Dear Reader,
Are you ready for some madness? Some lunacy? I know it might be a little nerve-wracking to take a chance on Captain Clive’s Dreamworld. After all, we’ve dealt with enough trauma over the past year to last us two centuries, at least. Is there a chance that you’ll be so horrified and enraged that you’ll throw the book down the basement stairs, soak the floor with gasoline, and take a match to it? Well, sure. In fact, that’s the most likely outcome. But there’s also the chance that you’ll like the damn book. That you’ll sneak pages in between sips of bourbon or leftover gasoline, that you’ll read chapter after chapter while pretending to be engaged by your Zoom call.
Captain Clive’s Dreamworld is my eighth novel, all of them are standalone. But while each novel stands on its own, similar themes seem to pop up over and over again in my writing. Some of those themes include the search for identity, the fallibility of memory, and the danger of groupthink. My protagonists tend to be emotionally wounded. They tend to be unreliable. Deputy Sam Hardy, the protagonist of Captain Clive’s Dreamworld, fits that description. Upon entering the peculiar amusement park town of Angels and Hope, it becomes clear that he’s nothing more than a bewildered outsider. And the more he digs, searching for the dark secrets of the town, the more he discovers his own sins.
The impetus for this particular novel came after a terrifying and traumatic experience: a trip to Disneyworld with my family. I resisted, believe me I did, but my children were just too persuasive. Upon arriving at the park, I was overwhelmed with all the matching Mickey outfits, with all the forced smiles, with all the canned laughter. It wasn’t long until I realized that I needed to get the hell out of that place! Kissing my family goodbye, I ran like a madman, shoving little kids and old grandmothers out of the way, holding Cinderella hostage until they finally got me a police escort out of that place. After spending a few days in the joint, I returned to my family, who hadn’t noticed my absence. We spent the next several days in a town called Celebration, Florida, which is just a few miles outside of the theme park. Apparently, it was developed as some sort of utopian company town. In fact, back in the day, they were even going to place it inside a climate-controlled dome. That didn’t come to fruition, but today it still feels like a Stepford Wives town, with perfect streets and perfect paths and perfect lawns. And so I started thinking: what would have happen to a town like this if Disneyworld ever collapsed? What would the people do? They wouldn’t allow the American Dream to vanish without a fight. And so, from that initial mumbling in my bread, a nightmarish little novel soon followed.
Listen, I know this novel won’t be for everybody. I know it’s weird; I know it’s surreal. But sometimes getting out of our comfort zone is the best thing we can do. And I promise that you will be anything but comfortable.
Enjoy the madness,
Jon Bassoff
About Jon Bassoff
Jon Bassoff was born in 1974 in New York City and currently lives with his family in a ghost town somewhere in Colorado. His mountain gothic novel, Corrosion, has been translated in French and German and was nominated for the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, France’s biggest crime fiction award. Two of his novels, The Drive-Thru Crematorium and The Disassembled Man, have been adapted for the big screen with Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild; Once Upon a Time in America) attached to star in The Disassembled Man. For his day job, Bassoff teaches high school English where he is known by students and faculty alike as the deranged writer guy. He is a connoisseur of tequila, hot sauces, psychobilly music, and flea-bag motels.
WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:
Website: http://www.jonbassoff.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jonbassoff
Facebook: www.facebook.com/jon.bassoff
About Captain Clive's Dreamworld
After becoming the suspect in the murder of a young prostitute, Deputy Sam Hardy is “vanished” to a temporary post as the sole police officer in Angels and Hope, an idyllic town located in the middle of the desert, miles from any other sign of life. Hardy soon learns that Angels and Hope was constructed as a company town to support a magnificent amusement park – one to rival Disneyland – known as Captain Clive’s Dreamworld. When he arrives, however, Hardy notices some strange happenings. The park is essentially empty of customers. None of the townsfolk ever seem to sleep. And girls seem to be going missing with no plausible explanation.
As Hardy begins investigating, his own past is drawn into question by the people in town, and he finds himself becoming more and more isolated. Soon his phone line mysteriously goes dead. His car’s tires get slashed. And he is being watched constantly by neighbors. The truth – about the town and himself – will lead him to understand that there’s no such thing as a clean escape.
Straddling the line between genre fiction and something more bizarre, Captain Clive’s Dreamworld is a terrifying vision of the collapse of the American mythos.
Praise
“Captain Clive’s Dreamworld winds its way through an eerie, Lynchian landscape, populated by Stepford citizenry, cursed lives, and all the bleak sensibilities of the most dire Cormac McCarthy tale. Bassoff’s latest is a must read for fans of the genre, or any reader who prefers their fiction with a sense of the off-kilter. Highly recommended!”
-Ronald Malfi, author of Bone White
“Jon Bassoff’s nightmarish bizarro novel Captain Clive’s Dreamworld reads like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone mixed with Twin Peaks mixed with Dante’s Inferno. Unremittingly dark, this roman noir is a trenchant attack on the empty promises of capitalism…a hopeless rebuke of the bright plastic flesh built around the broken, crumbling skeleton of the American Dream.”
-Jeffrey Thomas, author of Boneland
“Jon Bassoff mines an imaginative seam that remains unexplored by any other writer I know working today. I wish I knew his secret, but I’ll settle for reading Captain Clive’s Dreamworld.”
-Tony Black, author of Summoning the Dead
“Captain Clive’s Dreamworld is a masterfully rendered, very disturbing cautionary tale of pathological consumerism and nostalgia for a mid-century America that never was. Jon Bassoff’s vision is relentless and unsparing, his prose like a bone saw laying bare the corruption and perversion lurking beneath society’s superficial pieties.”
-Roger Smith, author of Dust Devils
“In Captain Clive’s Dreamworld, Jon Bassoff has created a haunting, suspenseful masterpiece that straddles the line between mystery and horror with expert skill.”
-S.A. Cosby, award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland
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