One Red Thread

by Ernie Wood

When architect Eddy McBride, a fortysomething self-absorbed noticer of details and self-appointed seeker of truths, stumbles upon a way to visit, watch and ultimately participate in events from his family history, he finds answers to long-ago tragedies and mysteries. But each time Eddy returns to the present, he unleashes the unhappy consequences of exploring history on his family and friends. And as Eddy's knowledge of the past grows, he turns from curious seeker of truths to frantic fixer of mistakes--present, past and by those from the present who would change the past--as he follows a devastating trail of hurt, disappearance and death.

Genres: Time Travel, Fiction, Science Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2014

About the author

ONE RED THREAD is my debut novel, but I've been an award-winning writer of non-fiction books, documentary film scripts, newspaper and magazine journalism, and advertising for years. I've also taught journalism. Like my protagonist Eddy McBride, I've followed architecture as a longtime passion, pursuing graduate coursework in the field and writing widely on the subject, including a history (University of North Carolina Press) supported by a research and writing grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other non-fiction books on a range of topics have included a best-seller on the Dallas Cowboys (Taylor Publishing). I was raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, majored in English Literature at Hamilton College in New York and now live in Austin, Texas.

Reviews

[Lincoln · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very hard book to review. Not because its a bad book, but because it is a special book. I finished it several weeks ago, as I was allowed to have an advanced copy, I have been putting off writing a review simply because I am unsure how to do this book justice in a review. Ernie Wood the author writes beautifully and the prose come to life so vividly in your mind. The main character does not even realize he is time traveling he just believes he has such an incredible memory that he can envision scenes from his past as if they occurred yesterday. Ernie Wood...takes that same concept of the character being able to envision the past and allows you as the reader to see the environment of the protagonist. You know how he is feeling, what he is thinking, the sounds, the smells, this book if I can describe it properly is delicious!! The pace is very slow, I am one for action and this is not a book I would typically recommend or even enjoy...however, the pace and the magic of this book sucked me like very few books truly do, and the pace did not dissuade me, as I got to know the lives and histories and miseries of these characters...that made them so real. Yes, the book is terribly sad, yes its slow, but oh my heaven do not allow that to stop you from picking this up. Its the type of book you will finish and continue to ponder for years. Thank you Ernie for allowing me to have an advanced copy. Thank you more for such a fantastic ride.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to throw in the towel on this book, so this review is based on an incomplete read. The middle was dragging so much that I keep finding things to do beside read it. I made the next day's soup at 10pm one night. I got a new hobby in order to avoid it. I even found myself stuck in line for 2 hours and decided I'd rather stare ahead than read it. There are ideas that are good here, but it really defeated me. There's a lot of thought and musing, but constantly sulky characters grated on my every nerve. Ernie Wood is a great writer and there are many quotable lines in this book, but this book was just not for me. I like to know what characters are thinking and feeling, but there's a limit to how much internal and external drama I care to read about, especially when the characters don't communicate with each other.

To be fair, a friend of mine read this book and loved it enough to gift all his book-loving family members with copies this Christmas. Perhaps I would have ended up liking it more if I'd read the last 40% or so, but I just can't make myself pick it back up again.

[Tom Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an amateur genealogist, history buff and fan of time travel stories, I am jealous as hell of Eddy McBride. The forty-something architect and main character in Ernie Wood’s first venture into fiction writing has an ability that I would kill for. His knack for paying attention to the details of the world around him has allowed him to slip into the past and experience events from his own past and from the lives of his family. One Red Thread deftly captures a world where people can, by attuning themselves to the sensory input about them, revisit events from the past. Wood deftly uses this device to spin a fascinating story that is told in reverse as Eddy and others go progressively further back in time, each time solving one mystery and uncovering another.

I enjoyed the story immensely and recommend it highly but I must admit that there were times when I found Eddy’s character pretty thick-headed and, had I been there, I would have had to resist the temptation to smack him upside the head.

