The style of how the story is told is a little unusual, but comes as a bit of a mixed blessing. There is little narrative connecting some of the scenes and this means there are some jumps along the way. Contrasting with this is the hyper level of detail within the scenes with every detail and movement written. It gave the book a bit of a disjointed feel which in some part worked in the context of the story, but did mean reading it wasn't as fluid as it could have been.
The descent of Frank into seeming madness is well orchestrated and there's some good ideas in there. I especially like the trick for knowing if you are in a dream or not, although this wasn't used as effectively as it could have been.
I did have an issue with the ending. It felt quite abrupt (it was after a big leap) and it didn't really provide a satisfactory conclusion. I don't mind an ambiguous ending, but it would have been nice to have known a bit more about the reality of the situation.
Overall I found it a decent horror read, but a bit more development could have elevated it into something special.
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| Click on image to buy from Amazon |
Frank makes a startling discovery in the shower. He finds six strange circles of skin gone completely numb—three neatly spaced down the center of his chest and abdomen, and three more down his spine. His doctor takes sadistic pleasure in carving out bits of Frank's flesh and a perverse childlike glee flipping through hundreds of pictures of his interior. But when the tests come back, he's unable to make a diagnosis and refers Frank to a psychiatrist. Under guided hypnosis, Frank uncovers clues in a repressed dream, but his sessions on the couch are soon cut short when he loses his job and his health insurance. Now Frank is forced to solve the mystery of his six dead spots on his own. Armed with nicotine patches, pornography, sleeping pills, and a stack of books on lucid dreaming, Frank delves into a world of nightmares to do battle with the monsters lurking inside his head.
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