The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

From the first page on, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters plunges the reader into an alternate Victorian world where cabals and alchemy rule. While the details are complex and the book a solid 760 pages, I found it a complete page-turner, the action moves and there is an emotional urgency to it that keeps you involved. Unlike many imaginary world novels, Glass Books does not suffer the problem of flat characterization or thuddingly dull writing. The descriptions are precise and evocative, the characters emotionally resonant. If you need your novels to be just like real life, Glass Books is not for you. Rather, more, it works more in the way of dreams, alternately beautiful and frightening, darkly erotic and an arch tribute to Victoriana. Dahlquist writes in a deliberately stylized manner. If historical fantasy with an edge (such as steampunk, though this is *not* a steampunk novel) appeals to you, you'll love Glass Books. If you like Diana Gabaldon and Susannah Clarke, you'll like this book, though the sexuality is darker (and stranger) than in Gabaldon. You may not be comfortable, but you'll never be bored.

I have a penchant for long, challenging novels, and "Glass Books" is certainly both. But don't let the words "long" & "challenging" discourage you from reading it. It is bizarre and unique, firmly rooted in a universal subconscious, both the author's and our own (by now you no doubt know that the creative impetus of the book sprung from a dream). It is also very visceral, a gothic mystery that you can totally get absorbed into. After picking up and discouragingly putting down novel after novel looking for a great summer read (I also enjoyed last summer's Dracula epic, "The Historian"), I finally found a winner!

At last! Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle and the Marquis de Sade have risen from the grave and told us a story! Glass BOoks is basically a Victorian Sci Fi Thriller with a plot like a Nautilus shell. It twists and turns and keeps drawing you in deeper. You follow these three odd characters--a resourceful jilted fiancee, an assassin with a scarred face and a heart of gold, a whack job physician--as they pursue the central mystery: What is up with these blue glass books? There's some sort of process, involving women strapped to tables and some sort of political cabal and this weird blue glass that has the property of turning people into hopped up zombies, of a kind--much like our own television sets do, perhaps.... It all takes place in a sort of re-imagined late-19th century Europe. As if it comes to us through the filter of period literature. Velveteen boudoirs, dashing dragoons, hidden passages... It's deftly written and a wild read. In one nice trope, two brass-masked men see an act of violence witn "the dumb inconmprehension of inhabitants from the moon first witnessing the savagery of human kind," a trope that invokes Melies as much as Verne. Most of all it's a world you can live in, and don't want to leave anytime soon. Think MYST. If you've ever played, you'll see what I mean. The world's created, then you move about it in it and its got tricks and surprises and self-consistent rules. I can't explain Glass Book's attraction by reference to any single other book, which is I think praise in itself. You'll have to read it.

I'm not generally a fantasy book afficionado, though I loved the Phillip Pullman books and grew up on Lord of the Rings, but when a friend recommended this book, I thought what the hell, I liked the cover and the first chapter was riveting in an odd and totally original way. Needless to say - I gobbled it up. The characters were fantastically vivid, and the whole imagined world so impressively conceived, I was literally on the edge of my seat. (I read a lot of it riding on the NY subway and found myself missing stops, and in one particular scene which I won't spoil for you, getting very red in the face...) It honestly didn't even feel long, the action moves incredibly fast - the writing had irony, wit and humor - it felt like fantasy wrapped in social satire - the glass books seemed to me to be an allegory for the dangerous force of all power hungry media structures that work on your base instincts and deprive you of your individuality, your critical mind, your creativity. I recommend this book to anyone who wants something really original.

Now I know what has been missing from the bookstores for ages. With "The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters", the grand adventure novel is back. Set in Victorian Europe, it is a fabulous tapestry of mystery, science fiction, sword play, sexuality and sensuality with a scheme to take over governments by a wonderful combination of sex and memory control. Gordon Dahlquist spins a plot worthy of Alexander Dumas, and his main characters Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang and Dr. Svenson are a wonderful rift on the three musketeers. And their nemesis? I'll just say she is one for the books. Dahlquist gives each of his triumvirate their own plot line which he beautifully dovetails in variations throughout the story into a fully satisfying climax.