[Clark Hallman · Rating 1 out of 5]

One Red Thread by Ernie Wood – This is a time-travel book about an architect and his family and friends who try to change their lives by altering the past, which is certainly an acceptable time-travel premise. Unfortunately for me, there are far too many pages of boring dialogue and boring thoughts from the characters, and very little gratifying action and accomplishments in this book. I did not find this book to be engrossing, but others might enjoy it.

[Carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually love time travel stories and I was encouraged by the many four and five star reviews of this one. Alas, I really didn't like it at all. It bored me. There was way too much introspection and not enough action. I didn't want to pick it up and there wasn't anything else since I rarely read more than one novel at a time. So....here it is: I did not finish it. It was just too awful for me, in the truest sense of the word. Boredom and death and sadness....not my idea of a good read. I got through about half of it and finally put it down for good. Life is too short.

[Debbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's rare for me not to finish a book, but I got half-way through this one and realized I had no interest in finishing it. The story unwinds at a glacial pace & I had a hard time accepting the time-travel concept used. You have to take that leap of faith in the author's story, and in this one I just couldn't do it.
On to better books!

[Robert Nolin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stopping at page 100. Too often I'm scratching my head, torn out of the story by odd passages. Eddy's wife tells him she's pregnant. He seems to have no reaction whatsoever. He says nothing to his wife. Were they trying to get pregnant? Is this good news? We don't know. His relationship with his wife just kept hitting queer notes that threw me. And then, 90 some pages in, she gets to talk in her own voice (which sounds exactly like her husband), and comments on the preceding 90 pages. What? Is she somehow reading the book, too? The time travel wasn't convincing, to me, but then I read a ton of SF. At this point I pulled out the bookmark, put the book on the table to go back to the library.

Some nice librarian highlighted this book, and I gave it a try. As a first-time novelist approaching 60, I thought I'd give Mr. Wood's debut novel a go. I'm thinking a few beta readers would have helped here. Sorry. Also, third-person might have worked better.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fortunate enough to have access to an early draft of this fine first novel. It's deemed "science fiction" by some readers because it involves time travel, but that characterization seems off to me. I thought it read more like a work of period fiction. The book's premise is that our present lives are shaped by our past - what we know of it and what we don't know of it. But what if the veil behind which some bits of our past are hidden could be lifted? What mischief might that unleash on the present? Very engaging and well-written. Bravo!

[Heather Balog · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I received this book as a Goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review. This book took me an extraordinary long time to read, not because it wasn't well written, simply because it was a difficult novel to grasp. The first several chapters flowed slowly, but jumped around in a sort of jumbled manner; different narrators, disjointed thinking, stories and actions that seemed completely unrelated...it seemed that the author was going somewhere but he hadn't bothered to inform the reader of where the journey was headed. And that's ok...I just found it hard to concentrate because of this. And then, here comes the time travel aspect of the novel, completely out of the blue and with absolutely no explanation of WHY it happened. And then the time travel itself occurred in an unexplainable, herky jerky sort of fashion. Once it became clearer how the event in the story were connected (by one red thread), it flowed easier for me and I found it more enjoyable. Although, certain aspects never made sense. Was this time travel ability a phenomenon that everyone in the town had? Where did it come from? And why was Libby able to "stay" and "interact" when nobody else seemed to necessarily do that?
I felt this could have been a phenomenal book, but I was let down by the "please suspend your belief of all that you know to be true" mentality, and the lack of explanation. And finally, the end was quite the let down...made the novel seem almost pointless. However, I must give credit where credit is due. The author's descriptions and language certainly made the scene and actions easy to visualize. The plot (once I deciphered it) was interesting and held me captive...the delivery however, needed to be a little tighter and less confusing.

