New Maps of Dream Cody Goodfellow & Joseph S. Pulver Sr. (Eds) PS Publishing, hb, 266pp, £20) I haven’t read much Lovecraft and have little knowledge of the tales that comprise his dream cycle. Perhaps that makes me somewhat unqualified to provide a critique of New Maps of Dream, but a story, whatever its external framing device or connection to an urtext, must stand or fall on its own merits. The book’s aim, according to co-editor Cory Goodfellow, is to allow contemporary writers to explore the dreamlands, or what he terms the “collective unconscious realm,” to wander through the liminal spaces at the back of our consciousness to the dreamscape, and report back on what they have found. Lovecraft’s own forays into the dreamscape were, according to Goodfellow, an attempt to repurpose “the archetypal shamanic journey to the underworld to renew the imperfect material realm,” in which “his dreamers sought the status, adventure and beauty missing from their waking lives.” Whatever Goodfellow and Pulver’s intentions, it’s to their credit that they’ve assembled such a diverse bunch of oneironauts, rather than the usual white male suspects, to venture out into the realms of the unconscious and speak of what they found there. The collection begins with Michael Cisco’s ‘Siren Song,’ which works better as a prose poem than it does as narrative. It may be a dream about a death to come, or one that has already happened. Or perhaps it depicts the final dreaming moments before death? I don’t know because, as in a dream, nothing is clear, nothing makes sense, nothing is resolved. While the images Cisco creates are startling in themselves—“ribbons of polished human anuses travel alongside them, ribbons like slack, elastic timing belts” or “rolls of dense shadow flow towards me from my wife”—the cumulative effect is wearying, leaving the reader with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. I much preferred Kaaron Warren’s slippery and nightmarish ‘Rust Red in Moonlight’ in which the self-harming Kyle dreams of monsters and mutilated girls and birds feeding on the carrion. Even so, these unsettling vision are less horrific than the reality he has to wake up to. On the surface, ’If I could be any Animal I would be …’ by S.P. Miskowski is about Jayne who, whilst recuperating from abdominal surgery, discovers that her online identity has been stolen, possibly by her former friend Bella. Probe a little deeper though, and Miskowski seems to be drawing a parallel between the ‘versions’ of ourselves that we present through social media, and the roles we play out in dreams. Is Jayne—or Jay—really a victim of catfishing, or is she dreaming this alternate version of herself, “having travelled these pages (Facebook?) for nine years”? Does her dream-self stem from this excessive use of social media, or from her reliance on oxycodone? Her life is one of absences that can only be filled with lies. The story hints at the cost of giving oneself too wholly to another, of using oneself up. More ominously, it speaks of the dangers of living too long in the narcoleptic dreamland of social media. A powerful sense of foreboding hangs over ‘Inhata’ by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, which tells the story of Kannan, who we first meet staring directly at the sun. He’s a lonely boy prone to losing himself in daydream, and the young playmate he meets at the start may or may not be a product of that imagination. When he is older, following a peculiar death at a party, Kannan has to call on his father to help him out. Subsequently, he is given a vaguely familiar wooden idol—the Inhata of the title— by his father as some kind of protective totem. Satyamurthy alludes to the father’s background in organised crime, though Kannan deliberately obscures the reality: “His father’s profession had remained opaque to him over the years, but he knew it was mainly about sorting things out.” It’s a life that as a young man Kannan rejects, going so far at to dump the Inhata at the bottom of a dry lakebed. This action that has its own mysterious consequences, as the notion of “sorting things out” recurs, causing a schism between father and son, but which father and son? Satyamurthy’s prose is sinuous and sensual, and the story follows its own dream logic in taking us right back to where we began. Philip Fracassi’s ‘Over 1,000,000 Copies in Print’ is a wild and Hellish acid trip of a tale that, at its climax, explicitly references Lovecraft, when supplanting the God of Christianity for the new Gods of the Dreamlands. The story takes place at a book signing for Lake, a nine year old kid who has written of his near death experience and vision of heaven. Don, the protagonist, is the frazzled and sceptical book store manager, trying to run the event without incident. As the time approaches to let in the fans (or fanatics, as he sees them) who’ve been queueing up for two days, things take on a sinister edge as Don reads passages from the book, passages that seem to speak directly to him. From this point on the ‘normality’ that he takes for granted quickly unravels and the narrative implies that religious faith itself is a sort of conduit to a dream realm where, in place of Jesus Christ, a bunch of malevolent new gods rule. Another tale that draws on Lovecraft’s conception of the Dreamlands, Lucy Snyder’s ‘Ruby Soul, Bone Moon,’ is a visceral polemic against racism and the kind of ideas that Lovecraft espoused. The author manages to avoid being overly didactic as she tells of a woman who, in the aftermath of a miscarriage, dreams of her