2014, 39 pages

Collette’s Dream Man is an unassuming novelette with a soulful cover consisting of a simply wonderful original painting by Sean Wallis.

Since H.P. Lovecraft plied his trade alienation has been the plumb line employed by the masters of horror prose to establish the verticality of human sorrow.

Lovecraft set the outer bar when he charted Mankind’s alienation from the very cosmos we are taught to believe cares for us like a stern father.

Matheson addressed alienation of the individual from humanity in superbly crafted prose.

In King’s Mr. Mercedes a sense of alienation bordering on a shattered mind is built over many hours of narrative immersion with a broken but still caring character.

Andy Nowicki, in a story that occupies no more pages then one of King’s chapters, saddles us with no tropes or characters from Central Casting. Indeed, Andy only gives us three characters, and tells his tale with minimal attention to plot, and only slightly more attention to characterization. Collette’s Dream Man is a biography of our alienation—the story of all of us sitting here at the End of Time looking over the edge—as seen through the eyes of three characters whose suffering negates the need to dress them up.

Beginning with the young belle of Savannah, Collette Anders, by all indications a perfect modern WASP version of young womanhood marooned in a postmodern catholic environment, the author dips into antiquity’s well for that deep sense of sacral alienation; that which girls experience when they first menstruate and which primitive boys replicate through rites of passage intended to achieve social separation for the soul.

Ancient Greek folk tales relate at least three cases of mortal women [respected mothers and wives at that] being loved in their dreams—and impregnated—by gods. Zeus, chief of the gods, was a virtual serial rapist of mortals. Such were the influences under which formed the Catholic Cult of the Virgin Mother Mary. However, Collette is not impregnated with a child, but with an ‘ideal.’ She is infected with the urgent notion that her dream lover lives in the flesh, and she might also know physical satisfaction along with the spiritual.

One could read Collette as America itself, seduced onto unhallowed ground, led by a material ideal into the mortuary of civilizations.

Collette’s anguished world is not hers alone. She is accompanied by two other tormented souls, together forming a trinity of angst in the overtly Trinitarian setting of a catholic community centered on two catholic schools and a parochial football game.

Mark Wills, womanizing high school teacher, is pointlessly adrift in the shallows of a world where his effortless charm and good looks doom him to one bad choice after the other. Mark is the true hero of ancient Greek myth [Paris, I think], reconfigured by the author as a shallow Generation X of a man-leaf twisting in the amoral wind.

One could read Mark as the failure of Modern Man, haunted by his terrible confrontation with the awful truth of his nature.

The trinity is complete with the most ascendant of the three sacral figures in the person of maimed and handicapped high school student Pierce Westlover, who loves Collette genuinely from afar, unlike the mass of men and boys who admire only her appearance. Pierce, however, is not packaged in an acceptable manner and knows that he is banished to the wasteland with no hope of connecting with the object of his adoration.

One could read Pierce as the spiritually handicapped and culturally maimed postmodern male unable to connect as a man with the world, with that which he might adore if he were compatibly equipped.

In Collette’s Dream Man Andy Nowicki has crafted a two-headed snake of a story; a tale of three impotent souls adrift and sinking in the stifling fog of social construct, and a brutally veiled allegory on the sterilization of Western Civilization.

Below is one of many telling lines from this tale of people making their way in a world that does not care to know them:

“…it is the only thing that brings me temporary relief in this arid realm of draught and thirst…”