Nightmares and Reality Merge in the Eerie Glimpse
Genre authors have employed nightmares, visions, hallucinations, and dreams to serve as woozy, off-balance plot devices, allowing their stories to get wried without necessarily making it all make sense. When done well (Bentley Little is a guy who does it quite well) the resulting vibe is akin to staggering through a house of mirrors while dizzy, a hodge-podge of prickly, not-quite-familiar sensations: weird, alien, frightening. As a reader, you find a chill running down your spine, and the sudden need to pinch yourself to make sure you’re still awake.
Glimpse: A Novel
Hardcover $26.99
Glimpse: A Novel
Hardcover $26.99
While perhaps best known for his action-packed sci-fi/bizarro-terrorism Joe Ledger series, prolific horror/suspense/comic writer Jonathan Maberry takes his own deep dive into the world of bad dreams in Glimpse, which begins as a bleakly unsettling drama, merges into a manic thriller zone, then quickly takes a hard left into the askew realm of the supernatural. Or does it? It’s hard to know for sure, as the narrative slides smoothly, sometimes imperceptibly, back and forth, constantly asking what is real, and what is just a vision. It’s a question imbued with unhealthy tinges of depression, loneliness, and addiction prevalent in the lives of nearly all of the primary characters.
While perhaps best known for his action-packed sci-fi/bizarro-terrorism Joe Ledger series, prolific horror/suspense/comic writer Jonathan Maberry takes his own deep dive into the world of bad dreams in Glimpse, which begins as a bleakly unsettling drama, merges into a manic thriller zone, then quickly takes a hard left into the askew realm of the supernatural. Or does it? It’s hard to know for sure, as the narrative slides smoothly, sometimes imperceptibly, back and forth, constantly asking what is real, and what is just a vision. It’s a question imbued with unhealthy tinges of depression, loneliness, and addiction prevalent in the lives of nearly all of the primary characters.
Our troubled lead is 24-year-old Rain Thomas, a recovering drug addict still reeling from the ramifications of an unwanted teen pregnancy and the unexpected death of the baby’s soldier father. Estranged from her well-to-do family, Rain is living shabby in a New York brownstone in a sketchy neighborhood, struggling to keep it together. As if she wasn’t fragile enough, things go further off the rails for her on the day she imagines (or does she?) there is someone hiding in her shower. It’s just the first sign that something is off—either in the world or inside her head. A day disappears. A job interview goes horribly wrong. A pair of eyeglasses seem to reveal more than they should. People appear and vanish in an instant. A pocket watch is found inexplicably in her mailbox.
Patient Zero (Joe Ledger Series #1)
Paperback $18.99
Patient Zero (Joe Ledger Series #1)
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
As Maberry slathers on the slow-burn spookiness—including the recurring presence of truly terrifying dream spectre, Doctor Nine—the tenuous line between reality and, well, not reality begin to blur at an alarming rate, as Rain’s past tries to catch up to her future and nightmare elements begin to cross over into the so-called real world. A shifty bad dreamland Rain calls the Fire Zone manages to seep into the minds of her ragtag support group as well as her own, and it is tough to know whether they are truly in danger there (a Fire Zone gives you some idea), as the scope and scale of the story grows much larger, as Mayberry orchestrates a finale of epic proportions.
As Maberry slathers on the slow-burn spookiness—including the recurring presence of truly terrifying dream spectre, Doctor Nine—the tenuous line between reality and, well, not reality begin to blur at an alarming rate, as Rain’s past tries to catch up to her future and nightmare elements begin to cross over into the so-called real world. A shifty bad dreamland Rain calls the Fire Zone manages to seep into the minds of her ragtag support group as well as her own, and it is tough to know whether they are truly in danger there (a Fire Zone gives you some idea), as the scope and scale of the story grows much larger, as Mayberry orchestrates a finale of epic proportions.
The twisted journeys of the characters, each flawed and scarred in unique ways, are the definition of hardscrabble. And just when you begin to settle in with Rain and her friends, the book gets weirder, introducing a fascinatingly mysterious tattooed P.I. named Monk, who has his own “special” abilities. He completely and unexpectedly rejiggers the way the story unfolds, and seems to cry out for his own spinoff.
Superbly chilling and darkly moving, Glimpse sees Maberry delivering on themes that are tough to tackle—the intersection between depression and horror—via propulsive storytelling and an unrelenting pace. I’m fairly certain I closed the covers with a clear idea of the dividing line between reality and dreams, but I left the bedroom light on a little longer, just to be sure.