Title: Dream War
Author: Stephen Prosapio
Publisher: Noble Publishing
Edition: Kindle
Pages: 277
Originally published: 2010
Genre: Science fiction / Fantasy
The dice landed on: 4
Did I finish?: Yes
Do I like the cover?: It’s all right
1980. Hector Lopez joins a CIA enterprise capable of entering dreams and extracting information. Lopez saves hundreds of hostages’ lives by dream-linking to terrorists and foiling their plans. When the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist group, kidnaps a US General, Lopez and his team execute every technique available for extracting information–including one that links our world to a dimension never meant to be discovered.
Present Day. The Sogno di Guerra–a Red Brigades sect–plans the slaughter of millions. And they’ve the help of Luzveyn Dred, the entity ruling the dimension the CIA inadvertently opened a portal to–the Spatium Quartus.
Aided by an aging expatriate, a recovering alcoholic, and a mysterious girl, Lopez must overcome memories of past failures and defeat evil–in this world as well as in a dimension of nightmares.
This is a really cool concept. I loved the beginning, and I kept loving it when the action moved to our times. The idea of a dream world, with a really bad “bad guy”, trying to break into our world by manipulating our dreams, how cool is that. But then, as the story moved forward, I grew less enthralled by it.
My main problem with it is that for me it reads like a movie. The story goes by at a breakneck pace, at the cost of the characters. I never feel that I get to know them properly. And, when you don’t much care about the people you’re supposed to care about, something is clearly not quite right. I also felt that there were things that needed more explaining.
The book also turned out to be the beginning of a series, how long I don’t know, and I didn’t want that. In my opinion there’s too many series around these days. And, while starting out as science fiction, it grew more and more fantasy-like as it went along, and that was a bit of a letdown for me. It might turn out, in the next book or so, that it really is science fiction after all. I guess I’ll find out if I decide to read the next book. The jury is still out on that one.
-This all sounds frighfully negative, but I still ended up with giving it a four. I think the concept is great and it’s competently written, but it wasn’t quite what I hoped for. Still, this is my personal opinion and I know that a lot of other people love it. If I was you I’d check out a few other opinions before I decided to read it or not.
