Somewhere Obscurely

About the Book

How would you describe Hell?

If your name happened to be Aramond Smith O'Reilly, you didn't describe it the same way as most men. You couldn't.

Since most men would describe your life as Hell, and you -- well, they'd probably call you the Devil.

But Aramond Smith O'Reilly really didn't see it that way. By his lights, he was simply performing a service, doing a job that someone would have to be doing, and so why not him? He could use the money same as the next fellow. The next fellow didn't have his problems.

Now did he?

What are Aramond's problems?

His mother was raped and murdered before his eyes when he was sixteen; then the murderer kidnapped him and sold him to a coyote, a trader in human misery who moves desperate workers illegally from depressed time zones to more prosperous periods of history, where they wind up as virtual slaves, called mohados.

Through less than legal, let alone moral circumstances, he manages to rise above his situation, purchase a timeship, and make a prosperous life for himself -- as a coyote.

He's troubled by his past, though, which haunts his dreams, since he's cursed with a photographic memory.

And finally, as if all that isn't bad enough, for the first time in his life he falls head over heels in love.

But the woman wants to puke just looking at him.

Is there any hope for a man like this?

About the Author

R.P. Nettelhorst was born in Ohio in 1957. He finished an MA at UCLA in Semitic languages in 1983. Currently, he serves as Academic Vice President of Quartz Hill School of Theology. Married, with three daughters, he lives in Lancaster, California.