Letters From Hell, Book One Time Diving
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR …
A burnt-out science teacher discovers he can meditate his consciousness back into his own teenage self and rewrite every regret. It works. Of course it works. And Letters From Hell — Book 1 of Craig Robertson’s Time Diving series — is Matt Dunsratty’s confession from the far side of what came next.
Ways To Buy Letters From Hell
BACK COVER BLURB
Regret is the eighth deadly sin. Matt Dunsratty learns it through trial and error.
He’s a tired high-school science teacher counting down to retirement, a man who can barely walk past a memory without flinching at the choices he made there. The girl he froze in front of at fourteen. The friend he failed. The career he never chased.
Then, on a slow summer afternoon, he tries an experiment so ridiculous it’s almost a joke — and his meditation lands him inside the head of his own teenage self. One whispered suggestion later, the past starts to bend. So does Matt.
Because regret, it turns out, isn’t a feeling you correct. It’s a hunger you feed.
Welcome to the Mattverse.
Letters From Hell Book Information
- ASIN : B0C22L1ZDD
- Publisher : Imagine-It Publishing
- Accessibility : Learn more
- Publication date : May 23, 2023
- Language : English
- File size : 2.0 MB
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 365 pages
- ISBN-13 : 979-8986076966
- Page Flip : Enabled
- Book 1 of 4 : Time Diving
- Genre : Time travel fiction
- Title: Letters From Hell Subtitle: Time Diving, Book 1 Author: Craig Robertson Series: Time Diving (Book 1 of 4) Genre: Science Fiction / Time Travel / Metaphysical Publisher: Imagine-It Publishing (El Dorado Hills, CA) First edition: 2022 Copyright: 2022 Craig Robertson Cover design: Alexandre — designbookcover.pt Editors: Michael R. Blanche · Beth Lynne · Forest Olivier Formatting: Drew Avera Language: English Page count: 365 Title-page line: “Be Careful What You Wish For …”
- ISBNs:
- E-book: 979-8-9860769-6-6
- Paperback: 979-8-9860769-7-3
- Hardcover: 979-8-9860769-8-0
- BISAC categories:
- FIC028070 — Fiction / Science Fiction / Time Travel
- FIC039000 — Fiction / Visionary & Metaphysical
- FIC028120 — Fiction / Science Fiction / Humorous
Audio Sample Letters From Hell
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Sample Chapters Letters From Hell
Tropes in Letters From Hell
- Consciousness time travel — no machines, no DeLorean
- Damned narrator / framing device (narration from the Gates of Hell)
- Origin story for a metaphysical-thriller series
- “Be careful what you wish for” pushed to its breaking point
- Regret reframed as a deadly sin
- Older protagonist with a younger self problem
- Coming-of-age inside a midlife crisis
- The protagonist as his own worst enemy
- First true love that haunts every timeline (Stacy / Shannon)
- Abusive-home best-friend subplot (Robbie)
- Historical-figure cameos (the Beatles, John Lennon)
- Mad-scientist antagonist out to stop the protagonist (Laszlo)
- Wisecracking first-person narrator
- Slow-burn metaphysical thriller
- Tragedy hidden inside comedy
- Cliffhanger trilogy opener
FAQs
Letters From Hell is Book 1 of Craig Robertson’s Time Diving series. Matthew Dunsratty, an aging high-school science teacher, discovers that disciplined meditation allows him to project his consciousness backward into the head of his own teenage self and plant new choices there. What begins as the harmless erasure of small regrets cascades into a destroyed marriage, a lost friendship, and ultimately a teenage version of Matt confined to a state psychiatric hospital for a murder he didn’t know he was capable of.
No, in this case, the title represents the metaphorical Hell Matt creates of his life. And remember, without loss there can be no redemption. In this case it takes four books to get there.
Letters From Hell is the first book in the Time Diving series. The original trilogy continues with Purgatory’s Best Shot (Book 2) and concludes with Heaven Says Wait (Book 3). Book 4, Into The Nexus, opens an ongoing arc set in the same Mattverse.
Time Diving uses consciousness-based time travel — no machines, no flux capacitors, no tachyons. Matt projects his mind backward into the body and brain of his own younger self, where he can influence his past thoughts and choices but cannot physically interact with the world outside that single, recursive perspective. Readers of Replay by Ken Grimwood, The Midnight Library, and 11/22/63 will recognize the territory.
Regret, Matt Dunsratty learns, is the eighth deadly sin. And it can damn you.
