View source for A Dream with Demons

Publisher's catalog copy:

In A Dream with Demons, Edward Falco invents a world where bruised adults attempt, over and over, to rewrite the violent scripts of their childhood. Preston Morris is an accomplished lawyer and novelist who writes painful, provocative stories to shore up fragments of his own desperate life. One of Preston's works, which forms the core of A Dream with Demons, tells of a sadly streetwise adolescent named Missy who struggles to come of age during the short space of a weekend when her mother finally leaves her tortured, brilliant lover, the artist Val Rivson.

Preston's genius -- or is it Falco's? -- is the accuracy with which he portrays the sublime compulsions of several tortured yet resilient people. Holding everything together is the unique hypertext structure of A Dream with Demons, which dramatizes a theme evident throughout: how the past can compel the present, through the fragmentary, unreliable, but ultimately persistent medium of memory.

(Source: Eastgate catalog copy)

Edward Falco's A dream with Demons is a novel-within-the-novel: a story of a woman, her daugther, and her lover. wrapped together with love and violence. This narrative is interrupted periodically by navigational opportunities that lead the reader into a basement of notes and memories. Falco imposes two layers of fiction in this work, the dramatic conflict of incest and abuse in the conventional narrative is echoed by more complex and ambigious backstory of the mirrorworld.