Discover Cherryville: The Newest Tale by Jerry Stubblefield

Let’s start with the full title — that is, the title and subtitle. It’s Cherryville, selections from a divaricated life. “Divaricated” means splitting off, or branching out in different directions. You could say tree branches divaricate as they go from the trunk out to their tips. As human beings, we don’t think of our lives as divaricating; instead we experience a single line through time beginning with our childhood all the way to the end. Cherryville takes some current scientific thinking about the divaricating nature of reality — the idea, supported by some pretty solid scientific thinking, that the universe is constantly divaricating into countless other universes — and applies the theory to one Nelson Goines. Nelson is a pleasant young man who can’t help noticing that sometimes his “self” takes off into another universe. He promptly forgets the history of the universe he has just left and takes on memories of a somewhat different history. He finds that, unfortunately, the girl he’s falling in love with one day, hardly knows him the next day. And as the previous history fades, his new memory verifies that here, he wasn’t actually so enthralled with that girl after all.

But Cherryville is not a sci-fi based romcom. Nelson Goines has a disturbed and disturbing past that he must confront even as it leads him into depraved and violent situations in the present, the past, and the future. The multiverse messes with the linear time line we take for granted, and it messes with who the people in our lives have become — even to the extent that we might see ourselves in another person who has been swapping universes.

In a sense the story of Cherryville, selections from a divaricated life is complex, but taken one page at a time, the book is easy to follow and makes as much sense as… well, as much sense as life itself. — J.S.