A Commandment Predicts Outside of Time

Daniel Torday’s 2023 novel narrates chronological (im)possibilities

Van by Pexels, trees by Hans, both from Pixabay

The rental car clerk at the airport in Columbus, Ohio tells the traveler to catch a shuttle van to a nearby town called Mt. Izmir. “You’ll be able to pick a sedan up there in no time,” the clerk says. It’s the first spoken line in the novel, a Twilight Zone line; this place is not one that you, dear reader, can find on a map, and as for the time of the pickup, the clerk won’t commit even to a fictional hour.

The traveler, Zeke, boards the shuttle van. The other passengers don’t acknowledge him, nor do the recipients of his text messages. Then, “the van lurches across the double yellow lines,” his head hits the window, and “he is confronted by endless vast nothing.”

Those are the opening two pages of The 12th Commandment, a novel that will be released in no time from St. Martin’s Press (January 17, 2023). You could read the rest as a ghost story. Maybe Zeke doesn’t know he’s dead. Maybe none of us know this about ourselves. Maybe there’s nothing to be known in that regard. If time doesn’t exist, neither does death.

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