★★★★☆ All Manner of Thing Shall Be, by Olivie Blake
A fun little bit of time-travel insanity
All Manner of Thing Shall Be
Olivie Blake
A fun little bit of time-travel insanity
The fifth story in Amazon’s Time Traveler’s Passport series, All Manner of Thing Shall Be by Olivie Blake, is a fun little bit of insanity. It concerns a group of mostly very old beings living in a mansion in Southern California. I say “beings” because the majority of them are not baseline humans. There’s a vampire, two monsters from Philippine folklore along with some more human characters from different eras. When I call them “very old” I don’t necessarily mean that the individuals themselves have lived a long time. Some of them were born long ago but arrived at their present time through time travel and are therefore not old in body.
They have diverse and complicated obsessions. One of them wants to assassinate Ferdinand Magellan. This is not as impractical as it may sound, because although Magellan has been dead for centuries, she (the assassin) has a time-travel bus at her disposal. A bigger problem, however, is that one of her housemates’ obsessions is to prevent Magellan’s assassination. And some of them have more ordinary concerns, such as making sure that the PTA (that’s Parent Teacher Association, for non-USAians) of her local school performs according to her specifications.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor will you expect it to. But it’s funny. One of the better stories in the series, and probably the most amusing of the five I’ve read so far.