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خوابگرد
این داستان جذاب شرح ماجرای باورنکردنی و عجیبی است که نظیر آن می تواند در هر نقطه از این کره خاکی اتفاق بیفتد و مدت ها بر سر زبان ها باشد. هنرپیشه گمنامی به نام "کورا استفانی" در یک میهمانی به خواب می رود و روش در بدنی دیگر و در جای دیگری سیر و سیاحت می کند وقتی بیدار می شود آنچه را بر او گذشته برای اطرافیانش بازگو می کند و آنها با این تصور که دوستشان خواب عجیبی دیده است موضوع را جدی تلقی نمی کنند اما پس از چند روز معلوم می شود که خواب کورا واقعی بوده و درست در همان زمان در شهر دیگری موضوع خواب موبه مو اتفاق افتاده است، این خوابگردی های عجیب ادامه پیدا می کند و ...
336 pages
First published January 1, 1955
7 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
About the author
Charlotte Armstrong
160 books77 followersFull name Charlotte Armstrong Lewi. Wrote 29 novels, plus short stories and plays under the name Charlotte Armstrong and Jo Valentine. Additional writing jobs: New York Times (advertising department), Breath of the Avenue (fashion reporter).
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 14 reviews
February 23, 2017
Olivia Hudson is a drama teacher. Her uncle, John Paul Markcus, is a well-respected man with an unimpeachable reputation. So why does Raymond Pankerman want to take him down?
Pankerman hires a failed playwright to come up with a hoax .. a plot ... that will destroy Marcus' reputation. Doesn't have to be true ... it only needs to be thought of as true. There's also a fledging actress to perpetuate a supernatural swindle.
Olivia refuses to let anyone denigrate her uncle.
It is Olivia's voice that tells the story. She's actually recording her words and telling the world what really happened. This book was Inspired by the mob mentality of the postwar McCarthy hearings.
Written in the early 60s, it has an outdated feel to it. The premise is a good one. I think it could have been better. It was a short read ...less than 200 pages. It was like trying to swim in mud. Not too interesting and not at all suspenseful.
I have read much better books by this author ... I can only surmise she was having an off day when this one was written.
Many thanks to Open Road Integrated Media / Netgalley for the digital copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is unbiased and entirely my own.
Pankerman hires a failed playwright to come up with a hoax .. a plot ... that will destroy Marcus' reputation. Doesn't have to be true ... it only needs to be thought of as true. There's also a fledging actress to perpetuate a supernatural swindle.
Olivia refuses to let anyone denigrate her uncle.
It is Olivia's voice that tells the story. She's actually recording her words and telling the world what really happened. This book was Inspired by the mob mentality of the postwar McCarthy hearings.
Written in the early 60s, it has an outdated feel to it. The premise is a good one. I think it could have been better. It was a short read ...less than 200 pages. It was like trying to swim in mud. Not too interesting and not at all suspenseful.
I have read much better books by this author ... I can only surmise she was having an off day when this one was written.
Many thanks to Open Road Integrated Media / Netgalley for the digital copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is unbiased and entirely my own.
October 19, 2021
Oct 18, 10pm ~~ Review asap.
Oct 19, 230pm ~~ After Marco and I read Armstrong's Mischief for our Zapata Reading Club, I thought I would like to read more of her titles. I could not remember ever reading any other book of hers, and I went off happily to Thriftbooks to browse and buy. I got this one and two omnibus editions with three titles per book. Yay!
The final couple of weeks of October are turning out to be for reading odds and ends, so I decided to dive into The Dream Walker and save the omnibus editions for Someday. This book was very much different from Mischief, and I needed a few chapters to get into the story properly, but once I did, I could barely put the book down.
Our narrator is Olivia Hudson, Dramatic Arts teacher in a private school for girls. She tells us the story looking back on it, with lots of 'we didn't know this at the time' type of comments, and sometimes that got annoying, but overall the style worked. Other major characters are Ollie's cousin Charley and his ex-wife Cora.
Cora is the major character because she is the dream walker, a title the newspapers give her after incidents which appear to show that she is able to be in two places at once. She faints into a trance, and when she wakes up, tells of where she was and who she spoke with, and when the story she tells is checked, it is all true.
Or is it?
Ollie doesn't think so, but she and Cora have been friends for years, so she is not sure what to do except continue by her side through the turmoil.
Until the dead body appears.
I don't usually care for murder mysteries or too much spooky suspense, but it seems that this author had the right mix for me: enough suspense to make me really try to figure out what would happen next, not too much blood and guts all over the place (at least in this title) and a writing style that made me feel part of the action.