The Time Diving series is a four-book metaphysical time-travel saga. Matt discovers he can dive into his own past and rewrite every regret he ever had. Then he has to live with the cost — lifetime after lifetime. Narrated in a wisecracking first-person voice that owes as much to Mark Twain as to modern science fiction, the Mattverse is a sandbox of consciousness time travel, hidden time-bending societies, doomed historical voyages, and the long arithmetic of choice.
Matt is not your typical time-travel protagonist. He’s older — a tired, slightly overweight, semi-retired high-school science teacher. One slow summer afternoon, he stumbles onto a form of meditation that lets him project his consciousness into the head of his own teenage self. There are no machines. No flux capacitors. No tachyons. Just a man, a memory, and a whispered new choice. And every choice has a price.
Time Diving belongs on the shelf with the great consciousness-time-travel novels — Replay, The Midnight Library, 11/22/63. But Craig Robertson’s Mattverse adds something most of those don’t: a theology. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, and the timeless Nexus aren’t backdrops. They’re load-bearing walls. Matt isn’t just traveling through time. He’s being judged by it.
As the series unfolds, Matt learns he isn’t the only one diving. A hidden order called the Lords of Time has been at this for centuries. Biblico Hoxha started World War I on a whim. Collie Red vacations on the Titanic. Morfran Gethin shops for nuclear material the way other men shop for groceries. Katherine Bayer carries her own psychological wreckage from castle to castle across the centuries. And underneath them all waits the Nexus of Time — a sealed dimension a diver can enter but never leave.
If you love humorous time-travel for adults that still takes its ideas seriously — redemption arcs without easy endings, multiverse-of-self storytelling, historical cameos handled with care — start at the beginning of Time Diving. Don’t stop until you reach the Nexus.
Letters From Hell
Matt Dunsratty has discovered the cure for regret. He can change his past.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
By projecting his adult consciousness into his younger self, Matt can correct what he considers to be the mistakes that shaped his life. Missed opportunities. Bad decisions. Women he could have loved. Every trip backward gives him another chance to finally get things right.
But there’s one unyielding barrier to fulfilling his wishes.
Every change he makes creates a different Matt.
Soon one seemingly harmless correction demands another, and then another. Matt discovers that his increasingly frantic alterations to the past can erase marriages, children, friendships—and entire futures. And once he’s tasted such power, the temptation to keep meddling becomes irresistible.
Whether it’s saving John Lennon’s life or altering his best friend’s path to self-destruction, Matt discovers that the road to Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions. Matt is building his own personal Hell—one correction at a time.
Letters From Hell is a darkly funny, wildly whiplashing time-travel novel about regret and unintended consequences. Most of all, it’s the story of one ordinary man’s catastrophic determination to make everything better—and how he continually achieves the exact opposite.
Every. Single. Time.
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Purgatory’s Best Shot
Matthew Dunsratty knows how to time dive. Through meditation, he can reach back into a younger version of himself and rewrite the past. He’s done it hundreds of times across countless lives. He’s had Shannon, lost her. Had kids, lost them. Made the right call, made the wrong one. And now, in this particular life, he’s spending year twenty in a state hospital for the criminally insane, medicated into a near-coma, being tortured by a guard named Tucker, and eating chocolate green bean surprise every weekday.
His plan to escape — through time, if not through the front door — depends on one thing: getting off his medications long enough to focus. And his means of achieving that depends on Billy Shovellbottom, the new night med tech who keeps offering him warm blankets and wanting something in return.
Matthew knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s not sure it’s going to work. He’s also not sure it matters.
Purgatory’s Best Shot is the second book of Craig Robertson’s Time Diving series — a brilliantly dark, savagely funny, and unexpectedly moving story about a man who has spent so many lives trying to fix his mistakes that he’s lost count of which mistakes were actually his.
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Into The Nexus
The trilogy is over. The Mattverse is not.
Matt Dunsratty has walked away. From Maria. From the dive. From every regret he might be tempted to rewrite. He’s sitting on a Portuguese beach with a Sagres in one hand and a TV remote in the other, working very hard at having nothing left to do.
It would be a great plan if Morfran Gethin weren’t somewhere in 1975, buying weapons-grade plutonium from a sweating man in a Waco warehouse.
Of the Lords of Time, Biblico is dead. Collie Red is sealed in the Nexus. Katherine Bayer hides in her castle. Maurice was never going to help anyone. Matt is the last one left who cares — and the last one Morfran has to fear.
The Time Diving series continues.
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Letters From Hell Sample Chapters
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