrorists, a woman who might be a living invocation of New Mexico itself, a crusading reporter, a crypto-Jew and a lovelorn waiter to band together to stop him. It's a long, hilarious battle…every bit of the ride was fun.”
- Amazon Review
