You're alive. In some way you're connected to everything around you. Everything that you choose to do. There's a connection between you and your life. Then something happens...

That damn ditch...

Now your life is filled with events and people but there's an overwhelming Déjà vu. Except you don't feel it as Déjà vu. There's just something uncanny about everything that happens. Every person you meet. Shuffled. Everything that made you you comes back but out of order. Out of context. Repetition of something almost just like something before. The decisions you previously felt embodied in now just seem to happen. As if in a dream. It's almost like you're watching yourself do everything you've done, but again and slightly different. That person is now this person. Wasn't that painting different? Much like a dream you sense what's coming but can't focus on it.

Who really did shoot you?
Why did you sit back down at that table?
At least your billiard skills seem to follow you here.

A blurb on the front from the LA Times states that it's an American Book of the Dead.
I usually cringe at that description.
This time it might be accurate.

This is a book that takes the tropes of the western genre and tells what it feels like to live, and then live again being subtly forced to make sense of your previous experiences.

Maybe it's more like a western Groundhog's Day, except every day all the main pieces and events are shifted so slightly. Not enough to bring awareness of the new situation you are in (you basically travel in a dream state) but just enough to make you randomly focus on very small details that swing into focus on each go round.

I started this review by giving this book 4 stars, but right now I think I'm changing it to 5.
There's something special here.

Hard to pin down but sticks with you like that dream that keeps coming back during the day in furtive snatches. ( )

"Quien es?" The same scene is reenacted over and over again in this hallucinatory Western. Or is it?
Wurlitzer examines the nature of consciousness, and human identity in this saga of Zebulon Shook and his quest to find the woman who (through no fault of her own) is destined to betray him. If this sounds like a bloodless storytelling exercise, it isn't. Bags of rattlesnakes, out of tune barroom pianos, saloon gunfights, exotic locales, ghosts, potlaches, supremely bad parenting and rivers of whiskey make The Drop Edge of Yonder an entertaining book. It's one I'll probably reread. ( )

Part violent jaunt up and down California and Mexico during the gold-rush, part vision quest, Zebulon is a man between life and death. Along with his half-brother, a reformed gunslinger turned medicine man, and the mysterious Delilah, caught between the worlds and the brothers, the three avoid hangings, jail time, and a bounty on his head while trying to find themselves. Moderate sex scenes, explicit language, graphic violence, drug use.