How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory

by Peter Counter

When a stranger shoots his dad on a Costa Rican pier, Peter Counter hauls his blood-drenched father to safety. Returning home, Counter discovers that his sense of time and memory is shattered, and in its place is a budding new mental post-traumatic stress disorder.


Counter begins to see violence everywhere. From the music of Cat Stevens to Jeb Bush’s Twitter feed. Walter Benjamin to Johnny Carson. Taskmaster. Video games. ASMR videos on YouTube. The world is steeped in gore. Again and again, Counter finds himself reliving his father’s shooting as his trauma is fragmented, recast, and distorted on a compulsive mental Tilt-A-Whirl.


Formally inventive and incisively smart, How to Restore a Timeline revels in a fragile human condition battered by real conflict and hyper-curated media portrayals of death. Channelling Phoebe Bridgers, George Orwell, and Jordan Peele, these essays look us dead in the eye and What kind of life can we piece together amid all the carnage?

245 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 10, 2023

About the author

Peter Counter is a non-fiction author and critic living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His criticism has been featured on Motherboard, Art of the Title, Toronto Music Scene, That Shelf (formerly Dork Shelf), and his horror blog Everything is Scary.

Reviews

[Mikki Mouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll be upfront in what could be perceived as a bias: I know and love Peter. A dear friend before the book came out, I made him sign a copy when it did. I was so proud of my friend.

It took me awhile to read this book in its entirety - not because it lacked or lagged, but because I was in a major reading slump. As soon as I knew I could honour my friend's book, I gave it a deep dive, and read it in a day.

And it was incredible.

Peter presents a series of essays that are diverse, critical, and central to his human experience, and no matter how scoping the topics - Dragon Ball Z, ASMR, or Paul McCartney's questionable existence - they all reflect back the aching humanity of trauma and PTSD. As a depiction of the gravity of trauma, the centrality of it in one's mind and daily life, this book is a masterwork of illustration. Each essay starts somewhere new, maybe a different book, videogame or album. I don't always know how it will fit, how it relates. Some things I've never heard of. After the first few pages, I realize that at the end I'll have what I need. I trust that he will show me what I need to see. And he does. He just asks that you follow him, a guide through his own mind.

Each page and section offers glimpses through precisely his lens, his experiences - making for one of the most immersive and gripping narratives I've come across. So unrelentingly himself, he never shies from who he is or the mental landscape he shares with the reader. To so accurately translate his world to the page is a brilliant demonstration of his talent and craft.

This book is like a kaleidoscope of a human experience, colours and shapes forming themselves, merging into something powerful, brutal, raw, and beautiful.

I started by saying I'm friends with Peter. If friendship is in sharing their lives with each other, and the occasional gift at holidays, Peter proves a good friend to any reader - he shares his life with you, with horror and hope together. He gives you his truth. It is a powerful gift.

[S. Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Counter's world shatters on a Costa Rican pier, his father's blood staining a family vacation, and his own memory fracturing. Trauma becomes a kaleidoscope, where pop culture fragments mingle with the shrapnel of personal tragedy and, in some instances, rend the very fabric of time. "How to Restore a Timeline" is a gut punch of a memoir and not always a comfortable read, but I always thoroughly enjoy Peter Counter’s excellent writing on pop culture and horror and the parallels he draws or connections he makes between those things, and trauma and grief, or social issues, and or philosophical notions—these tangled musings are very much my cup of tea. Even so, I did not expect to find a chapter about Dragonball Z, an anime series I have literally not seen a single episode of, as poignant and inspiring as I did. That’s the hallmark of an incredible writer, I think. To make you give a shit about things you previously never spent a single second thinking about.

[Matthew Bebis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gotta read some more heart lighted stuff geez

Some good chapters. Slightly repetitive.

[Ronan O'Driscoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There's no room for ironic distance in a scream."

Peter Counter's difficult-to-categorize book is full of great one-liners like the above. It's a narrative that jars, even when it's discussing Batman or Dragonball Z. At it's core, it is a very personal memoir of life lived with the consequences of a traumatic event. This is the black hole which the wide range of topics touched on rotate about: martial arts training, lapsed Catholicism, PTSD, Bipolar disorder, Cruise ship holidays, Slaughterhouse Five and a bunch of related books, movies, video games and music.

On a personal level, I was struck by the similarities between PTSD and Autism: the sensitivity to sounds and other triggers, the need for repetitive actions to salve the same, along with the desire to dispel misguided myths about the condition.

[Richard Popoola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter has a phenomenal mind and I really appreciate how he was able to talk about his life in such a way that was relatable. A true masterclass on how I feel the mind and people process trauma. Phenomenal read.

I was lucky enough to meet him and get a signed copy. I am excited to see what he writes next.

[h · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely! It was wild to come across his essay about having spatial-sequence synesthesia - something that I have too. I've always said that my trauma made me feel like I jumped into an alternate timeline and the title of this book definitely pulled me in in that respect. I skimmed some of the parts that went in depth about popular culture stuff, but otherwise it was a great read.

[Flora · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not for me. A lot of words but doesn't say much, rambling about songs and TV shows, repeating the same stuff over and over again. Some chapters are actually pretty good but most of them I had to force myself to finish.

[Enid Wray]

I am bailing on this… Clearly I am not the reader for this title.

I know nothing of the various video games or martial arts - nor even some of the films - that he dissects in any given essay.

I appreciate the way that he draws parallels between events in his life and any and all manner of films and/or video games and/ or anime and/or martial arts that he’s discussing in any particular essay.

The problem is that he gets lost in the weeds doing so - he goes into minute detail about the action in, or construction of, the film/game/whatever that unless you are also totally immersed in this world it just makes your head spin.

And trust me, he is living in, and mining territory in, worlds that are alien to me.

In comparison, I didn’t get half of the pop culture references in Superfan by Jen Sookfong Lee, but that did not detract from my enjoyment of the title. Sadly that’s not the case here.

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.

DNF