Second Chance by Chet Williamson (1995)

A time traveling future murderer ditches his friends on the way from the 60s to the 90s, in order to adopt an anonymous persona and carry out plots of mass destruction. That's the basic plot of Chet Williamson's Second Chance, and if that sounds weird enough, it gets even weirder when you expand the plot summary.

The hero of the story, a decently likable new age musician named Woody, decides he'd like to relive his past, specifically his college days from over two decades past, and he gets his old friends together, and since he's rich, he's able to rent out the exact same apartment they partied in back in the 60s, and fill it with items and artifacts from that era, recreating, as best he can, a typical partying night from the best time of his life. Back then, his girlfriend and his best friend attempted to blow up a campus ROTC building, only they end up blowing themselves up.

Now, in the present, he and his friends get together at this old apartment, they even dress as they would have in the 60s, and smoke some expensive weed, while sitting in a circle. And they end up traveling back through time, and suddenly their long-dead friends show up. Before long, they reason that they've gotta get back to the present, and they figure, why not take their dead friends with them? It works, too--they get in a circle, smoke the great weed again, and they all come back to the present, where they lead somewhat different, better lives, with their dead friends returned--except, oh, actually, the one guy, he slipped their grasp in the time traveling, and now leads a secret life as a mysterious killer named Pan, who carries out assassinations and mass killings, in the name of saving the planet.

Completely ridiculous plot--but somehow it works as a mostly serious, non-jokey, science-fiction thriller. I've never read anything else by Chet Williamson, but I wonder if his other stories are as completely crazy as this one. It's quite something that he's able to write this in a manner that can be taken seriously. He somehow pulls it off. The method of time travel, in particular, could potentially come off as very silly--something out of a low-budget stoner comedy--but damn if it doesn't work. I found myself enjoying the story so much, I didn't require any more evidence that smoking a joint with friends in a circle can send you back, or forward, through time.

The novel was originally published in 1995 and was re-released in 2002 by Leisure Books, home of a wide range of genre writers. "Second Chance" is a strange blend of horror, science-fiction, and pot, and I highly recommend it.