The Dream Beings
Aaron J. French
Samhain Publishing
January 2016
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
Aaron J. French’s novella, The Dream Beings, is an elegant mashup of classic supernatural horror and classic hard-bitten detective noir. If this description seems self-contradictory—how can a story be both “elegant” and a “mashup”?—that is intentional. French manages to remain true to the essence of both kinds of storytelling while allowing the two to intersect and interact.
The novella maintains the pacing and general tone of a murder mystery, including particularly bloody, brutal, ritualistic deaths. The passage introducing Jack Evens, P.I., raises generic expectations that are met in such details as the innuendo-charged dialogue between Evens and his beautiful former-girlfriend-now-secretary; the awkward working relationship between the P.I. and his main contact on the police force, especially since evidence at the first murder points to Evens as the murderer; and in the systematic unravelling of the case, including chases, gun fights, a midnight tour of the local cemetery, and an overwhelming sense of darkness and shadow. Thus far, nothing unexpected.
At the same time, however, French adds additional levels that require subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—shifts in style, for which he borrows the sophisticated vocabulary and structure of such authors as H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith to direct readers into another world, an invisible world monsters known as the Dream Beings.
The two universes—mystery noir and supernatural horror—intersect because…well, because Jack Evens himself belongs to both. He is a solid investigator; however, he also “sees” what no other investigators can. When he enters a crime scene, he understands things about the victim and about the perpetrator that go beyond human senses; and when one bit of evidence at the first scene is his own name, written in the victim’s blood, he is shaken to his bones at his perception of inherent evil. He gradually discovers that behind—and within—the human killer are a race of “transdimensional beings,” “Eaters of Souls and Matter,” unbound by time and space, that crave to be “made of matter” so they can destroy humanity and occupy the Earth.
More crucial and more painful, he realizes that a long string of women have died horrifically for one purpose: to bring him into the light so the Dream Beings can kill him.
Because he is the “Vessel.”
French performs a bit of literary sleight-of-hand as he combines the two threads of his story. The Dream Beings is interesting simply as a mystery to be solved; French never forgets this goal and provides moment after moment of uncertainty and suspense, continuously surprising readers as the quest follows to its inevitable outcome.
It also, however, provides a counterbalance to much Lovecraftian fiction, most of which picks up on HPL’s image of vast, cosmic entities, indifferent to humanity, indifferent to morality, intent only upon assuaging their own wishes and desires. French provides these, of course, in the eerie, quasi-Cyclopean Dream Beings. What is different in his story is that there is an unanticipated offsetting power as well, one manifest in “majestic” beings of “purity and grace”—angels in modern parlance.
The result is that The Dream Beings simultaneously works on a mundane level by generating justice for the innocent victims of a rabid killer and on a far more significant level by working toward moral balance in a world threatened by evil and coldness, hence the “elegant mashup” of my opening sentence. The story creates interest in the characters beyond their basic narrative functions as investigator and killer. And eventually it thrusts everything that occurs into a context of greater Truth and Possibility.
Despite this complexity—or better, because of it—The Dream Beings is not merely noir-yet-again or Lovecraft-warmed-over. It establishes its own protocols, its own cosmic laws, its own strictures of style and language, and uses them proficiently and effectively to achieve its—and its author’s—ends.
Highly recommended.
