REVIEW: A Season of Strange Dreams ~ C.S. Thompson ~ BeWrite Books ~

Title: A Season of Strange Dreams
Author: C.S. Thompson
Website of Author: http:www.
Publisher: BeWrite Books
Website of Publisher: www.bewrite.net
Genre: Fantasy
Publication date: 2003
ISBN: 1-904224-58-X
Length: 297 pages
Format: Paperback, eBook, CD ROM format
Reviewer: Lucille P Robinson
Http://www.lucilleperkinsrobinson.com
Alternative-Read.com

Nociviganti = Sleepwalker
Jim Rankin is a sleepwalker. This means that Jim visits dream worlds while he's asleep. The problem: A Gate was opened in the Fringe, a place where death, monsters, and such, inhabit and where Jim visits when he's sleeping. If the Gate remains open, it will allow all the horrors of nightmares and hell to come through into earth as we know it. Five years earlier, before this story takes place, Jim and his young group of sleepwalkers, drunk on the wine of their power to cross over into the Fringe, closed the Gate. After their return to reality, many of them were killed. Jim left town.

The solution: The Paramount, a being Jim serves who lives in the Fringe, calls Jim back to his home town. Jim gathers another small group of people to help and he returns to the Fringe to close the Gate a second time.

The story weaves back and forth between dreamland and reality as C.S. Thompson describes the action of this hard-core fantasy. It also goes back and forth between the actions Jim and his friends take to close the Gate the first time to what he must go through to close the same Gate this second time. Monstrosities more horrible than any shown in Stephen King's movies inhabit the Fringe. Murder is rampant in both the Fringe and reality. Take away the fantasy elements and the story could probably be an outline of The Godfathers from a henchman's point of view. With the fantasy elements, there is a tendency to look upon the evils from the Fringe as being the cause of our world's moral decay.

Personal opinion believes the story is what nightmares are made of. The writing is good. Jim's purpose for living is good. Descriptions give good images of the beings in the Fringe as well as the live humans of Nottamun. However, when I first started the story I was a little confused by the way the chapters alternated between the present and the past and the way Jim switches to dreamland and back to reality. After several chapters, the reader will be better able to make the switches. Anyone who likes blood and gore and a lot of profanity mixed with monsters, witches, and the walking dead, will love this book.

Author Bio:

C.S. Thompson is the President of the Cateran Society, an organization devoted to researching and practicing the historic Gaelic martial arts. He is a poet and translator, and an author of crime fiction, horror, dark fantasy, and a manual on the use of the Highland broadsword. He is a board member of the Fellowship for Celtic Tradition LLC, and a member of the Celtic Martial Arts Research Society. He is 30 years old, and lives in Portland, Maine, US.

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