A review by nigellicus
Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers by Tim Powers

adventurous dark funny mysterious tense

5.0

It turns out a number of these stories were also in Strange Itineries which I read last year, but rereading them was hardly a chore and that was a library book and this one is mine all mine. Powers deploys time loops and ghosts and ghost loops and looping time ghosts over and over again and each time there is something new and original about them. I daresay it'd be facile to credit his Catholicism for his facility at deploying the almost ritualistic logic of dealing with ghosts and time travel, but as a raised Catholic myself, it seems that there's something he just gets right about them, moves them out of the fantasy/horror cliches of robed figures in darkened woods or mud-smeared shaman-types and into the everyday manipulation of ourselves and the things around us in patterns and repetitions or carefully ordered sequences used to create deeper meanings and find the power to shift things that aren't bound by the physical laws we understand. Making magic mundane, like the roads and boulevards of his beloved Los Angeles revealing stranger things underneath to marvel at.