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Take a Weird, Wild Road Trip with Tim Powers in Alternate Routes
Tim Powers is the author to turn to if you want to uncover the secret history beneath the truths you think you know. In fiction, a secret history is something like an alternate history, picking the threads of real historical events and spinning them into grand tapestries of conspiracy—all the accepted reasons for any given event are wrong; here is the real story.
The truth is submerged under history itself like an iceberg, and Powers had been steering his craft into those eldritch depths for a very long time. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood might have been in league with vampires, like in Hide Me Among the Graves; Last Call twists together the Fisher King, the Tarot, and mid-century Las Vegas mobsters; Medusa’s Web takes on old Hollywood. Powers’ most recent outing, Alternate Routes, is also a secret history, this one of California’s freeways, and the occult of the motorcade.
Alternate Routes starts in medias res, and gives you precious little time to catch up. Sebastian Vickey (not his real name) plies the California highways as a driver for a service that promises insulation from the chatty ghosts who haunt the motorways. He’s a disgraced Secret Service agent, on the run because he heard something he shouldn’t have in a motorcade that took then-President Obama to a chicken and waffles restaurant. Several years hence, another agent, Ingrid Castine, who works for a clandestine agency tapped into the haunted highways of California, makes the near-fatal call to warn Vickey of her agency’s imminent attack.
Castine and Vickey end up on the lam together, working their way through the contacts the latter has build up over the years, and all the places that confound the surveillance of California’s haunted highways. There’s a fence who sells them raisins and chocolate—to ward off ghosts, you see—who has a door in his house that lets out into the open air of a cliff face, or the other world, depending on your perspective. They have dinner in an illicit restaurant in a condemned building before a night spent, uncomfortably, in a graveyard. Vickey meets with a woman who makes a living as a costumed Supergirl, seeking information. That all sounds bananas, and it takes Castine, too, more than a little while to ken to her new situation, one in which she is a fugitive from a secret agency helmed by a man who isn’t exactly keeping it together himself.
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Castine, Vickey, and the crazed department head are all working toward a deeper structure, and it all comes to a head when Castine takes an impossible freeway exit out into alternate reality just on the edge of things, conjured by the steady stream of LA traffic. Vickey must make the choice to rescue her from this impossible secret reality, aided by a Hasid, a Mexican child, a car covered in stickers, and a taco truck.
Alternate Routes feels lighter than the average Tim Powers novel; more comic, more playing. There are a number of puns and Easter eggs for the dedicated fan—the sort of thing that doesn’t matter to the larger plot, but rewards the faithful. I, myself, am a huge proponent of serious writers taking a break to have a bit of fun. Watching Powers turn his prodigious research skills toward the motorcade and the California highway system (in addition to the Daedalus myth, for funsies) is an absolute pleasure. Alternate Routes hums with unrelenting action in addition to thoughtful secret history, which is just the coolest twist.