I am looking forward more than ever now to those two omnibus editions!
Oct 19, 230pm ~~ After Marco and I read Armstrong's Mischief for our Zapata Reading Club, I thought I would like to read more of her titles. I could not remember ever reading any other book of hers, and I went off happily to Thriftbooks to browse and buy. I got this one and two omnibus editions with three titles per book. Yay!
The final couple of weeks of October are turning out to be for reading odds and ends, so I decided to dive into The Dream Walker and save the omnibus editions for Someday. This book was very much different from Mischief, and I needed a few chapters to get into the story properly, but once I did, I could barely put the book down.
Our narrator is Olivia Hudson, Dramatic Arts teacher in a private school for girls. She tells us the story looking back on it, with lots of 'we didn't know this at the time' type of comments, and sometimes that got annoying, but overall the style worked. Other major characters are Ollie's cousin Charley and his ex-wife Cora.
Cora is the major character because she is the dream walker, a title the newspapers give her after incidents which appear to show that she is able to be in two places at once. She faints into a trance, and when she wakes up, tells of where she was and who she spoke with, and when the story she tells is checked, it is all true.
Or is it?
Ollie doesn't think so, but she and Cora have been friends for years, so she is not sure what to do except continue by her side through the turmoil.
Until the dead body appears.
I don't usually care for murder mysteries or too much spooky suspense, but it seems that this author had the right mix for me: enough suspense to make me really try to figure out what would happen next, not too much blood and guts all over the place (at least in this title) and a writing style that made me feel part of the action.
I am looking forward more than ever now to those two omnibus editions!
December 9, 2024
Not so good as expected, just dropped it.
August 29, 2013
فقط موضوع جالبی داشت...
December 11, 2017
A reverse mystery set in the sixties in which an actress-turned-schoolteacher unveils the truth behind her school friend's "dream walking" episodes.
May 17, 2023
درکل جالب بود، روند و کارکترهاشو پسندیدم.
November 25, 2023
Quite good. Better than I expected.
August 10, 2021
[I have the paperback drably retitled ALIBI FOR MURDER but with an evocative Marchetti cover] Of course I have an interest in noir that overlaps with the supernatural–even if it’s just an element that the protagonists are at pains to discredit as quickly as possible. Probably best known for her novel Mischief, which became the film Don’t Bother to Knock, Charlotte Armstrong has unconventional approaches to crime fiction that make her stand out from a lot of the more popular mid-20th century writers.
The story is narrated by Olivia Hudson, who mostly seems to want to back away from life, talking into a tape recorder after the events have passed. Abandoning the stage, she had become a teacher but maintains a foot in Broadway life–and an unrequited yen for Charley Ives. Of course they’re thrown together to unravel a mystery that threatens their mutual ‘uncle’ and power-behind-the-throne D.C. insider John Paul Marcus. The scars of the war are still fresh (1955) but there’s a paranoia, too, that bad apples are going to turn everything that’s good on its head. Olivia muses on the power of The Big Lie: ‘Even now when you don’t have to believe the lie any more, it’s hard enough, isn’t it, to believe that any one would have gone to so much trouble.’
At first she and others dismiss the apparent astral projection as a kind of parlour trick: a seven day wonder that will be forgotten, instead of an ingenious, complicated and fiendishly cynical plot. That it involves women — particularly actors — makes it even more suspect. Much of the tension comes not from ‘whodunnit’ but from the attempts to stick too closely to rationality without the leap of imagination. When Cora the Dream Walker becomes witness to a murder the stakes rise quickly–and the theories: ‘Cora was in league with the Devil. Cora was a witch. Modern science is always rediscovering truth in old wives’ tales. There were witches after all. And this settled it.’
Fun to read and very inventive structure. Some quotes:
People didn’t have to believe the nonsense. Doubt was enough. Doubt, for most, is exactly the same thing as condemnation.
How precious a thing it is to meet everywhere an assumption that you are most probably decent and normally intelligent. If this is lost, you are left in the loneliest kind of place, a world without any fellows where you find no peers and don’t belong.
‘Coincidence means only a connection that’s not seen. Roots meet underground. And hope is creative…’
Bonus points, too, for quoting my favourite line from Richard II, which I also pilfered for Owl Stretching.
