Side Life

By: Steve Toutonghi

Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith

Dazzling, paranoid literary sci-fi for fans of Blake Crouch and Philip K. Dick

Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. There is also a dog-eared notebook filled with circuit diagrams, beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, and pages of code.

When Vin decides to climb into one of the caskets to see what happens, his reality begins to unravel, and he finds himself on a terrifying journey that asks fundamental questions about reality, free will, and the meaning of a human life.

©2018 Steve Toutonghi (P)2018 Recorded Books

Maybe it was too smart for me?

I enjoyed this story and i consider myself smart, BUT this deep time/space concept confused me and I felt dissatisfied at the end.

Umm... what the heck!?

T. Ryder Smith was an awesome narrator. He is, by far, my favorite narrator that I’ve heard since I started listening to audiobooks a few years ago. And that’s saying A LOT coming from me! I’m super picky about narrators. Most of them either get the character voices all wrong, have the wrong type of accent for how I’m picturing the character, are too monotoned, or they just stink altogether. So I was very happy with T. Ryder Smith’s performance. Well done!


Now for the book itself. I gave the story 3 stars. At first, I would have been totally willing to give the story all 5 stars. But over time, I found myself getting more and more frustrated by it. For one, I didn’t see a point in the portion of the book where Vin goes into other people’s “bodies” and is essentially in their minds. The fact that it was a completely separate story EVERY TIME he did a “shot” bothered me. If the author had connected the stories somehow at the end, then fine. But I honestly found myself tuning those parts of the book out completely until Vin woke up from his shots. I mean really, they were quite pointless. The cannibal, the war and balloon guy, William, Winston Churchill... etc. I mean... maybe I just wasn’t understanding what they had to do with the rest of the story, but I didn’t find them to be interesting at all. If the author had focused more on the different realities and that part of the story line, then this book could have been absolutely epic. I was so excited to find a book about different/alternate realities at first. So I was really REALLY disappointed when this ended with next to no answers about anything. There was no real climax and there was no real “OHHH!” moment where I finally put everything together and realized the point of the story. It just sort of... ended. I think the author confused himself, honestly. I really do. I think he focused way too much on the story lines of the people whose bodies Vin went into and not enough on the story line of Vin himself. And SPOILER ALERT: YOU NEVER FIND OUT WHO NERDEAN IS!! Never. Not even an inkling. Vin’s story never comes together and you never really find out how Kim and his daughter were shot in that one reality. I could go on and on about my frustrations, but overall, the story just fell completely flat. Very disappointing.

Surprisingly good!

Had not heard of this author before, and there was little to go on from the reviews, but I found it to be excellent. I enjoyed his accurate descriptions of obscure parts of Seattle, and the story was just quirky and edgy enough to make it feel plausible even though the premise is pretty far fetched. Well narrated by T. Ryder Smith. I'm looking forward to more from Toutonghi.

The hidden gem I'm delighted I found!!

This was an amazing book. I had never heard of Steve Toutonghi, but this book is the novel I've waited for my entire life. I don't want to give away too much, but if you have ever enjoyed sliders, or the Dark Mirror Episodes of star trek and thought, "I wish their was a scientifically accurate version of this concept somewhere," this is that book!