reviewed by
Bonita Crider
Five strangers with nothing apparently in common are drawn to a dark basement room. Instead of finding the answer to their nightmares, they find the nightmare itself. Each one dreamt of another's death. As a reporter and a detective try to unravel what happened and why, the pattern emerges again, with those trying to resolve the mystery becoming part of it. That's the basic premise of Shane Christopher's In Dreams.
Horror is an oddly visceral genre, and achieving that kind of elemental effect in written form is tricky. A writer can take the low road by wallowing in the gory, stomach lurching details, going for a truly "gut reaction." It's something that a lot of lesser writers opt for. Thankfully, Christopher doesn't go that route. He alludes to nasty details but never describes them, leaving it more to our imaginations. A smart move, since what we imagine for ourselves is always worse than what some one else can imagine for us. And it's less distasteful than graphic gore.
The next trick for the horror writer is to create atmosphere. It's a balancing act between that setting the mood of fear and camp. The method Christopher opts for is an ordinary day, ordinary life with Something Very, Very Wrong. It's worked for Stephen King, so it's not a bad choice. Unfortunately, Christopher's writing is so pedestrian that rather than create a sense of dread, his writing evokes more of a "eh?" reaction.
So what's left for the writer who skips the gore and fails at atmosphere? It's the puzzle, the mystery, the explanation for what the heck is going on here. And that requires that the author has thought everything out well in advance for the result so that all the puzzle pieces fit together. It doesn’t seem like the writer did that kind of mental homework. He gives hints of some sublime maleficent power at work but it never connects that power, whatever it is, to the events in a tangible way. As a result, everything builds to a brutal crescendo, but makes no sense. And in the end, you're left no wiser about the events than 280 pages before.
