Nightmare Therapy

About the Book

What happens when nightmares become reality and no one really notices?

In an unnamed New England city in a near future marked by economic collapse and the wide-scale failure of the Internet and digital technologies, a group of young, disaffected urbanites enters into a series of group therapy sessions to explore their nightmares. In fact, these post-New Age inner-explorers not only experience their worst fears under the influence of a dream-enhancing drug, they soon find that their hideous nightmares are becoming deadly to themselves and others.

But, in a society in which human misery and murder are commonplace, no one cares about the inexplicably weird deaths of a few fringe group members. No one, that is, except the city's top homicide detective, Thomas Costello, who is under mayoral orders to investigate a rash of pet slayings that has the city's jaded populace up in arms. In the course of his search for the mad perpetrator the press has dubbed the Pet Hunter, Costello sees his own life turn increasingly strange and increasingly interconnected with one of the nightmare session participants---the beautiful nihilist Ashley Quick---who may be the source of the surreal evil that is releasing the ugliest impulses of the human subconscious across an entire city.

As a contemporary comedy of ideas masquerading as a schlock horror novel, Nightmare Therapy moves at a rapid pace through a drug-twisted world of feminist anti-car terrorists, homicidal children, political egomania, unwholesome Francophilia, and occasional---and wholly gratuitous---inundations of bodily fluids and other sickening effluvia.

"Nightmare Therapy effortlessly radiates insane ideas and deeply deranged images that horrify, disturb, and ultimately compel" notes Donal O'Shea, Dean of Faculty at Mount Holyoke College. "Infused with the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft, comic books, and Punk nihilism, this delightfully demented and perversely satiric novel rolls like an offbeat juggernaut over a reader's sensibilities, alternating bombast and lyricism, depravity and sublimity. Read it and weep/gag/laugh."

About the Author

Kevin McCaffrey lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and oversees media relations at Mount Holyoke College.