Have you ever felt, with a sense verging on a conviction, that if you just took a different turning or went down another street, that you could simply walk right out of this world? Do you suspect that some among the lost and the disappeared, those who go and never come back, are some who did exactly that? Have you felt the shift of the world’s scenery and thought that, for a moment, you glimpsed the other scenes upon other stages?

I have. I don’t know if Michael Scott Rohan did too, before his death (now, he knows the truth of what he perhaps glimpsed), but Chase the Morning is predicated on just this happening to its hero, Steve, a yuppie shipping agent: the hollow man of the 1980s when greed was good. Steve stumbles out of this world and into another, and then the other world comes after him in this one, and he has no choice but to follow, out of the Core and into the Rim, sailing into the cloud archipelago of the worlds of deep history and deeper imagination that exist in parallel to our own mundane reality. What’s more, the Rim is a world of pirates and adventure and dark magic and mystery. If you get to step out of our world directly into another, Rohan’s would be one of the most adventuresome to visit. It’s a gripping, vivid read, made better by Rohan’s excellent prose and well-written characters, none more so than Steve, the slowly filling hollow-man protagonist.

I wonder where Michael Scott Rohan is wandering now. I hope he has visited the Rim and found there adventure beyond anything he imagined.