Ken Grimwood's telling debut novel, Breakthrough (1976), was heavily influenced by EC Comics, concluding its blend of science fiction, reincarnation and horror elements with the surprising & unpredictable twist ending. Cured of epilepsy by the breakthrough inside medical technology, 26-season-old Elizabeth Austinside has miniature electrodes deep-seated in her brain. She may control her seizures by pressing an external remote to activate a electrodes. Adjusting to the normal life, she is ready to patch higher the disruptive marriage & resume her abandoned career. All the same, when a portion of the implant operation, Elizabeth gave her consent for the insertion of more electrodes, featuring experimental functions unknown to science. Whilst one of victims electrodes is caused, Elizabeth lives memories which are then non her have. She discovers the remote control has given her a ability to eavesdrop in her last life 200 years it used to be that, & she keeps this a secret from either her doctor. Intrigued, she finds a earliest being appealing & begins to spend other & supplementary instance there. At length, she discovers that a woman it used to be that occurs as manslayer world health organization is plotting to destroy Elizabeth's married man in the present.

Although Breakthrough went away from print shortly fallowing publication, creator Gary Carden ranked it alongside books by Stephen King and Ray Bradbury: "Over the last 40 years, there are 40 or 50 'good trash' books that have remained in my memory because the writing was graphic, suspenseful and tense. Like the clichéd blurb on the cover of most suspense or crime fiction always promises, I found I 'could not put it down.' A lot of these managed to frighten me, and that is a pretty good trick. When I read Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, I actually turned on all of the lights, locked the door and finished the book before sunrise. The same thing is true of Stephen King’s ''Salem's Lot. I read it in a motel in Maggie Valley and ended up finishing it in the lobby where I had the comforting presence of other people. I’ll not forget James Hall’s Bone of Coral or James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues or Ray Bradbury’s October Country. Then there was a book by Ken Grimwood called Breakthrough and William Goldman’s Marathon Man''. All of these authors have the ability to 'set the hook' in the first page, and then you are there for the long haul, reading as you eat, neglecting the chores and refusing to answer the phone. You aren’t reading Kafka or Tolstoy, and you know it, yet you know the author is far better than most writers of popular 'thriller' or 'suspense' fiction. Sometimes, he gets pretty close to 'literature,' but essentially, he is just entertaining you."

Film producer William Castle took an interest within adapting Breakthrough for a picture show, however the design was never realized. Breakthrough has certain parallels by owning David Williams' 2nd Sight (Simon & Schuster, 1977), coincidentally written a equivalent month & late adapted for the TV flick, Them Worlds of Jennie Logan (1979). Williams has commented, "As the author of Second Sight, I have to tell you that until I read this Wikipedia page in 2004, I had never heard of Ken Grimwood or his novel Breakthrough."

A 1988 World Fantasy Award went to Grimwood for his novel Replay (Arbor House, 1987), the compelling account of 43-season-old radio journalist Jeff Winston, world health organization dies & awakens back withinside 1963 in his 18-month-old system. He so begins relive his life by owning intact memories of the next Xxv years, & this happens repeatedly sustaining different cases inside both period. This acclaimed novel, the best seller within Japan, was an obvious influence in Harold Ramis' comedy-drama Groundhog Day (1993), and variations of Grimwood's plot premiss can too become seen in the Japanese film Taan, aka Turn (2001), and a 1993 TV movie 12:01, adapted from either a Richard Lupoff short story "12:01 PM," originally in the December, 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Around Locus magazine's 1998 poll of the better fantasy novels published before 1990, Replay located #32.

Orson Scott Card, reviewing Replay for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May, 1987), wrote, "Jeff makes a quick fortune gambling on sure things; this time the 1970s and 1980s are filled with the glamour and disappointment of wealth. Until he dies again. And again wakes up in 1963. And again, and again, replays of his past life, each time wiser than the time before, each time surprised by new joy, new pain. Children he raised and then lost, lovers who don't want him the second time around. Desperately lonely with all his knowledge that he cannot share, he searches for others caught in the same endless loop of lifetimes. And finds some. Grimwood's style is clear, penetrating. He leads us through Jeff Winston's lives with great skill, never lingering too long with any one experience, never moving so rapidly that we cannot taste the flavor of each passage through the decades. Replay is Pilgrim's Progress for our time, a stern yet affectionate portrait of the lives we lead. When I finished it, I felt I had been moving with the hidden rhythm of life, that I had seen more clearly, that I had loved more deeply than is ever possible in one short passage of years."

Publishers Weekly reviewed, "Grimwood has transcended genre with this carefully observed, literate and original story. Jeff's knowledge soon becomes as much a curse as a blessing. After recovering from the shock (is the future a dream, or is it real life?), he plays out missed choices. In one life, for example, he falls in love with Pamela, a housewife who died nine minutes after Jeff; they try to warn the world of the disasters it faces, coming in conflict with the government and history. A third replayer turns out to be a serial killer, murdering the same people over and over. Jeff and Pamela are still searching for some missing parts of their lives when they notice they are returning closer and closer to the time of their deaths, and realize the replays and their times together may be coming to an end."

Grimwood's fascination by owning cetacean intelligence, encounters with dolphins and a food and drug administration into intraspecific dolphin communication gave him the inspiration for Into a Deep (William Morrow, 1995), a "spiritual adventure" all about a marine life scientist struggling to crack the code of dolphin intelligence. It features protracted inventive passages written from either a point-of-learn from of many dolphin characters. To locate "the willful denial and gratuitous cruelty" exposed within tunthe camping, Grimwood secretly infiltrated a crew of a San Diego-depending tuna boat.

More novels include A Voice Outside (1982), exploring mind control & telepathy-getting doses, & Elise (1979). Innate inside Versailles within 1683, Elise is immortal due to her DNA, & a story traces her lives by using various lovers & married man through the centuries.

Grimwood died of the heart attack in his home in Santa Barbara, California. At the instance of his dying, he was writing a sequel to Replay. His works come involved in the [http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/sbauthors_1.html Santa Barbara Authors and Publishers] Favorite Collection at a University of California, Santa Barbara.