Thomas is the Bram Stoker award-winning author of Damage and Stained. His acclaimed new novel, The Dust of Wonderland has been compared to Peter Straub's Ghost Story.
Lee Thomas, Author
Lee Thomas is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Damage and several other novels, and around a score of short stories. His new novel, The Dust of Wonderland (Alyson Books, 316pp, ISBN 978-1-53950-011-5) is earning rave reviews and looks set to extend his reputation.
The Dust of Wonderland
When word reaches him that his son has been attacked and left in a coma, Ken Nicholson returns to New Orleans after a two year absence in Austin. Nicholson had long led a double life before coming out, for many years as an apparently conventional husband to Paula and father to Bobby and Jen, but before that as a young man as the kept lover of Travis Brugier, a mysterious figure who ran Wonderland, a private club where young men –Brugier’s ‘vassals’- pandered to the rich and powerful of New Orleans.
Brugier’s reputation was destroyed in a bloodbath within the courtyard of Wonderland, even before his body was found. But when it becomes clear that both he and his family are being stalked by Bobby’s fiancée and her threatening companion, Ken must face the possibility that either Brugier never died, or that he has the power to reach out from beyond death and ensnare the Nicholsons. But why?
Only by confronting what happened in Wonderland over thirty years before can Ken hope to understand and then survive the terrible forces threatening to engulf him and those he loves.
Stained
Central to The Dust of Wonderland is that history settles like dust on those who live through it; or worse than dust – “memory was a disease, a chronic illness that could lay dormant for months, even years, before it woke to virulently infect its hosts.”
That sense that the world we know overlays a more brutal, corrupt, even infected world that oozes and stains its way into our world runs through Thomas’ debut Stoker-winner Stained, and resurfaces here. It’s possible that it’s a view that stains all his work with darkness.
Ghost Story
The Dust of Wonderland has been compared with Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, and there are similarities; both feature a malign spirit, the protagonist’s need to face old history, and reality dissolving into illusion. But there are differences too; whereas Straub’s Chowder Society were old men sitting around telling one another stories, Thomas prefers more direct methods of getting our attention – notably an iron bar to the skull. Similarly, whereas Straub is elliptical, Thomas is lean, but no less eloquent.
“The concern that had been with him since Paula’s panicked call only a few hours before sprouted sharp-edged vines that raked through his stomach and chest.”
His native spirit too is more fully rounded than Straub’s one-dimensional Manitou; it is man himself who has made Brugier what he is, so it is man who must bear the consequences.
There are times --such as when Nicholson grieves for Bobby-- when The Dust of Wonderland is almost too painful to bear, but what Thomas is telling us is that no matter how awful the world is, we must bear it. Beauty and pain, love and loss, all are inseparable, and we must bear them without flinching. In the midst of the horror, Nicholson’s essential humanity gives us an anchor.
The Dust of Wonderland is a quite literally wonderful book.
