Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

Having very much enjoyed Amanda Downum's immersive series The Necromancer Chronicles a few years ago, I'm an obvious target for Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, an intrusion fantasy set on the Canadian west coast.

After a week plagued by nightmares, Liz Drake decides that she has to travel the three thousand miles from Connecticut to Vancouver to find out what has really happened to her friend Blake Enderly. Together with her boyfriend Alex, Liz starts looking into Blake's apparent disappearance. At first the couple's tone is slightly jokey, with Alex casting them in the roles of Holmes and Watson. But when they arrive at Rainer Morgenstern's art gallery on the back of a clue found in Blake's apartment, they discover that they're caught up something far more serious: Blake is in a coma and his boyfriend Alain is dead, both having drowned, exactly as Liz' dreams foretold.

Rainer and his partner Antja, who are as close at the book gets to human villains, are hiding all sorts of things both from Liz and Alex and from each other. Rainer is obviously involved in supplying a drug called mania, something that triggers powerful mystical visions whilst slowly transforming the user into some sort of non-human monster, while many of his occult promises seem tied up with his oath to the sinister King in Yellow. Antja, for all the apparent confidence of the masks she presents to the world, is worried about Rainer, especially in light of his infatuation with Blake, and seems to have made some sort of Faustian pact to keep them safe after some unspecified event forced them to flee Berlin for Canada.

On the other edges of events are Lailah, who seems to have moved beyond mere humanity, and Rae Morisseau, a young goth pulled into Rainer's circle through her drug-dealing boyfriend who also seems to be connected with dangerous local boss Stephen York. But despite her position on the periphery of the core events of the book, Rae plays a pivotal role in the finale, making a hard decision in light of her growing realisation that her mania habit is eating away at her humanity in a way she can't seem to fight off.

Dreams of Shreds and Tatters is a mixture of urban fantasy and Lovecraftian horror, with more than a touch of the gothic thrown in. The characters are all flawed and troubled and vulnerable in their own ways. Both Liz and Blake have troubled pasts which, much as they've tried to escape them, continue to shape their behaviour in the present. Alex, too, is struggling with an event in his past which, although only ever alluded to, seems to have followed a similar shape to Blake's current trajectory and which has left him in a broken, fragile state of health. Similarly, Antja and Rainer are caught up in the sweep of events even as they choose to shape them. Their relationship mirrors that of Liz and Alex, with both Antja and Alex having stronger feelings for their partner than are reciprocated; something that explains the bond of uneasy friendship that forms between them during a glamorous party at Rainer's gallery.

The book isn't flawless — there are bits of the narrative, like the three Alices, that seem to drop out partway through — but the world it imagines is intriguing and unsettling, the characters are strongly drawn, convincing and unsettling, while the moments of horror are suitably visceral and unpleasant, and the whole thing makes for a rewarding and engaging read.