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Future astronaut, Jimmie Cherko, grew up in a working class, upstate New York family, eyes toward the stars. Never gifted in anything, he’d always had to settle for second-best. In his quest for space, he'd failed at Air Force pilot and navigator training. Despite always short of attaining his goal, Jimmie stubbornly continued to feel there had to be something more to his life, something important he was meant to do....
A lifetime later, Jimmie finds himself a crew member aboard a damaged orbiting spy station for a super-secret government organization, the Exoatmospheric Reconnaissance Organization. Alone, amnesiac, and oddly restrained within a cocoon-like apparatus, flashes of disturbing memory assault him: of a sleepwalking mother... her questioning the actual number of children in the family... his own mysterious and lifelong association with deer and conflicting military and civilian lives... and a shadowy, fedora-wearing stranger... along with the appearance of a fellow space station crew member who seemed more than a little “off.” What he remembers contradicts what he’d actually lived. Soon, it all becomes clear...too clear...and he realizes, he’s not the man he thought he was....
Fact manipulation. Disinformation. Obfuscation. Are the lives we live really our own?
A lifetime later, Jimmie finds himself a crew member aboard a damaged orbiting spy station for a super-secret government organization, the Exoatmospheric Reconnaissance Organization. Alone, amnesiac, and oddly restrained within a cocoon-like apparatus, flashes of disturbing memory assault him: of a sleepwalking mother... her questioning the actual number of children in the family... his own mysterious and lifelong association with deer and conflicting military and civilian lives... and a shadowy, fedora-wearing stranger... along with the appearance of a fellow space station crew member who seemed more than a little “off.” What he remembers contradicts what he’d actually lived. Soon, it all becomes clear...too clear...and he realizes, he’s not the man he thought he was....
Fact manipulation. Disinformation. Obfuscation. Are the lives we live really our own?
330 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 19, 2013
1 person is currently reading
7 people want to read
About the author
F.P. Dorchak
8 books6 followersF. P. Dorchak has been writing horror, metaphysical, and weird fiction since he was six years old. Frank is published in the U.S., Canada, and the Czech Republic. His novels are:
1) Psychic (2014)
2) ERO (2013)
3) The Uninvited (2013)
4) Sleepwalkers (2001)
His anthology, Do The Dead Dream? (2017), which won the 2017 Best Books Award for Fiction: Short Stories.
His short stories have appeared in small press magazines, as well as the regional anthologies You Belong 2016, Words and Images from Longmont Area Residents, the 2012 The You Belong Collection, Writings and Illustrations by Longmont Area Residents. His two standalone short stories are:
1) "Broken Windows" (2017)
2) "Clowns" (2016)
His newest agented manuscript was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and is making the rounds.
Frank is currently working on his next manuscript. He can occasionally be reached in séances, and his website is www.fpdorchak.com...but don’t believe everything he tells you....
1) Psychic (2014)
2) ERO (2013)
3) The Uninvited (2013)
4) Sleepwalkers (2001)
His anthology, Do The Dead Dream? (2017), which won the 2017 Best Books Award for Fiction: Short Stories.
His short stories have appeared in small press magazines, as well as the regional anthologies You Belong 2016, Words and Images from Longmont Area Residents, the 2012 The You Belong Collection, Writings and Illustrations by Longmont Area Residents. His two standalone short stories are:
1) "Broken Windows" (2017)
2) "Clowns" (2016)
His newest agented manuscript was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and is making the rounds.
Frank is currently working on his next manuscript. He can occasionally be reached in séances, and his website is www.fpdorchak.com...but don’t believe everything he tells you....
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 4, 2019
There isn’t a place in this world (or other worlds) where Mr. Dorchak isn’t willing to go with his great imagination. Having enjoyed his last book, The Uninvited, I opened this new one with great expectations. I was intrigued by what was being cloaked beginning page one. From mysterious deer that appear out of nowhere and with no clear meaning, to the sense that main character Cherko has his own tracks following him. I stopped to ponder this idea for a long time and later found evidence that we were in a sort of time travel book. The darting between clearly documented time periods, of course, was a hint too. The story unravels like a mystery. The secret about why our hero feels so out of place and out of time is more fascinating than any simple time travel book. The book’s proposal is hard to wrap one’s mind around and yet handled very well.
Cherko is a reluctant top secret recruit for the military. His internal struggle, insecure dreams of becoming an astronaut, may not be thwarted after all when he’s recruited to fight the good fight. Or is reality lying? “Peeling back the black onion” means Cherko, and even lover Erica, have to face creepy images like an old woman and a child walking right up to her bedside with a rod – and touching her with it. Just touching her.
This book is more of a hard sci-fi than was Dorchak’s paranormal indulgence, The Uninvited. Though it has a huge dose of techy speculation in it, the writing itself wasn’t too gear-head for me. Sure there were the missile range details, low earth orbit, top secret operation centers, Zulu time, etc. But in the end it was a human story. There’s love and well-drawn backstory and unremembered scars, fears that we can relate to. And then there’s the writing, the beautiful writing such as when Cherko is “ruthlessly grilled like so much steak” about what he knew of anti-satellite technology. Or when he had “snot bubbles blowing out his nose as he exploded huge, soul-searing pleads.” Who couldn’t read on?
This is a story in which one man has a preordained purpose he’s unaware of, where shadows may be more than dark spots, when time itself may not be progressing in a normal fashion for reasons that are also far from normal. It is an earth where troubles may involve beings that aren’t human, where enemies are friends and those Cherko trusts most are enemies. Or are they?
There is a “furriness of soul” (my favorite phrase in the book) about what Cherko is experiencing in ERO, with themes of loneliness and self-confidence and how truly enigmatic our existence is.
If you read up about F.P.Dorchak on the back of the book, you realize you may have just gotten a tiny bit of the inside scoop on the author himself as well as mysteries such as Area 51. Which, of course, makes the book all the more fun!
Cherko is a reluctant top secret recruit for the military. His internal struggle, insecure dreams of becoming an astronaut, may not be thwarted after all when he’s recruited to fight the good fight. Or is reality lying? “Peeling back the black onion” means Cherko, and even lover Erica, have to face creepy images like an old woman and a child walking right up to her bedside with a rod – and touching her with it. Just touching her.
This book is more of a hard sci-fi than was Dorchak’s paranormal indulgence, The Uninvited. Though it has a huge dose of techy speculation in it, the writing itself wasn’t too gear-head for me. Sure there were the missile range details, low earth orbit, top secret operation centers, Zulu time, etc. But in the end it was a human story. There’s love and well-drawn backstory and unremembered scars, fears that we can relate to. And then there’s the writing, the beautiful writing such as when Cherko is “ruthlessly grilled like so much steak” about what he knew of anti-satellite technology. Or when he had “snot bubbles blowing out his nose as he exploded huge, soul-searing pleads.” Who couldn’t read on?
This is a story in which one man has a preordained purpose he’s unaware of, where shadows may be more than dark spots, when time itself may not be progressing in a normal fashion for reasons that are also far from normal. It is an earth where troubles may involve beings that aren’t human, where enemies are friends and those Cherko trusts most are enemies. Or are they?
There is a “furriness of soul” (my favorite phrase in the book) about what Cherko is experiencing in ERO, with themes of loneliness and self-confidence and how truly enigmatic our existence is.
If you read up about F.P.Dorchak on the back of the book, you realize you may have just gotten a tiny bit of the inside scoop on the author himself as well as mysteries such as Area 51. Which, of course, makes the book all the more fun!
Displaying 1 of 1 review