RELEASE DATE: May 31

AUTHOR: Deirdre Swinden

Book Link: https://geni.us/Somnium

Description:

Immerse yourself in a terrifying blend of psychological horror and high-tech science fiction in this riveting novel where dreams can kill. Gillian Hardie experiences nightmares so intense they threaten her very existence, thanks to a glitch in Somnium Corporation's groundbreaking dream advertising technology. Every night, her sleep unleashes monsters that her body reacts to as if they were real, pushing her to the edge of despair.

Armed with her lucid dreaming skills, Gillian battles these horrors, but when an accident traps her in a perpetual dream state, she must rely on Nathan Keller, a nightmare warrior, and Dex Cooper, an Operator, to navigate this nightmarish reality. With her darkest fears manifesting like never before, Gillian faces a race against time to survive a threat that could unleash unimaginable horrors from the depths of her mind.

TRIGGER WARNINGS:

This novel includes a brief depiction of sexual violence, gore and nightmare imagery.

Author Bio:

A successful writer/editor in the corporate world for more than two decades, Deirdre Swinden is currently living and writing in North Carolina. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University and has published short stories in Griffel Literary Magazine and Grim & Gilded. Early in her writing career, she won the Popular Short Story Contest at the 2000 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference with her short work, “Shooting Televisions.”

SOCIAL MEDIA:

WEBSITE – https://deirdreswindenauthor.com

X/TWITTER - @DeirdreSwinden

FACEBOOK – https://www.facebook.com/deirdre.swinden5

Link to Author interview: https://youtu.be/oLZP6YNPF-0

Somnium book review:

Deirdre Swindon presents a dark and disturbing world in Somnium, a place where corporations prioritise profit over consumers’ safety – if you can imagine such a thing.

The book is full of beautiful descriptions and imagery; the dialogue is realistic and drives the story forward, and Swindon negotiates the balance between showing and telling expertly in all but one chapter. The result is a tense and thrilling Sci-Fi/Horror novel.

The main character, Gillian, and her love interest, Nathan, aren’t perfect – thank the goddess – and I love Swindon’s descriptions of their physical scars:

“fingernails playing the faded lines of scar tissue on her right cheek as if they were guitar strings.”

“a gash across his face that functioned like a culvert when it rained.”

So, what’s the story about?

Gillian has bad dreams. As far as she can recall, she’s always been plagued by nightmares, monsters she must fight while she sleeps. Sometimes those battles spill into the real world, breaking a brother’s wrist, mother’s teeth, father’s ribs. In desperation, her family send her to a mental hospital to be cured. But if Gillian’s dreams can be trusted, the asylum is a place of nightmarish abuse and monsters.

“Hannibal Lecter decorated his thousand-room memory palace with frescoes. Sherlock Holmes built a mind palace to store his facts. But Gillian Hardie had trapped the horrors of her dreams behind endless spirals of locked doors in an asylum like no other.”

It isn’t clear, at least not to me, when Gillian was exposed to Somnium’s dream advertising technology, but after her mind rejected it, her dreams changed; they became dangerous. Now she has a guardian angel who goes by the name of Nathan Keller, a nightmare warrior. He jumps into her dreams to battle her demons while falling in love with her. For her part, Gillian avoids sleep as much as possible with the help of stimulants. The story kicks up several gears when something happens that prevents Gillian from waking up.

Somnium has a compelling plot, but the large cast of characters is confusing at times. Although we spend a lot of time inside Gillian’s head, I still find it hard to really connect with her; this may be due to frequent narrative shifts between different characters. Other point-of-view characters include Dex, a technician at Somnium, and Nathan, Gillian’s nightmare warrior. There are at least a dozen characters, most of whom work at Somnium. Sometimes I found it necessary to flick back to earlier chapters to remind myself who some of the characters are and how they fit into the plot.

The story strays into cliches and archetypes, always a risk in dreamworld-based stories, and the “real-world” villain feels like a caricature too. Despite this, Somnium offers plenty of thrills and chills. For those readers who love discovering a new series, the ending of Somnium allows plenty of room for sequels, and I suspect we’ll get the opportunity to revisit this world.