Subject to Change

San Francisco, 1960. Pendleton is coming home after two months away, eager to reunite with his fiancée Beth. But something has changed. Beth can become things. A bird. A cat. A spotted dog carrying stolen goods in her jaws. She can fold herself into an umbrella and walk out of stores. What begins as bewilderment curdles into something darker as Pendleton realizes his future wife has become someone else entirely, someone who transforms to escape, to take, to feel free. Ron Goulart's novel is a fever dream of early sixties San Francisco, where the space age optimism masks something more sinister: the terror of loving someone who cannot stay who they are. This is identity as fluid, frightening, and strangely beautiful. The prose has a hallucinatory quality, both playful and tragic, exploring what it means to know another person when that person can become anything. For readers who want their science fiction strange, philosophical, and unafraid to ask what we owe to the people we love when they become strangers.