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Café Noir
Sunday Morning at Cafe Noir is a domestic suspense novel written as one woman’s intimate conversation with herself as she tries to make sense of her life. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
The idea of this novel came from observations of how some individuals talk in a mobius-meandering manner that almost never arrives at the initial destination. I combined this with the insight that for some these digressions are the waterfall that drowns out the primal scream of their mental anguish. I also wanted the entire book to be the unnamed narrator speaking directly to the reader – unnamed to represent how women are objectified and oppressed by systemic inequity.
Café Noir becomes much more than a setting—it feels like a place where the narrator can finally begin to confront herself. What role does the café play in her emotional journey?
Café Noir is a safe space for the narrator. Though she is surrounded by dozens of people including her husband Douglas, she is alone. Though she is drowning in her own thoughts, she is alone whether she is staring out the window or into her bowl of oatmeal. At the same time it is an uncomfortable space because there are no cleaning implements for her to distract herself from the emotional turmoil that has become the soundtrack that constantly plays in her mental background. Ironically, for the narrator, Café Noir is also the only place where she knows any degree of peace – no one to talk to so she has no need to talk about anything and everything except that which keeps pulling her under.
The novel raises difficult questions about justice, revenge, survival, and guilt without offering easy answers. Was it important to leave readers wrestling with those moral complexities?
The desired impact of the book was to confront the reader with the fact that there are no easy answers to the things that we barely survive. Many forms of media suggest that poetic justice is the answer, but in reality we have been changed and no form of justice can undo the depths of that change. Much like humanities’ quest for the better life, the more changes we bring to the world, the more we have to face unexpected consequences.
If readers leave Sunday Morning at Café Noir reflecting on one central idea beyond the suspense itself, what do you hope stays with them?
Though we intensely crave revenge in the seclusive depths of our soul, it never satisfies, it never compensates, and it never restores what was lost.
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Never Enough Time
A bell-shaped machine sits in a hidden Nazi test site in the mountains of southern Poland, humming with the sound of electric bees before it vanishes and returns with a young American woman inside. That image gives Joe Sandoval’s Never Enough Time its strange, urgent charge. Sandra Schreiber, pulled from 1965 Kecksburg into the machinery of the Third Reich, becomes both prisoner and reluctant strategist, forced to face Hitler, Himmler, and the nauseating possibility that every choice she makes might bend history in the wrong direction. I read it as historical fiction with a hard streak of time-travel alternate history, the kind of novel that treats speculative machinery less as a toy than as a moral trap.
Sandoval’s prose is at its strongest when it slows down around physical sensation. Smoke. Ozone. Rope burns. The dull headache that follows each trip through time. He likes repetition, and that gives the book a blunt, pulsing rhythm. “Everyone stood still, not breathing, not blinking” captures the novel’s best mode, when wonder and terror occupy the same breath. The dialogue can be direct, even stark, but that plainness suits a story built around interrogation rooms, military hierarchy, and people trying to survive by saying only as much as they must. My favorite line of tonal compression is Sandra’s recognition that “with the Nazis, hope never lasted long.” It’s simple and it works.
What interested me most was the book’s refusal to make time travel feel clean. Sandra doesn’t get the comfort of one heroic correction. She gets consequences, headaches, fractured memory, and the awful knowledge that even useful lies can become fuel for catastrophe. I wrestled at first with the novel’s repeated returns to brutality, especially in the scenes involving Dietrich, because the emphasis is often punishing. Then the pattern clicked. Sandoval isn’t using history as set dressing; he’s showing fascism as a system that turns cruelty into procedure. In flavor, the book sits somewhere between Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but it is angrier than the former and more mechanically plot-driven than the latter.
Readers drawn to World War II historical fiction, alternate history, Nazi occult science, time-travel suspense, and anti-fascist speculative fiction will find the most to admire here. This isn’t a delicate novel. It’s earnest and committed to the idea that history isn’t past simply because a date has passed. I came away thinking less about the machine than about Sandra’s stubborn refusal to let terror make her small. Never Enough Time is a time-travel novel with a historian’s dread and a survivor’s clenched fist.
Pages: 274 | ISBN: 9798256359768