[Nate Van Coops · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gets 3.5 Stars from me. Ernie Wood is a talented writer and I think anything he writes is always going to land above average. He has a flair for elegant prose and his lush descriptions are truly evocative of specific times and settings. The details of a scene rush to the forefront of your experience and, in this book, those details help to immerse you in the history of these characters. There were more than a few times when I was taken with the precision of language he uses to capture the moment and noted specific lines of striking beauty. Seemingly benign motions by characters, like swinging a baby carrier, a subtle act that lesser writers would blaze past, come to life through Wood’s writing. It is almost as if you can feel the weight and texture of objects and the scents and emotions of scenes in tangible detail. That is a talent I very much admire. Lovers of detailed literature will enjoy this sensory journey. I found it akin to Jack Finney’s Time and Again in its attention to detail.
My criticisms of this book come from areas where I struggled as a reader. I’m a lover of time travel adventure as a genre, but this book could be more accurately categorized with literary fiction. Time travel aficionados like myself may take similar issue with it. It does involve time travel but the method used was frustrating to understand. The story’s main protagonist, Eddy McBride, is capable of slipping into the past to observe and interact, but this ability is never adequately explained, or clearly defined. It also comes to light that nearly all the main characters in the story share this ability. That is an astounding detail of the world and one that begs questions as a reader, but those questions do not get answered. I struggled to get my mind around the limitations being set for this method of time travel but they seemed to vary constantly. Sometimes characters could only see the past but not interact. Sometimes they could stay in and even be injured in the past. What was supposedly an instantaneous journey and return in the present sometimes endangered the body left behind in the present. Every time I felt like I had discovered some hard and fast rule, it would be changed. The driving force of the mystery was a character who seemed very ineffective, and despite his warning that characters only had a few chances to get things right in the past, that rule was summarily dismissed by the protagonist, who goes on to keep time traveling anyway. The other characters’ motivations and limitations in regard to traveling were even more vague and I never did understand why all the burden of solving the issues at hand had to fall to the protagonist. I felt that if his efforts were so unsatisfactory that they darn well should have done something themselves. The character of Walter Lee was especially vexing in that category, his inability to swim notwithstanding.
I really wanted to finish this book and see where it was going but found myself putting it down frequently due to frustration. One formatting issue with the story contributed to that, but may not be a deterrent to other readers. The book is written in first person perspective but is told from the point of view of multiple characters so you are obliged to hop into different characters heads every few pages. I have not seen that method employed often. I typically enjoy first person point of view so that would not have been a negative for me except for the fact that the main characters’ voices were not very distinct from one another. While the characters themselves had unique motivations and actions, their voices as narrators were nearly identical. Their vocabularies, sentence styles, and even the cadence and rhythm of their thoughts all read the same. If it were not for the character names attached to each section I would have had an impossible task of differentiating which character was speaking. I actually opened the book to random pages as an exercise and tried to determine which character was narrating. If not for their specific actions or references to other POV characters, I couldn’t tell the difference. The good news is that Ernie Wood writes really beautifully. If you are going to have a bunch of narrators who all sound the same, at least they all were erudite, eloquent speakers. It could be a lot worse.
The title of this book, One Red Thread, ties to the plot of this tale, which is woven through the tapestry of the protagonist’s life and family history. The challenge for me was following the thread of plot through the fabric, which to me, all looked red as well. There were quite a few times where I wanted the story to just get on with it. I loved Wood’s descriptions of scenes and places but sometimes felt I was drowning in them and just needed something else to hold onto. The history of tragedy that the family endures is very interesting, but as it is surrounded with so much emotional “woolgathering” by the main characters, you don’t get much time to get oriented chronologically before being jerked into some other scene or worry of the characters. The present day dramas of the four main characters left me a bit callous, since the characters themselves were not especially likeable, other than that they all shared an affinity for the cat. I think the mysteries being addressed by the characters are solid and certainly would direct the fate of a family’s story, but I would have liked to see more actual resolution to the tale. It seemed at the end, a story doomed to repeat itself with the next generation of brooding, ineffectual time travelers.
In conclusion, this is a book I was glad to experience for the sake of Ernie Wood’s beautiful writing. I learned from it and was certainly inspired by its beauty. The story itself is one I will remember by emotional feel more than structure or plot. It left me with the feeling that the past will always be the past, elusive and mesmerizing, but in the end there is nothing you can do about it. I hope that Ernie Wood continues to use his talents. I’d like to see what he could do with a promising future and not a past better left alone.

