The Reading Bud

Book Details:

Author: E.B. Miller 
Release Date: 6 July 2026
Series:
Genre: Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Format: E-book 
Pages: 286 pages
Publisher: Evil Eye Publishing
Blurb:
Mark Robson is trapped in flux.
Every 18 minutes and 32 seconds he wakes up in a new reality, then dies.
The only clues to help him stop this crazed cycle and return home to his pregnant wife are the people, things, and events that reappear across worlds,
…or what he calls his constants.

Review

Constants by E.B. Miller is a wildly inventive, darkly funny, and emotionally bruising speculative novel about death, reality, grief, addiction, love, and the terrifying instability of existence. The story follows Mark Robson, an archaeologist who finds himself trapped in “flux,” a looping condition in which he appears in a new reality, lives for exactly eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds, and then dies again. Sometimes the worlds are recognisably ordinary; sometimes they are cartoonish, apocalyptic, mythic, futuristic, or absurd. But through the chaos, certain things keep returning: the countdown, earthquakes, his pregnant wife Lya, his missing twin sister Alex, and the Psychiatrist who gradually becomes both witness and anchor.

The novel’s greatest strength is its sheer conceptual audacity. Miller takes a premise that could easily have become repetitive and turns it into a relentless existential puzzle. Each new “existence” becomes another possible clue, another psychological projection, another metaphysical test. The book constantly asks whether Mark is travelling across dimensions, dying repeatedly, dreaming, hallucinating, trapped in a delusion, or being observed by something larger and stranger than human understanding. The result is a story that feels like Groundhog Day thrown into a multiverse blender with existential horror, gallows humour, and a very damaged heart at its centre.

Mark is an excellent protagonist precisely because he is not easy to like all the time. He is angry, sarcastic, terrified, self-pitying, intelligent, cruelly funny, emotionally avoidant, and often exhausting. But that is also what makes him compelling. His horror is not simply that he keeps dying, it is that each death strips away his ability to pretend. His marriage to Lya, his guilt over Alex, his fear of fatherhood, his alcoholism, his grief for his mother, and his lifelong suspicion that happiness is something other people are allowed to keep all become inseparable from the cosmic madness around him.

The relationship between Mark and the Psychiatrist is one of the book’s strongest narrative devices. Their recurring appointments give the chaos a frame and a much-needed structure. The Psychiatrist’s office becomes a strange little island of analysis inside the storm, where theories are tested and the impossible is treated with increasing professional seriousness. Their exchanges are often funny, tense, and surprisingly moving, especially as the Psychiatrist shifts from sceptic to witness to someone whose own reality has been contaminated by Mark’s condition.

The prose is sharp, kinetic, profane, and often very funny. Author Miller has a gift for absurd violence and surreal image-making. At its best, the writing captures the exact emotional texture of panic: the racing thoughts, black humour, bodily terror, and sudden flashes of insight that come when the mind has no stable place to stand.

That said, Constants is not a light or tidy read. The novel is long, intense, and intentionally disorienting. Some readers may find the repeated deaths, philosophical debates, and reality-theory discussions overwhelming. The book’s humour is also quite abrasive, and Mark’s voice can be relentless. But for readers who enjoy speculative fiction that is conceptually bold, emotionally messy, and unafraid of both absurdity and grief, that relentlessness becomes part of the experience.

Overall, Constants is ambitious, strange, darkly comic, and emotionally resonant. It is speculative fiction with teeth: funny, frightening, chaotic, intelligent, and unexpectedly tender in its treatment of people who are trying, and often failing, to reach one another across impossible distance.

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