Some authors earn your trust so completely that the subject, genre, or plot of their latest book doesn’t matter. Jonathan Carroll is one of them. If he’s written something, I want to read it.
You don’t go to Carroll for what happens. You go because of how things unfold—quietly, strangely, in the shadows between memory and dream. Genre labels don’t stick to him: fantasy, horror, sci-fi, mystery. He shrugs them off. His stories live in the borderlands between the fantastic and the familiar.
Meet Frannie McCabe
At the center of The Wooden Sea is Frannie McCabe, the police chief of Crane’s View, New York—a town he grew up in, and the place he’s chosen to stay. He’s a former hellraiser, a Vietnam vet, twice married, now a pillar of his community. By most standards, he’s a man who’s settled. Not in defeat, but in peace. He’s where he wants to be.
And then a three-legged dog dies in his office.
That’s where the strangeness begins. The dog, named Old Vertue, feels like more than just an animal—he seems marked by a life fully lived. Frannie buries him with a quiet reverence, not realizing that this simple act will open the door to something vast, surreal, and inexplicable.
Soon, oddities ripple through his small town: a missing couple, a girl found dead in a school bathroom, a disappearing tattoo. Something is shifting. The air smells like change. And Frannie, without meaning to, starts following threads backward through his own life.
Time Travel, But Not the Kind You Know
Yes, this is a time travel story. But not the cinematic kind with glowing portals and split timelines. This is time travel that feels like American Pie—full of memory, regret, music you didn’t know you remembered. It’s a story about love, family, and the impossible chance to observe your younger self—not to fix anything, but to understand.
It’s both a coming-of-age story and a going-of-age story.
An Ordinary Man in Extraordinary Circumstances
Most stories in this genre celebrate transformation. A hero emerges. A mantle is taken up. But Frannie doesn’t transform. He adapts. He reacts as any reasonable, grounded man might—confused, stubborn, skeptical, and strangely calm.
He doesn’t become something he never was. He remains exactly who he is: someone who’s lived, made peace with his past, and now finds himself staring down a future that makes no sense. And that choice—to keep him real—feels radical.
Some readers might say the novel loses steam partway through, that it meanders or doesn’t deliver a climax worthy of its setup. And that’s true, in a way. But it’s not Carroll who stumbles—it’s Frannie. And that’s the point. The end of a cosmic, even metaphysical experience rarely wraps up in a clean, satisfying arc. Sometimes, it just ends.
Where It Happens Matters
Carroll doesn’t set his stories in mythic lands or high-concept cities. He sets them in towns like the one you grew up in or tried to get out of. Towns where everyone knows who your parents were. Where “downtown” exists mostly because it always has. Places that seem small until something extraordinary lands in the middle of them.
“Crane’s View is a peanut butter sandwich—very filling, very American, sweet, not very interesting. God bless it.”
That’s where The Wooden Sea happens. And it couldn’t happen anywhere else.
The Story Keeps Growing
This isn’t usually the Carroll book people recommend first. But maybe it should be. It doesn’t reinvent genre—it ignores it. The speculative elements don’t call attention to themselves. They just happen. And because of that, they feel truer.
When I interviewed Kelly Link, she talked about stories that grow—ones that reveal more each time you revisit them. The Wooden Sea is like that. It leaves trees to climb, questions to return to, truths submerged just beneath the surface.
Also, yes—there are aliens.
Why It All Matters
Fiction often tells us the world is worth saving. The Wooden Sea shows us why. Because it’s full of people like Frannie. Because even when the stakes are universal, what really matters are the small things: a dog’s death, a disappearing tattoo, the mystery of your own father before he was your father.
Carroll doesn’t beg us to root for McCabe. He doesn’t have to. Frannie’s story doesn’t offer big speeches or final answers. It offers recognition. You see pieces of yourself in him. Pieces you forgot you carried.
Final Note
Carroll’s gift isn’t putting a new spin on genre. It’s making you realize his version is the one that always made the most sense—you just hadn’t seen it yet. His stories don’t try to be fashionable. They feel like they already are, just for you, in the moment you read them.