ancestors and their southern, confederate heritage, and the evils inflicted on their slaves. There she also encounters a dream version of her old history teacher, Miss Green, who tells of the connection between their two families—the protagonist’s ancestors owned Miss Green’s—and a terrible wrong that was done to Abigail, her great-great grandmother. Linking the history of the American South with the far more ancient history of the Dreamlands, Snyder has the her heroine travel to Dylath-Leen on a quest to find Abigail, a quest which is as much about reconciliation as it is about righting an individual wrong. It also offers, in the form of an unwitting, but generous sacrifice, an extraordinarily moving rationale for the protagonist’s miscarriage. ‘The Sweetest Little Girl in the World’ by Damien Angelica Walters is written as a series of excerpts from transcripts between psychiatrist Dr Beaumont, and her patient, 9 year old Lissa, whose sister has disappeared. Lissa claims to have taken her sister to a ‘dream place’, though is unable—or unwilling—to account for her disappearance. Dr Beaumont is sceptical and, over the course of their early sessions, tries to draw the truth out of Lissa. It’s a deceptively simple tale, with Beaumont’s pragmatic and sympathetic questioning drawing us in, only for Walters to pull the rug of rationality out from under our feet as the little girl’s duplicity is slowly revealed and the doctor is inexorably pulled into Lissa’s pastel coloured nightmare world. In ‘If the Cat were around He would have eaten the Fish,’ Mehitobel Wilson plays with the idea of dreaming that one’s house has an undiscovered wing or room where all manner of dark things may happen, including the usurpation of one’s own identity by a more malevolent version of oneself. Nathan Carson’s ‘Oil of Cat,’ is a slight but amusing update on Lovecraft’s story ‘The Cats of Ulthar’ in which a pair of lucid dreamers willingly give themselves up to the dreamland. Further extrapolations of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands are presented by Scott R Jones and Matthew M Bartlett in their respective stories, and while the former’s The Dankness over Dylath-Leen’ strains too hard for comic effect, the latter’s ‘The Malls of Ulthar,’ succeeds in giving us more ominous glimpses beyond the portal in the form of responses to an advert for authentic accounts of dreams. Nick Mamatas’ ‘The Onionland Tingle’ is a clever and engaging attempt to link the experience of ASMR—auto sensory meridian response, a pleasing form of paresthesia—with the dreamland. The collection ends on a sombre note with Jeffrey Thomas’s melancholy and beautifully observed ‘Drunk on Dream,’ a story that warns of the dangers of seeking solace from the pain of reality in dreams. In the wake of a painful breakup, Thomas’ protagonist turns increasingly to alcohol as a means of transporting himself to the dreamlands where he searches for something to fill the emptiness in which he is drowning. His state of mind is rendered with mournful precision, as here: He would drink before he went to bed. It would help him fall asleep, and sleep deeply; it would help him drop away into the well of sleep with such a plunge that he would bypass the lonely act of masturbation. After an encounter with an old man—possibly a dream version of himself—he decides to be more purposeful in his dreaming in the hope, we suspect, that it will lead him back to the woman he loves. Just when it seems that hope might be fulfilled, Thomas brings us back to bitter reality with a literal crash. Rarely has the appearance of the fantastic in a story been so brutally curtailed. It’s a fitting end to this exploration of the Dreamlands, one that suggests a realm that is still resistant to our whims and desires, a place that remains subject to its own internal and unfathomable laws. Mike O’Driscoll October 2021 New Maps of Dream [Hardcover] edited by Cody Goodfellow & Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. AN ANTHOLOGY edited Cody Goodfellow & Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. CATEGORY Fantasy / Horror PUBLICATION DATE Autumn 2021 COVER & INTERIOR ARTWORK Marcelo Gallegos PAGES 276 EDITIONS Unsigned Jacketed Hardcover — ISBN 978-1-786367-25-3 [£20] ABOUT THE BOOK Once, the guardians of the Cavern of Flame admitted sleeping seekers to the Dreamlands, an endless realm of sublime horrors and unspeakable beauty. Some questers returned with wisdom and otherworldly inspiration to brighten the dreary waking world, while others remained forever where beggars could become emperors, mortals could cavort with gods, and ardent dreamers could cheat even death. Once said to be more real than our own mundane reality, the Dreamlands now lie seemingly beyond our reach, the arcane art of dreaming all but forgotten. Were we exiled from it? Or has it simply changed as we have changed, since the old maps were mistaken for fantastic forgeries? To reopen the Dreamlands for a new era, Cody Goodfellow and Shirley Jackson Award-Winning editor Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. dispatched nineteen modern oneironauts to survey the feral territories of the collective unconscious, and their reports will haunt your waking hours and invade your sleep. With New Maps Of Dream, H.P.Lovecraft’s oft-overlooked other mythos is reawakened in a unique fusion of horror and fantasy, where inner and outerworlds uneasily couple and stir strangevisions fromthe elusive planewe only touch in the depths of slumber. CONTENTS
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