The story is narrated by Olivia Hudson, who mostly seems to want to back away from life, talking into a tape recorder after the events have passed. Abandoning the stage, she had become a teacher but maintains a foot in Broadway life–and an unrequited yen for Charley Ives. Of course they’re thrown together to unravel a mystery that threatens their mutual ‘uncle’ and power-behind-the-throne D.C. insider John Paul Marcus. The scars of the war are still fresh (1955) but there’s a paranoia, too, that bad apples are going to turn everything that’s good on its head. Olivia muses on the power of The Big Lie: ‘Even now when you don’t have to believe the lie any more, it’s hard enough, isn’t it, to believe that any one would have gone to so much trouble.’
At first she and others dismiss the apparent astral projection as a kind of parlour trick: a seven day wonder that will be forgotten, instead of an ingenious, complicated and fiendishly cynical plot. That it involves women — particularly actors — makes it even more suspect. Much of the tension comes not from ‘whodunnit’ but from the attempts to stick too closely to rationality without the leap of imagination. When Cora the Dream Walker becomes witness to a murder the stakes rise quickly–and the theories: ‘Cora was in league with the Devil. Cora was a witch. Modern science is always rediscovering truth in old wives’ tales. There were witches after all. And this settled it.’
Fun to read and very inventive structure. Some quotes:
People didn’t have to believe the nonsense. Doubt was enough. Doubt, for most, is exactly the same thing as condemnation.
How precious a thing it is to meet everywhere an assumption that you are most probably decent and normally intelligent. If this is lost, you are left in the loneliest kind of place, a world without any fellows where you find no peers and don’t belong.
‘Coincidence means only a connection that’s not seen. Roots meet underground. And hope is creative…’
Bonus points, too, for quoting my favourite line from Richard II, which I also pilfered for Owl Stretching.
November 21, 2015
John Pankerman, a wealthy man is caught as a communist. He wants to get back at John Paul Marcus, an important man in Washington. Pankerman hires a smart man, Kent Shaw to figure out how. Kent hires two sometime actresses, Cora and Darlene, who have similar faces with a pointed nose, to act out cases of supernatural being at two places at once. Cora pretends to faint and when she comes out she describes being in another place, meeting someone, and talking with them. Later, the person to whom she talks during her dream describe Cora in exactly the same clothes she was wearing (the person who actually performed the act being Darlene). At one point, Darlene explains what she is doing to an old flame, and Kent has to kill him. The real reason for the "plan" is to have one of the dreams be Pankerman giving a note to Marcus in the park in Washington, and thus ruin his reputation with communism. The whole story is told by Cora's friend Olivia, who finally helps to figure out what is happening.
July 11, 2015
This is an unusual book, with an odd, terse writing style; I found it a little off-putting at first, and it took me a while to get used to it. The sentences are very short. The story is told in narration, by someone who is speaking to a tape recorder, and who seems to be in some kind of institution, although where and why is not made clear until the end.
It's all rather melodramatic and quite repetitive in places; there's an awful lot of harping on the near-perfection of the sainted Marcus and the insidious nature of suspicion. This book was written in the 1950's, and it's definitely of its time.
My chief complaint is that there's really no mystery to speak of -- the narrator knows all, it seems, and everything is explained as we go along, so we know who's doing what, and how, and why. The only question is, how do they prove it?
It's all rather melodramatic and quite repetitive in places; there's an awful lot of harping on the near-perfection of the sainted Marcus and the insidious nature of suspicion. This book was written in the 1950's, and it's definitely of its time.
My chief complaint is that there's really no mystery to speak of -- the narrator knows all, it seems, and everything is explained as we go along, so we know who's doing what, and how, and why. The only question is, how do they prove it?
December 31, 2009
It is one of the best books I have ever read.I was really hooked while reading.I could guess what would happened at the end,but I couldn't put it down.I like the idea of being at the same time in two places.
November 1, 2010
I was going to give it 2 stars - until I got to the very end. ;-)
February 21, 2018
Olivia Hudson is a drama teacher at a Manhattan girls school. She refuses to let her uncle play the role of dupe in a real-life revenge story.
This book is a re-releases that takes place around the cold war. It was a fairly quick read. While some might say it’s a bit outdated, I found that it has become relevant again with everything that has happened since our last election. Overall it wasn’t a bad read and I would probably read more from this author if she something a bit more recent.
**I voluntarily read and reviewed this book
This book is a re-releases that takes place around the cold war. It was a fairly quick read. While some might say it’s a bit outdated, I found that it has become relevant again with everything that has happened since our last election. Overall it wasn’t a bad read and I would probably read more from this author if she something a bit more recent.
**I voluntarily read and reviewed this book
Displaying 1 - 13 of 14 reviews