Dream or Nightmare?
Author: Dermot Davis
Do you remember your dreams? I have the tendency to dream a lot early in the morning so often wake with one fresh in my mind. Usually they involve not having been to a class all semester and facing the final exam. I like to stick with the classics. In Stormy Weather, author Dermot Davis takes us into a significantly more complicated dreamscape with his protagonist, dream analyst Robert Monro.
Robert is a bored, boring man stuck in a rut. He loves his wife and son in a distant, vague sort of way and feels vastly superior to most of the mere mortals who populate his everyday life. When his wife leaves for an impromptu vacation and a patient gives him a potion that makes him question the difference between dreams and reality, he begins to examine his life in all its pompous, stuffy, boring glory.
That’s about all the real story there is here. There is a lot of supposedly confusing symbolism as Robert tries to deal with his new dream/wake world, but it’s all painfully obvious. Apparently he needs to work through his issues to be able to fully awaken. Every new issue that comes up is some ridiculous cliché and he’s the last to figure them out. The reader is miles ahead of him, already being bored by his next self-serving “revelation”.
Stormy Weather (good God, not to be confused with the Carl Haissen novel of the same name) is, at least, a quick read. But Robert is an asshole, his wife but a glimmer of a character that feels like an afterthought and the rest of the peripherals are just conveniences through whom the author makes his bland, uninspired and uninspiring observations about the meaning of various dreams.
The book is also filled with stilted dialogue, psychobabble and the grandiose notion that we as readers should find Robert’s discovery that he is, in fact, an asshole, somehow divine. It also bears unwelcome similarities to far superior works like, say, It’s a Wonderful Life. Or Dallas. There’s nothing original here, and it wasn’t that good when it was done the first time (s).
Overall, Story Weather is just another self-indulgent treatise by someone who fancies themselves an expert and thinks that endows them with the magical power to write fiction. ½ star out of five just for having recognizable English words. Not recommended for anyone.
— S. Millinocket
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Wow-and the Midwest Book review called in a “minor literary
masterpiece.” Obviously, you think you know better.