When the novel Westchester Station opens, we meet Robert Winstead, an advertising salesman who, we quickly learn, takes pride in always being on time, to the point of being obsessive about it. Even with all his careful preparation, he can't control mother nature. When a snowstorm in Chicago grounds his plane to a business appointment in Schenectady, he rises to the challenge of getting to that meeting on time. All he has to do is catch a train to Schenectady. But he has to take a taxi to get to the train station . . . What he couldn't possibly anticipate is something rising up and challenging him in return. An intertimensional train station, no less. An ironic situation for a man obsessed with time to get stuck in a place where time doesn't follow any rules he's familiar with.

Winstead is told by the station manager, "You come to Westchester Station for a purpose. When you leave, you have fulfilled that purpose." In other words, the station is a metaphor for getting people whose lives have been derailed for some reason back on the right track, and that it's not that easy to recognize the derailment and even harder to find the way to correct it. In the quest to discover why he's there, Winstead explores the station. His encounters and discoveries are told in a series of vignettes featuring different characters, each with their own reason for being there.

The mindset of the reader is very important to the enjoyment of Westchester Station. If readers don't catch on to the vignette structure of the book, they will find it confusing and possibly even disappointing. The only constants that unify the vignettes are Winstead, his quest, and the station itself. The plot does not have the kind of progression or dramatic elements many readers are accustomed to, and many would call Westchester Station "plotless," some might go as far as to say "pointless." These readers have to stop looking for a traditionally structured plot and enter into the same journey of discovery as Winstead.

The structure of the work is akin to the serendipity of real life--except I suspect that the station has some control over where Winstead explores and who he encounters based on his own knowledge of the world, although in his own mind he visits most of the station. Unless he's extremely well read for an advertising salesman, he comes across as knowing more detail about history, myth, legends, etc. than he really should. Winstead's detailed and diverse knowledge chips at how much readers are willing to accept. Any false note in the world of lies that fantasy stories are spun from tends to collapse the effort of readers to suspend disbelief.

Believing that the station somehow chooses the situations Winstead encounters from his own knowledge and frame of reference also helps relieve the nagging suspicion that Welch used Westchester Station as a vehicle to expand miscellaneous ideas that he has always wanted to expand upon. Sometimes one gets the feeling that Westchester Station is as much about Welch indulging in the exploration of favorite ideas as Winstead's journey of discovery.

Because Winstead is looking for the purpose that brought him to Westchester Station, we may expect each encounter to have an impact on him--revelations to help guide him to the right track (literally) and the right train to rumble away to the rest of his life. But something more interesting happens. More often than not, he has an impact on the person he encounters. Instead of these other people being the catalyst that changes his life, he's the one who changes their lives. As if the novel is really about the stories of those people and the reader is given narrow peeks through Winstead's eyes into those ongoing lives. These impacts aren't always positive or predictable because Winstead's own sense of self comes into play. Winstead has always had a strong sense of control over what he thinks is the ideal for an orderly and successful life. In Westchester Station he discovers the destructive side of these perceptions.

Westchester Station is an experimental and dark piece. Welch does a fine job of depicting the other main character--the station itself--as a place with impossibly varied spaces that seem to be a bit dingy around the edges. My only real complaint is that the editor's touch was too light. The book has a few too many typos, instances of incorrect punctuation, and, in a couple of places, words obviously missing, than most readers feel comfortable with for both reading and purchasing.

For those readers who enjoy an engaging, thought provoking adventure for the mind, Westchester Station may have just the ticket--as long as you don't want to go to Schenectady.