TRIP TO THE QUIET ROOM is a novel about family, about what you do when the limelight goes away, about time travel and obsessions.

It’s also about cotton candy factories staffed by underage labor, blacksmiths, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, past and present, fighting (and post-concussion syndrome) in ice hockey, and about made-to-order wishes, granted by the butterfly ranch hidden on the Cape Cod National Seashore.

It is around 75,000 words of time-slip fiction, and is an account of the hunt for William Murphy as seen from four points of view: his own, that of his wife and daughter, stranded in the past, an ex-teammate who now works for the FBI, and the director of Old Sturbridge Village, a long-in-the-tooth tourist attraction.

The novel is similar to James Renner’s “The Great Forgetting” or Dexter Palmer’s “Version Control.”