Eric Heisserer is best known as the screenwriter who adapted Ted Chiang’s brilliant novella “Story of Your Life” into the blockbuster film Arrival. Heisserer’s debut novel, Simultaneous (2025), benefits from a high-concept premise and makes for a breezy, engaging read.
A thriller with a speculative premise, Simultaneous’s driving narrative force is in fact its central relationship. Grant Lukather is a Homeland Security agent in an obscure “predictive analytics” division, his job to investigate leads that purport to anticipate forthcoming terrorist attacks. A tip-line call brings Grant into contact with Sarah Newcomb, a Santa Monica therapist who specializes in past-life hynopsis. One of Sarah’s clients successfully predicts an explosion, making this the first time ever that one of Grant’s “psychic” leads has had a positive result. Working together, Grant and Sarah make a startling discovery about the nature of existence that embroils them in faceoff against a highly unusual serial killer.
Simultaneous is confident and clever, with an accessible style and likeable core duo whose teamwork inevitably spawns a “romance under fire.” Heisserer keeps the pace energetic, and while there’s an occasional screenplay-blocking vibe to the prose, his characters are nicely defined and he has a fine handle on the requisite genre protocols. This one would probably make a fun movie, and definitely left me interested to see more of the author’s work in this medium.
