Gardner Dozois on THE BOOK OF DREAMS
With Gardner Dozois’s kind permission, here’s his full review (from Locus) of the Nick Gevers-edited The Book of Dreams: “As if to drive home just how much we’ve lost with her death, Kage Baker has the best story, “Rex Nemorensis”, in The Book of Dreams, a collection of five stories edited by Nick Gevers. The fantastic element in Baker’s story is a bit slender, but the voice is wonderful, supple and colloquial, able to handle lyrical and even mystical passages equally, as well as gritty straightforward narrative, and she does an impressive job of making a few acres of swamp and scrubland seem like a fully realized fantasy world. All of the stories in The Book of Dreams are fantasy or slipstream, no science fiction here, and although Baker’s story impressed me the most, Lucius Shepard delivers a strange mixture of horror and Hollywood satire in “Dream Burgers at the Mouth of Hell”, and Robert Silverberg contributes a long Twilight Zoneish vision of a man participating a little more fully in his dreams than he’s comfortable with, “The Prisoner”; there are also elegant and intricate slipstream pieces by Jay Lake and Jeffrey Ford.”