What Discord Follows

by Gavin Moore

Gray Harker’s unhappy trudge towards his fiftieth year is not going well. Not only has he started to experience hallucinations and bizarre memory lapses, but his best friend's leaving do has turned into a night of fighting actual Nazis, followed by a trip to a mental hospital.

Rescued by a mysterious woman with a penchant for cool entrances and cheesecake, the pair now find themselves trapped in the last place Gray ever expected to find himself. Pursued by a murderous lepidopterist and reluctantly assisted by a student with her own problems, to survive and get home they have to uncover who wants them dead and why! And while they’re at it, figure out if they really did learn anything from Die Hard and why Superman doesn’t date Supergirl. But first, coffee! Oh and some cheesecake if you've got it…

Reviews for the comedy sci-fi mystery romance What Discord Follows:

‘Yeah, it’s alright’ - My sister
‘Send me the link, I’ll try and get round to reading it…’ - My wife

445 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 27, 2022

Reviews

[Simon]

A page-turner.

^ That's the one sentence review for What Discord Follows.

This author's debut novel mixes sci-fi, romance, and humour in what feels like a very organic way. We follow our main character Gray as he begins to have unusual experiences with his memory, and before long the readers are thrust into an exciting and mysterious world known only to a small number of human beings.

Far from being a fantastical tale of adventure and he-man protagonists, What Discord Follows gently introduces the reader to the mystery of the TSD and this cheesecake-obsessed woman that Gray has many questions for; before you know it, you are fully invested in the characters and the plot. The dialogue and actions of Gray and the other people we meet are realistic and relatable, which make the novel all the more engaging.

Similar to my personal favourite subgenre of horror movies: "Oh f***, these events could theoretically be possible in real life and happen to me!"); this novel affords the reader that same sense of immersion, but in an exciting and familiar way. The events of What Discord Follows are written so well that the reader can easily slip into Gray's shoes and be fully immersed in the plot. Like I said, it's a page-turner!

I highly recommend reading this book.

Plot Spoilers Follow:

Moore's take on time travel is incredibly refreshing. In some media of the genre, main characters' explanations of paradoxes and causality feel forced and break the reader/viewer's immersion; however, in What Discord Follows, the rules just seem to make sense! The concept of Constants who can remember old timelines that no longer happened is a great narrative conceit and allows the author to dismiss classic Grandfather Paradoxes quite believably. The other key plot device is that time passes at the same rate both in the past you travelled to and in the present you travelled from. This is a subtle but brilliant rule that allows Moore to have fun with changing past events while maintaining the ever-present danger that changes made to the past can still be undone by Foster or other conspirators in the present.

One of my favourite moments of the book, to which you can see the slow buildup, is the budding romance between Hark and Pay in the past rippling forward and changing the past timeline of Gray and Paige. In the first version of their timeline, we slowly see Paige open up and let down her guard. Gray and Paige share an intimate moment which evokes a feeling of young love and butterflies in one's stomach. That feeling is ripped away when they wake up and find that their timeline has changed due to their younger versions falling in love. The reader experiences the unfairness and sad longing for what could have been when we realise that now they actually got married and divorced years prior. Most of the book has been slowly building up this romance between adult Gray and Paige, and it almost seems cruel of the author to do this to the characters and to the reader! You can truly feel the heartache and frustration from adult Paige in the following pages as she lets out her anger and disappointment.


Some criticisms (No spoilers):

I had very few issues with this novel. It goes without saying that as this is the author's first publication, he should be given some allowance for typos here and there.
- I did find that the beginning of the novel was a little slow to get going. I worry that this could cause some readers to put it down too early.
- There are a lot of pop-culture references in the dialogue in the first few chapters. While I personally enjoyed them, I felt that it may be a little off-putting to some readers who are not overly familiar with the sources, and may inhibit their relatability with our protagonist.
- Some passages are quite heavy with adverbs, which sometimes feel like filler words that don't really benefit the sentences.

[Helen Bellamy]

Stephen King's advice about writing novels is have a good 'what if?'. This novel has plenty of interesting 'what ifs?'. What if you could re-explore Sheffield and Liverpool in the early 90s? What if you could eat as much of the best cheesecake as you wanted? What if you could laugh at your own middle aged failings along the way? A thoroughly enjoyable read with characters that you feel like you know but want to know more about anyway.