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374th out of 1,498 books
—
12,022 voters
This Dream Called Death
Stephen Janis is an awarding-winning investigative reporter. The urban crime scene is his beat. His engrossing, surreal novel, “This Dream Called Death,” is his second book.
The fast-paced story is set in the decaying, crime-saturated and once-highly industrialized, “City of Balaise.” It’s a look into a grim, but maybe a not-too-distant future, where your worst fears of an...more
The fast-paced story is set in the decaying, crime-saturated and once-highly industrialized, “City of Balaise.” It’s a look into a grim, but maybe a not-too-distant future, where your worst fears of an...more
164 pages
Published
November 5th 2009
by Novelzine
(first published 2009)
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By Michael Willis
Peculiar....it seems as if I had it figured.
Having read just one-fifth of Stephen S. Janis', This Dream Called Death I actually thought I had comprehended the entire book a prior.
Yes, the story was well crafted, thoughtful, and unique. The plot too, was smart and complex.
But just a couple of dozen pages in it appeared the psychological issues that emerged to propel the narrative forward would ultimately be the author's undoing.
This was heady material.
A story which presumes to in...more
What makes this book fascinating for me is how it configures a surreal allegory for the little known affects of an mass arrest policy in Baltimore city that was the primary crime fighting tool during the middle part of the past decade I heard the author speak, and he said he got the idea for dream regulation from covering Baltimore's zero tolerance arrest policy. According to him the city arrested almost a three quartrers of a million people in 8 years, most of them African American. Police woul...more
Dystopian novel that examines the underside of the American penal system and the so-called "zero tolerance" arrest policy. Following the fortunes of the city of Balaise beset by crime, the book chronicles the downfall of a "recorder" of waivers who works for the city's Buruea of Dreams. Uncovering a plot to incarcerate thousands of citizens based on thier dreams, the protaginist finds himself ensnared by the same systenm that he helped create.
While this book is a great dsytopian read, it's a little more subtle and thus stimulating than most. Instead of postulating some sort of technology driven mad world, the book manages to create a different sort of terror, namely that our unconscious thoughts are grist for the punishment mill. It's not for everyone, but it brought to light an interesting perspective on how we punish, and what it really means.
Really short...but fun in a dystopian/obvious sort of way. I liked the structure, I liked the narrative and a couple of the messages about "too much diversification of learning."
May 04, 2013
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Stephen Janis is an award-winning investigative reporter and the founder of Investigative Voice, an online investigative journalism web site.
As a staff writer for the Baltimore Examiner (and one of only a handful who worked at the paper for its entire existence) he won a Maryland- Delaware-DC Press Association award in 2008 for investigative reporting on the high rate of unsolved murders in Balti...more
More about Stephen Janis...
As a staff writer for the Baltimore Examiner (and one of only a handful who worked at the paper for its entire existence) he won a Maryland- Delaware-DC Press Association award in 2008 for investigative reporting on the high rate of unsolved murders in Balti...more
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