Dream Woods - Patrick Lacey
Vince and Audra's marriage is more than on the rocks, it's on life support. Audra has already left Vince once in the middle of the night and then couldn't go through with leaving her twin boy's, one of which is diabetic, and her husband all alone and returned. Vince is looking for anything that can save their marriage. He turns to a mysterious billboard that he sees on his way to work one morning. Its advertising Dream Woods, an old amusement park that burned to the ground when he was a kid. Apparently, it's opened back up and Vince is encapsulated with excitement at the prospect of being able to share the awesome experience he had as a kid with his family. But is Dream Woods really open for business? Especially, after what all happened so many years ago?
Have you ever woke up from a dream that seemed so realistic while you were sleeping that you're left in a fog when you awake, half in reality and half stuck in the dream, and it takes you a little bit to clear the fog out of your head? At first, the dream feels so realistic and then, after a while, you realize how silly it was and you can't believe that you ever thought it was real. That's kind of how you feel when you start reading Dream Woods. You have to be ready for it. Lacey's latest isn't a straight forward story told in the realistic here and now, and that's what tripped me up for the first 1/3 to 1/2 of it. It should be read as a messed up fairy tale. Think of it as if C.S. Lewis wrote about an old, Disney World-esque theme park in rural Massachusetts and then Clive Barker and Bentley Little got a hold of the first draft while tripping on acid and made some revisions. As you can imagine, you have to let your imagination go and have fun with it. It's not meant to suspend your disbelief. It's meant to steer you into an almost comic book/nightmare type of world. If you can get past that, you'll enjoy Dream Woods. Lacey's story is energetic and well written. But it's kind of stuck in the middle. It's not straight forward enough to be taken seriously and it's not so over-the-top that it's a pure fantasy, and maybe that's what Lacey intended. The characters are well rounded for a novella length story. But, Audra comes across as more annoyingly ungrateful than a lost soul trying to find herself and that makes it hard to root for her. The gore is poured on by the bucketful, but the people that are being offed are the extras on the set. You don't get to know any of them and it becomes kind of numbing when faceless people are killed by the trainload. I go back and forth on this book. There were parts that I could really get into and then there were paths that Lacey took that I wish he would've went a different direction. That doesn't mean that I think it's bad. Not at all. But, it's kind of like being in the mood for a traditional pizza and then getting some version with broccoli, goat cheese and pine nuts on it. While that may not be a bad thing, it's not what you had in mind when your taste buds were all primed for pepperoni and mushrooms.
3 Blood Stained Mascots out of 5
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