Dreams of a Dead Country
A novella.
Through a series of fantastical transformations our narrator searches wistfully after a mysterious female presence: metamorphosing through figures human and bestial, animate and inanimate, even as walls / hills / weather. Fraught with claustrophobic imagery, this relentlessly surreal odyssey explores – and seeks to transcend – the borders of the human state.
Dreams of a Dead Country is subtly executed Chinese puzzle-box-of-a-story. Douglas Thompson takes us on a Borgesian journey of identity and disorder; masterfully straddling the duel terrain of both mindscape and landscape. Thompson’s prose is ornate and intimidating, but beneath the surreal projections of his imagination lies a gentle, humble heart. A true artist: one of our finest and most criminally under-rated writers. Dreams of a Dead Country is a gift. - Chris Kelso, author of I Dream of Mirrors
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Douglas Thompson
Douglas Thompson’s short stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, most recently Albedo One, Ambit, Postscripts, and New Writing Scotland. He won the Grolsch/Herald Question of Style Award in 1989 and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His first book, Ultrameta, was published by Eibonvale Press in August 2009, nominated for the Edge Hill Prize, and shortlisted for the BFS Best Newcomer Award, and since then he has published four subsequent novels, Sylvow (Eibonvale, 2010), Apoidea (The Exaggerated Press, 2011), Mechagnosis (Dog Horn, 2012), Entanglement (Elsewhen Press, 2012) and has two forthcoming in 2014, The Brahan Seer and Volwys, from Acair Publishing and Dog Horn respectively. The Rhymer is his eighth novel.
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