A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamspawn
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Author | Christa Faust |
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Language | English |
Series | A Nightmare on Elm Street |
Release number | 2 |
Genre | Horror |
Publisher | Black Flame |
Publication date | 26 April 2005 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | Print (Paperback) |
Pages | 416 |
ISBN | 9781844161737 |
OCLC | 57527052 |
Preceded by | A Nightmare on Elm Street: Suffer the Children |
Followed by | A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protégé |
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamspawn is a 2005 British horror novel written by Christa Faust and published by Black Flame.[1] A tie-in to the Nightmare on Elm Street series of American horror films, it is the second in a series of five Nightmare on Elm Street novels that were published by Black Flame and involves a group of high school girls who call fourth and attempt to control supernatural killer Freddy Krueger.[2]
Plot
[edit]Seven-year-old Rose Gibson lives in Bakersfield, California, with her negligent drug-addict mother, Laurie, and sexually abusive father, Ed Parker, a drunk who once made Rose watch as he killed her dog, Pepper. One night, the Gibson household is visited by Freddy Krueger, a serial child rapist and killer who, after being burned to death by angry parents, now haunts the Dream World. Freddy murders Laurie and Ed, but fails to kill Rose.
Twelve years later, Jane DeHaan moves to Southern California. Jane, a teenager whose father died of AML, is an overweight goth who adores the Victorian era. Jane is bullied at Hemingway High, where her main tormentor is a promiscuous and alcoholic cheerleader named Amber Dunn. Jane befriends Lola Cole, a punk horror film fan, and together they fake Amber's kidnapping by dropping her off at a rehab clinic while she is intoxicated as a prank on her and her three sycophants, Ashley, Kayla, and Shayne. When Amber returns, she is rejected by the other cheerleaders and thanks Jane and Lola for helping her overcome her addiction, befriending them, and confiding in them about how she was rendered infertile by a botched abortion; the three outcasts are nicknamed the "Petticoat Mafia." Jane also becomes romantically involved with and loses her virginity to a member of the school's wrestling team, an artist named Brandon Ortiz.
Rose, having become a self-harming misanthrope since her parents' deaths, transfers to Hemingway and joins the Petticoat Mafia. After attending a party alone, Rose tells her new friends that she was gangraped by the wrestling team and talks the other girls into helping her get revenge by performing a ritual to summon Freddy. The ceremony, held in the abandoned factory where Freddy was once employed, works, with Rose coercing Freddy into doing her bidding by withholding the bladed glove that Freddy wielded in life as the "Springwood Slasher." After Freddy murders every member of the wrestling team besides Brandon, it is revealed that Rose lied about being raped in order to get the Petticoat Mafia to help her revive Freddy, who Rose has been obsessed with since childhood, wanting to use Freddy to commit a grandiose murder–suicide that entails detonating a bomb full of knockout gas in Hemingway. With everyone in the school knocked out by the gas, a massive shared dream forms in which Freddy begins killing people by the dozens, including Amber and Lola, the latter of whom has her brain eaten by Freddy after he traps her in a nightmare recreation of Night of the Living Dead.
Freddy, after mocking Rose for believing she could control him through his glove, murders Brandon and attacks Jane. Rose rips Freddy's heart out and incinerates it, the glove, and herself in a furnace, which vanquishes Freddy. Jane is confined indefinitely to a psychiatric hospital, where she spends all of her time staring blankly at a TV, after the Petticoat Mafia is blamed for the 461 deaths that occurred at Hemingway.
Publication
[edit]Author Christa Faust celebrated the book's release with a signing at the Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank, California on June 12, 2005.[3]
In 2006, Black Flame reprinted Dreamspawn as part of Ripped From a Dream: A Nightmare on Elm Street Omnibus, a compilation that included Suffer the Children and Protégé, the preceding and subsequent Nightmare on Elm Street novels that were published by Black Flame.[4]
Reception
[edit]In a dual review of Dreamspawn and its predecessor, Suffer the Children, that he wrote for Science Fiction Chronicle, Don D'Ammassa concluded, "I wasn't really surprised by anything in either book, but both are quite suspenseful and do a good job of capturing the atmosphere of their inspiration."[5] Writing for the The Boar, Reece Goodall lambasted the novel, which he noted felt like "a poor high school drama, full of caricatures of teenagers" and "two very different stories awkwardly stapled together."[4]
References
[edit]- ^ Stephen Jones (2006). The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17. Constable & Robinson. Introduction: Horror in 2005. ISBN 9781845293154.
- ^ Beverly Baer, ed. (2005). What Do I Read Next? 2005: A Readers Guide to Current Genre Fiction, Volume 2. Gale. p. 245. ISBN 9780787690229.
- ^ "TODAY Come and enjoy a barbecue for..." latimes.com. Burbank Leader. 11 June 2005. Retrieved 14 August 2024.
- ^ a b Goodall, Reece (6 November 2020). "The bizarre Elm Street spin-off novels: Ripped from a Dream". theboar.org. The Boar. Retrieved 14 August 2024.
- ^ "Critical Mass by Don D'Ammassa". Science Fiction Chronicle. Vol. 1, no. 261. United States: Warren Lapine. May 2005. p. 31.
External links
[edit]- Dreamspawn title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- 2005 British novels
- 2000s horror novels
- British horror novels
- Domestic violence in fiction
- Fiction about animal cruelty
- Fiction about casual sex
- Fiction about child murder
- Fiction about false allegations of sex crimes
- Fiction about gang rape
- Fiction about incest
- Fiction about infidelity
- Fiction about mother–daughter relationships
- Fiction about self-harm
- Fiction about shapeshifting
- Fiction about virginity
- Ghost novels
- Homophobia in fiction
- Juvenile delinquency in fiction
- Literature about pedophilia
- Murder–suicide in fiction
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (franchise) mass media
- Novels about abortion
- Novels about alcoholism
- Novels about artists
- Novels about bullying
- Novels about cancer
- Novels about cannibalism
- Novels about child abduction
- Novels about child abuse
- Novels about child sexual abuse
- Novels about cyberbullying
- Novels about dysfunctional families
- Novels about eating disorders
- Novels about friendship
- Novels about mass murder
- Novels about moving
- Novels about nightmares
- Novels about orphans
- Novels about precognition
- Novels about racism
- Novels about rape
- Novels about revenge
- Novels about serial killers
- Novels about spirit possession
- Novels about suicide
- Novels about teenage pregnancy
- Novels about telekinesis
- Novels about telepathy
- Novels based on films
- Novels set in abandoned buildings and structures
- Novels set in Bakersfield, California
- Novels set in California
- Novels set in factories
- Novels set in high schools and secondary schools
- Novels set in psychiatric hospitals
- Novels set in the 1990s
- Novels set in the 2000s
- Novels with multiple narrators
- Supernatural novels
- Third-person narrative novels
- Works about school violence
- Works about single parent families
- Works about philosophical pessimism
- Works about torture
- Works set in apartment buildings
- Zombie novels