Staff Pick
Although he doesn't even know she exists, Henry and Kristin actually have a lot in common. A famous actor, he is a brooding Tabula rasa — more clockwork than orange — a curiously contradictory person losing himself in better and better roles. And she: lonely, odd, too easily given to intimacies, she is his biggest fan. She shares Henry's preoccupation with himself (although hers is an obsession) and they are both similarly detached from the world around them. They slip through their days as muffled and distant as dreamers, estranged by their teeming inner lives. Reading it evoked the same blurry feelings in me and the inevitable awakening was jarring. It's not an uplifting read, but it's so good, it makes cheer feel overrated. Dream Sequence stands out as a nihilistic modern myth, a literary descendant of Nathanael West and Camus. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Adam Foulds, the award-winning author of The Quickening Maze, pens a stunning and terrifying vision of the damage done between a fan and a celebrity in Dream Sequence--where the borders between inner and outer life have been made porous in a world full of flickering screens large and small.
Henry became famous starring in The Grange, a television drama beloved by mothers and wives, and whose fans speak about the characters as though they were real people . . . yet Henry dreams of escaping the small screen. An audition for a movie directed by a highly respected Spanish auteur holds the promise of a way forward. Whether holed up in his apartment eating monkish meals of rice and steamed vegetables or snorting cocaine at desert parties in Doha, Henry's awareness of his own image, of his relative place in the world, is acute and constant.
But Henry has also--unwittingly--become an important part of the life of recently divorced Kristin. He appears repeatedly on the television in her beautiful, empty Philadelphia house, and her social media feeds bring news of his London home, his family. What Kristin wants is simply to get as close to him in real life as she has in her fandom.