[Karen J Shields · Rating 5 out of 5]

One heck of a read

This one turned me inside out and upside down. I've read the theories about the new physics and how they see time and dimension differently from classic theories, but it's hard to comprehend in your own head, let alone to turn it into possibility by making into such a rich story full of fascinating characters. Congratulations Mr. Wood.
Now I need to rest my head and read something simple and easier to understand.

[Laura Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was quite a cerebral look at time and how a group of friends tries to avert a tragedy that occurred 30 years before. If we can visit the past, can we change it? Are we doomed to repeat? How do our personalities affect this process?

[Carla · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish it, the writing was so bad.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiction
Wood, Ernie
One Red Thread
Tyrus Books
978-1-4405-8273-8, hardcover, 336 pgs., $24.99
May 2014

If you could go back in time, would you? Would you change events if it were possible to do so? Intervene to prevent a tragedy? Should you? Courage, noble sacrifice or hubris? How would you determine which specific link in the chain to alter, which thread to pull to alter the pattern without the whole tapestry unraveling? Is it even healthy for us to understand “too well” the relationships between those threads? I am mixing my metaphors. Remember the Butterfly Effect. The perfectly chosen epigraph to Part I of One Red Thread is from Ecclesiastes 3:15 — “Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before.”

One Red Thread, a handsome book, is Austin writer and journalist Ernie Wood’s ambitious and accomplished first novel, taking on no less than time and space as well as history and the slippery nature of truth. Eddy McBride is a fortysomething architect much given to introspection and obsessive observation. He calls his defining habit “wool-gathering.” I call it navel-gazing that leads to analysis paralysis. “I can’t resist trying to make sense of how the world works. Find some meaning. And I can’t keep my sticky fingers out of the trouble that my searching sometimes brings. Unintended consequences.” The mysterious appearance on his front porch of Walter Lee, the elderly yard man who used to work for the McBride family, and the unsettling homecoming of Libby, a childhood friend, set the stage for a tragic and interwoven family history to come alive once more.

The main characters of One Red Thread are complex while leaving room for development — or regression as the case may be. There are times when you will doubt the reliability of each of the narrators (“These may have been real events, real memories, or real made-up stories.”); however, their various motivations seem genuine. Their distinct voices provide multiple first-person narratives, vividly presenting their divergent experiences and interpretations of, and reactions to, the same events in this intricately plotted and fast-paced story.

One Red Thread is a hybrid of mystery, horror, and the metaphysical that had me thinking Stephen King, Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, “The Twilight Zone,” and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Seriously. Wood hooked me in the prologue and never lost me. He has created a challenging novel of psychological suspense with an atmosphere of pervasive foreboding. The sense of acute disturbance is all the more powerful because it remains nebulous almost until the end. The ending is satisfying in explanation with just the correct amount of tease and creeping unease. Remember your Faulkner. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.

[Juliabednar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with the reviewer who said that this is a hard book to review. It really doesn’t fit into a nice niche. To say it is a science fiction/time travel book is selling it short. Most time travel novels rely on a portal or some sort of trickery and then focus on the difficulty of fitting into an unfamiliar environment. In ORT, however, the past, present, and future coexist, often interacting, with the characters at first stumbling on the ability to move between realities, then doing so with purpose. Wood uses this coexistence to address (but, of course, doesn’t resolve) many philosophical questions, such as: Do others’ choices in the past affect our present? If we could change the past, would we/should we? What toll would those choices have on us?

