saltdawg

This is a weird slipstream book that feels like it is trying to horn in on Nick Mamatas's territory sometimes.

Jonathan Abernathy is a lonely adult. He is an orphan, and his life is going nowhere. He goes and begs his old manager at the hotdog stand for a job because he desperately needs the money.

But he is working on a bigger project where he is a dream auditor. At night, he enters people's dreams and sucks away the bad parts so that they can be more productive. (This is the thing that feels Mamatas-like. People are doing weird things because of capitalism.) There are all sorts of things about the dream world that are unclear. What happens to the parts of the dreams that are sucked away? What happens to the lives of the people whose dreams have been changed?

He has a neighbor named Rhoda who has a daughter named Timmy, and sometimes Rhoda asks Jonathan to watch Timmy.

He likes her. He starts seeing her in dreams, but whose dreams are they? Which dreams are real?