Book Review: 'The Dream Lords: A Plague of Nightmares' by Adrian Cole
'The Dream Lords: A Plague of Nightmares' (176 pp.) first was published by Zebra Books in 1975.
The followup volumes in the so-called 'Dream Lords' trilogy are 'Lord of Nightmares' (1975) and 'Bane of Nightmares' (1976). Zebra subsequently reissued the series, with different covers, in 1976 and 1977. Trying to figure out the order of the books, based on the cover numbering of the Zebra titles, is confusing: both 'Lord of Nightmares' (1977) and 'Bane of Nightmares' (1976) are numbered 'Volume 3'.......?! While 'Lord of Nightmares', from 1975, has no cover numbering at all.................
My copy of 'A Plague of Nightmares' was issued in July 1977 (176 pp.) and features striking cover art by Tom Barber.
While the cover art suggests that 'A Plague of Nightmares' is a fantasy / sword & sorcery adventure, in fact, the novel is science fiction with a heavy overlay of fantasy elements. So readers will encounter hovercraft, spaceships, ray guns, and robots, along with telepathy and occult phenomena.
The plot is set in the far future. Earth, convulsed by wars, has degenerated into a wasteland ruled by warlords and inhabited by 'barbarians'. For the colony worlds, settled centuries ago by Terran fleets, Earth - known simply as 'Ur' - has become nothing but a legend. Foremost among the colonies is the planet Zurjah, whose potentates, a cabal of powerful telepaths known as the Dream Lords, pacify the population with a constant flow of psychic sendings.
Protagonist Galad Sarian is the son of one of the Dream Lords, and destined to take his father's place. However, Sarian can't help feeling that something is wrong with the seemingly placid world ruled by the Dream Lords, and as the novel opens, he makes the acquaintance of an elderly seer named Chalremor, who informs Sarian of the underlying reality that is hidden from the people by the psychic machinations of the Dream Lords.
When Sarian confronts his father and the other Dream Lords about their machinations, he is reprimanded and exiled to the plant Gargan, one of the polities in the Zurjah Federation. There, Sarian learns of a conspiracy to overthrow the Dream Lords and place all of the Federation under the rule of a homicidal despot. Hunted by his enemies, and forced to rely on a group of rebels armed only with swords and spears, Sarian will need to unleash his own psychic abilities if he is to have any hope of saving the Federation from slaughter and slavery......
UK writer Adrian Christopher Synnot Cole (b. 1949) began publishing short stories in the small press in the early 1970s, and has since become an accomplished author of novels in the fantasy, science fiction, and sword & sorcery genres (my review of his 1993 novel 'Blood Red Angel' is here.)
Given that 'A Plague of Nightmares' is one of his first published novels it would not be appropriate to give it an intense critical scrutiny. It is safe to say that 'Nightmares' reads like the sort of novel that would have been serialized in Amazing or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1960s. The prose style is reminiscent of pulp-era horror and fantasy fiction, and is intended to lend a Lovecraftian flavor to the proceedings.
As far as plotting goes, the first 86 pages are devoted - in a leisurely fashion - to characterization and background, and the very first action scene doesn't arrive until page 87. Thereafter events unfold at a frantic, at times contrived, pace, which is maintained until the very last paragraph (which necessarily introduces a cliffhanger ending, since the story is continued in volume two).
I suspect that eventually I'll tackle the other two volumes in the series. For volume one, I am comfortable with giving 'A Plague of Nightmares' a 2 Star Score.
For another take on this novel, readers are directed to a 2016 review over at the MPorcius Fiction Log.
