Actual rating: 3.5🌟

This is a collection of 4 stories with time looping and time war as a theme. I love stories with time elements on it and I was excited to read this one.

Among the 4 stories, I like the 1st one the most. I've read it months ago and I remember it being action packed and time loop was used in an interesting way.

The 2nd story was short and felt a bit disjointed. The 3rd one is okay-ish but a bit confusing. The 4th one is connected with the 3rd story and so is the epilogue. I quite like that Art is on the epilogue.

The last story has lots of infodump and it kinda lost me, lol.😅

Overall, it was an okay read for fans of time travel and aliens.

*Thanks to the publisher for granting me access of this book via Netgalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest thoughts and opinions of the book.*

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Time Loopers: Four Tales from a Time War by David Hambling, Byron Craft, Matt Davenport, and John Delaughter is a science fiction book of five interconnecting short stories. Mr. Hambling is an English freelance journalist and author. Mr. Craft is a screenwriter, published articles, and an author of Lovecraftian horror. Mr. Davenport is a published author with many sci-fi and horror books under his belt. Mr. Delaughter is a writer of horror and Lovecraftian anthologies.

The book consists of five stories:

Time’s Revenge by David Hambling – The main character keeps living the same day over and over again, which he can reset with an app on his phone. The protagonist has lived the day so often that he goes through the routine of investing money, making millions in case he’ll make it to the next day. But he’s not the only one that can reset the day.

The Comatose Many by Byron Craft – A comatose man shows up in as mall town in the ‘50s, with an ID placing his birth 20 years in the future, as well as magical gadgets. The story explores the consequences of going back in time trying to prevent an event from happening.

Time Trapped by Matthew Davenport – Irene, a librarian, discovers a book of spells used to travel through planes of existence. She, of course, thinks it’s all fake until she transports for the first time with all the consequences, intended and unintended, it entails. Irene doesn’t only travel in time, but between planes of existence, taking over someone’s body and being manipulated by something, or someone, she doesn’t know, on missions she doesn’t understand.

The Terror Out of Time by John A. DeLaughter – This story tells of a billionaire, Dimitri-Laurent de Marigny, who is obsessed with the idea of eternal life. De Marigny sends an expedition to find the secrets of the 1920s the Dyer Expedition that returned from Antarctica, the few survivors talking about strange creatures, creepy fossils, and more.

A Stitch in Time – the epilogue which brings it all together. This short story is from the point of view of Art, one of the time travelers that appears in all the other stories. Art is trying to tie up loose ends from the mess left by the protagonists of the previous stories.

Books like Time Loopers: Four Tales from a Time War by David Hambling, Byron Craft, Matt Davenport, and John Delaughter are always difficult to write about since, usually, the quality and style varies between authors. This book, however, has all five stories which are well written and interesting. Even though they are written by the different authors, the stories are similar enough and in the same vain that it doesn’t really bother the reader.

The concept is fine, I’ve read similar books (sections written by different authors) and I realize it takes a lot of work and communication to make them work. The key, I believe, is to give the authors enough information to tie the stories together, but also much freedom to make them their own.

I really enjoyed four out of the five stories. One story was, for me, a little difficult to follow and somewhat convoluted, but overall it’s a very enjoyable book with great takes on time travel, as well as traveling between worlds.

The collection opens up with an introduction explaining the background, settings, and an idea what to expect from the rest of the book. The introduction is something which I really appreciated (even though I disagreed with the author’s assessment of the excellent movie Edge of Tomorrow), because it gave me a heads up of what to expect and not feel lost within the first several pages of the first story.

This is a book which is sometimes complex, but mostly full of fun and very interesting concepts. The writing is good despite, or because, the different styles. The book has a bit of everything sci-fi, horror, and even a group of alien gods, and it’s always interesting to have one book to check out how different authors tackle the same, or at least a very similar, subject.

TIME LOOPERS is a fantastic science fiction horror anthology that deals with time travel as well as occult subjects like H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. I think I enjoyed the first story by David Hambling the most as it dealt with a time traveling assassin who may be stuck in his own personal hell because his opponents have access to time travel too. Who exactly can "win" and what are the parameters for losing? The others are nicely related to Miskatonic University, Yog-Sothoth, and other creatures I absolutely love. It was a bit of a twist moving from the first story to occult-horror but I still enjoyed it.

While the stories weren't really for me, for different reasons, they were well written and I really liked how they handled the time loop elements. Especially seeing how the loop influences the protagonists personal life and mentality in the first story was great, however it was very much a action/spy story, which just isn't my jam.
After reading that one, I was pretty aware that the others probably wouldn't be my type of story, which maybe influenced how I read them. They were different from each other and offered a nice variety, though, and the introduction was very effective, but I don't feel qualified to review this any further.

I was given a copy of this book to review.

As I started to read this book, thoughts of groundhog day came to mind. I also recalled the same ideas from the TV show Supernatural. I was very surprised not to see the same basic theme. The story has much action and drama, each time the "day" resets, new events occur. The constant change in the storyline was wonderful to come across.

Well written and loads of action and easy to follow. This is a great SciFi read.