cover image Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

Amanda Downum. Solaris, $9.99 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-78108-327-7

Downum (the Necromancer Chronicles) grounds this tale of friendship and love in a community of artists and magic users. When a ritual goes terribly wrong and leaves Vancouver artist Blake Enderly in a coma, his best friend, Liz Drake, and her stereotypically English boyfriend, Alex, travel to Vancouver to find out what happened to him. To save his life, Liz must navigate deadly magical peril in the waking world and undertake a quest in an equally dangerous dream world that leads her to Robert Chambers’s Carcosa and its ruler, the Yellow King. Downum’s narrative is packed to excess with artists and hangers-on, a dangerous drug with connections to the dream world, bloodthirsty maenads, and gun-toting cleanup artists specializing in supernatural mishaps. Readers eager for diverse characters will delight in the casually displayed variety of sexual and romantic orientations, including Liz’s comfortable asexuality. The vividly evoked bohemian, magical Vancouver and the haunting dream lands are largely secondary to the bonds of love, romantic and otherwise, among the novel’s likable, intensely beleaguered core characters. Agent: Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary Agency. (May)