One small section that really resonated with me was:
“…all this time we think we’re building a future, but what we’re really doing is creating the past.” We live on hopes and dreams. We live in the future,…Then suddenly—whoosh!...it’s back somewhere behind us. Whatever we experience as it goes by, it’s never what we thought it would be, and then it’s gone forever.” But in Woods’ universe, it’s still there for us to experience and relive, and change—or not.

Yes, ORT’s introspective. Yes, that can get annoying. But if I were going in and out of various time periods, I think I would be spending a lot of time thinking about what was going on and why, and who can I trust with that information.

Bottom line: Well done, Ernie Wood.

[Jan Pelosi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I will admit here that I almost stopped reading about 50 pages in because I was so confused, I did keep plugging away at this book. I love the concept of time travel, and if there was only one super power I could have, that would be it. This book really made me long for something I'll never have, the ability to go back in time and see my parents, grandparents, great grandparents in their every day lives--to see the events that made them who they were. Changing events in the past can never really be good because of the effect those changes can have on present day lives, but it was interesting to read the back story of why Sheila, Tim, and Eddy needed that connection to the past.

I'd really love to sit down and discuss this book with Ernie Wood someday. Who knows, maybe I'll find him walking on the street in Austin one day and get that opportunity.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone to really likes the concept of time travel--The Time Travelers Wife, The House on the Strand, etc. My only criticism is the difficulty I had in trying to envision some of those trips back, especially when Libby and Eddy or Sheila and Eddy were there are the same time but from different points in the future. That was hard for me to wrap my head around.

In the end though, I did really love this book. It was very well written, very cerebral, and I would definitely recommend it to my friends.

[Jim Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel was written by a fellow I met at a recent Men’s retreat at U Bar U in Texas. The novel portrays the problems of a middle-aged architect named Eddy in exploring his family’s past. Some traumatic events happened to his family, when he was young, including the loss of his older brother, who was run over in a hit-and-run accident. Eddy seeks to recover events of the past and delves into it in such a way that he has visions of past events and, in fact, seems to be transported back then so as to witness the events as they unfold. The red thread of the title is particularly associated with a certain older family friend who appears at times to summon Eddy into exploring his past. The complications of the novel turn out to be problems associated with travel to the past including the question of whether time travelers can alter the past as well the potentially negative effects on one’s present life of too much engagement with one’s family past. More importantly, the novel demonstrates, perhaps, the special importance of family history for American Southerners, such as the author and his main character, as well as the universal significance of family history to all of us. I recommend this book to readers who want to read about and reflect upon such issues.

[Amy Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ernie Wood's time travel/family history book pulls you in with engaging prose and interesting story lines. Like any good mystery, the reader is left wondering page after page about what will happen next to the various characters. Will the characters in the present be able to change the past? Will events in the past continue to affect several generations of two different families after the time-travel incidents? I recommend One Red Thread to readers interested in exploring the concepts of how the past constantly influences the present and future.

[Lynda West · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was privileged to read an early draft of the highly engaging One Red Thread.. The novel has a tangible sense of time and place as Wood moves his protagonist seamlessly through history and events both catastrophic and quotidian. The traveler, and the reader, ultimately have to live in the present and confront the effects of that past on this present.
I look forward to making the journey with the "traveler" again post publication.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eddy meets Walter Lee, he has no idea how his life is about to change. He discovers he can time travel back through his life. At first he observes this time but then he decides it's important to fix past mistakes. An unusual book that makes one ponder about their own life and wonder about how life could be different if one decision had been different. This looks like the first fiction Ernie Wood has written and he did a wonderful job of moving back and forth in time. Enjoyable.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ernie Wood’s graceful One Red Thread haunted me long after I reluctantly finished it. Beautiful, moody and touching, One Red Thread is about memory, and the ever present past, yearning to be touched.”

— Frank Coffey, author of Dying Light, The Shaman and Night Prayers

[Jack Goodstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometime overly complicated meditation on time travel and the obligation to try and change events. Complicated even further by references to multiple narrative points of view and references to "Rashomon," so there is always a question about narrative reliability.