Here's something a little different for my Arizona book for November. It's a YA fantasy, but not in any way that's likely to suggest. It's grounded in rather grim reality but spends the majority of its pages exploring (and trying to save) a wonderfully envisioned and notably unique dream world. It seems that Laura Stoddard, whose debut novel this was, dreams every night and also remembers what happened, so naturally she transferred that to a fictional creation, Gwen Stoker. I'd protest at Gwen being short for Gwenevere rather than Guinevere, but the Old Welsh root does start with Gwen, even if it's Gwenhwyfar rather than Gwenevere.

We meet Gwen immediately, as she's riding a doughnut down a river of chocolate. Her companion is Tabitha, a talking frog with a lisp, and they're looking for the Original in this particular dream orb. By the time they find him, it's too late because the vulture-man got there first. He's a seven-foot-tall man with feathered arms and the head of a vulture. He's the bad guy in Gwen's dreams and eventually we'll get around to figuring out who he is, but that's not particularly important yet and I actually prefer this early when it's a deep character study rather than late when it becomes more good guys versus bad guy action. I should add that it had to and I have no problem with that, but it lessened the impact for me.

Gwen is eleven-years-old and she used to be cool when she was nine, before the tragedy. Her mum is Beverly and she's coping but missing how things used to be, not just because of who they lost—and I'm not going to spoil that because we're not let in on the details until halfway through—but what was lost at the same time. Nine-year-old Gwen was a joy. Eleven-year-old Gwen is miserable. She's become alienated and rebellious. She can still be cool fleetingly. She has a tarantula called Hera for Scheherezade. She reads Edgar Allan Poe's poems. She maintains a dream journal. And, when a squirrel says hi, she punches it out of sheer instinct.

In dream, the squirrel turns into a girl, the same girl that the frog became earlier. She's Tabitha, her best friend before they moved to the appropriately named Hope Falls. And, starting at home base, the farm where the Stokers used to live, she shows Gwen around her dream web. While the heart of the book is progression, dealing with guilt and finding a way to remember the past while not letting it spoil the future, the pivotal locations are all in dream and Stoddard builds quite the vision of what that looks like.

Every one of us, apparently, has a dreamosphere that effectively stores our dreams. Every time we dream something new, it's sent up a thought-strand into a new dream orb. If we know how, we can revisit those dreams, but mostly the orbs just multiply and sit there, waiting. Gwen dreams a lot and she dreams deeply, but what's really different in her dreams is that they're being stolen. The vulture-man is an external force that doesn't belong in Gwen's dreams, but who has invaded them and is destroying them. Each dream orb has an original, the spark that dream grew from. If the vulture-man pulls down their eyelids, they vanish and the dream orb goes with them.

Clearly there's reason behind this and eventually we get to the point where Gwen can figure out not just the how but the who and the why. The who is obscure for much of the book, the why being far more interesting. As we learn that late, I won't spoil it but it's something that prompts much thought. Someone is doing it for a reason, that reason makes sense to them and it has a palpable benefit to them. However, it damages the person to whom it's being done, which is only initially Gwen. As the story expands beyond just her, we realise that others are being affected too and, in most instances, they aren't powerful enough dreamers to have a Tabitha to help explain details, so Gwen has to help them. It's one huge problem that affects a lot of people and that leads us to the who.

Stoddard clearly enjoys her dreams and has an absolute blast bringing them into fiction. They're an original and highly evocative creation and they would make this a very easy book to adapt to a visual form, whether that be a comic book, a television show or a feature film. Hollywood would be all about the action in the later stages, but the introspection of the earlier chapters has all that it needs to resonate with viewers too. And there's real depth there. It speaks to depression, to guilt and to how we torment ourselves after the fact.

The one thing I'm not convinced by is how the logic Stoddard builds into her worldbuilding affects us. It certainly invites us to apply this to ourselves, because we all have depression at some point or other, even if we don't let it rule our lives. It also offers us a way out of that, but it's perhaps a bit of a cheat to be able to blame somebody else. It's not our fault we're miserable; it's someone else literally interfering with our dreams. However, all that said, if it isn't our fault, then it's not everybody else's fault if they're depressed too. If it doesn't make us examine our own attitude to our own guilt, then maybe it'll make us examine it to others.

One reason for such deep characterisation is that this is emphatically Gwen's show for most of its pages. We meet others, most obviously her family, including elder sister Stella and cousins Caleb and Luke, who visit often, but also people at school, both teachers and fellow students. None get close to the same depth of characterisation as Gwen, but there's enough there for Xander Wayne to be a worthy character, too, as a bully who's given a shot at redemption. However, how we react to that may depend on what we take from the previous paragraph.

'The Dreamosphere' was Stoddard's debut novel, which saw print in 2014. However, I presume that it grew out of something called 'The Dream-Web Diaries of Gwenevere Stoker'. Goodreads says it was self-published in paperback in 2011 and ran two hundred and fifty pages, fifty more than 'The Dreamosphere'. Maybe it was this but without editing done by the folk at Cedar Fort Publishing. I don't see anything since, so maybe this is less the beginning of a bibliography and more a story of serious importance to the author that simply had to be shared with the world. ~~ Hal C F Astell