Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! by Adam Dove
Publisher: Last-Picked Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

In these six stories, full of dangerous magic, fragile men, and broken families, Adam Dove explores the macabre reality of masculinity and the lives it destroys.

A teenager becomes trapped in a cyclical dreamscape, turning a high school crush into an absurdist nightmare. A promising sculptor uses a new technique to mold his lover into the perfect woman. A deserted child’s search for his missing father leads him to the sinkhole on the outskirts of town—which his classmates say leads straight to Hell.

Spanning the breadth of genre and blurring the lines between reality, dream, and nightmare, the stories in Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! show us that beneath the hardened shell of masculinity is a broken, wailing humanity, desperate to be free.

Anything is possible in dream-like places.

In “Unstable Ground,” a deserted child’s search for his missing father in a sinkhole quickly spiralled out of control. I loved the dreamlike quality of this tale, especially as the main character wandered further into the sinkhole and discovered things that made this reader shudder. Every layer, both metaphorically and literally, of the underground tunnels and caverns he explored gave another clue about what was happening and made me wonder if my previous assumptions about what was really going on should be reevaluated. This was something I couldn’t stop reading until I knew how it all ended.

“Everyone! In the Dream! Is You!” continued the trend of making this reader feel like I was trapped in a nightmare, but this time the setting was a high school where the rules of physics and biology kept changing so quickly that I had trouble keeping up with what was going on. It would have been helpful to have a more defined plot in this story given how many other aspects of it were different from one scene to the next. This was a pattern that repeated in a few other stories, too, and led me to choose the rating I did.

A rotting, infected tooth caused such horrible pain for a character in “Heap” that he decided to take matters – and maybe even a molar – into his own hands. This opening scene set the stage for an exploration of a relationship that was placid on the surface but filled with mysterious and horrifying twists and turns the moment its surface was scratched. The vivid descriptions in it made me shudder sometimes, but I couldn’t possibly stop reading.

Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! was surreal.