Halfway through her second night on the job, a young woman is locked in an upstairs bedroom, climbs out through a roof hatch, and army-crawls across the tiles of a Hollywood Hills villa because there is nowhere else to go. From up there she watches a man with a golden head of hair slip away from his own party, look twice over his shoulder, and vomit something solid onto the hillside. He cups it in a shaking hand, flings it down, and grinds it into the mulch with his heel. She has no phone, no signal, and no way back down. This is roughly page 125 of Dreamland by Olivie Blake, and it is a fair summary of the whole enterprise: a woman in the wrong place, holding no leverage at all, seeing exactly the thing she was hired not to see.
The House Is Where Dreamland by Olivie Blake Keeps Its Teeth
Anya Morris is twenty-two, biracial, out of work, and living again in the courtyard apartment building her family owns, where her mother has converted the old Filipino dry goods store into an occult shop. A gala invitation from a boy she knew in school leads to a job offer from Emmanuelle de Witt, sister of the actor William de Witt, at a salary that would take her four years to earn otherwise. The work is vague. She is to keep an eye on someone named Julian, who has not been photographed since he was a child, whose medication bottles bear another man’s name, and whose bedroom door locks from the corridor.
The villa itself does most of the atmospheric labour in Dreamland by Olivie Blake, and it does it superbly. Built into a cliff by a long-dead oil magnate, gutted and rebuilt with a tech billionaire’s money, it is described throughout as descending: every terrace a circle lower, the parties arranged around a pool, the guest cabanas below that, and below everything a derelict greenhouse and a fountain that will not run no matter how many motors are ordered for it. The paint smell never lifts. Everyone who lives there has a cough. The reader works out what that cough is roughly two hundred pages before anybody says it aloud, and the fungal reality of the answer, closer to a study of mould and health than to anything supernatural, is one of the book’s better jokes about legacy.
A Chorus of Women Who Are Already Dead
Dreamland by Olivie Blake opens not with a chapter but with an overture. Three voices identified only as Chorus speak from beyond a set of unsolved deaths, and one of them observes that a woman dies the moment people stop saying her name. It sets the terms for everything after. Across the summer the newspapers call this one the season of exsanguination, women keep being found posed and hollowed out, and the coverage moves on within days because a boyfriend gets arrested and domestic violence is not considered interesting.
That is the argument the novel is actually making, and it is made with real teeth. Anya’s cousin is building a gallery installation from sketches of the victims, stained-glass flowers where their organs should be, and the two of them argue about whether this is witness or profiteering while a customer waits to ask about a sale calendar. An agent tells Anya that her audition failed because she should work a little on her pain. She books an eczema commercial instead. A journalist from a major newspaper flirts with her over a tarot spread while she calculates how to grift him. Every scene is doing double duty: comedy on the surface, and underneath it a ledger of what a young woman is expected to trade.
The buried heart of Dreamland by Olivie Blake is Emmanuelle, and this is where the novel is at once bravest and most frustrating. When her history finally arrives, it is a case of child sexual abuse rebranded by the perpetrator as the great romance of his life, complete with a girl from Ohio renamed into something he found more exotic. She spends the novel drunk, cryptic and grotesque, a woman with a face assembled from other people’s features, and only in the last pages is the reader told what she actually was. It is a devastating reveal. It is also a character kept in the wings for four hundred pages so the reveal can land.
Where It Loses Its Footing
Four things hold Dreamland by Olivie Blake back.
- Too many registers. First-person memoir, second-person chapters addressed to a demon, and screenplay interludes with stage directions that comment on the audience. The screenplay scenes begin as a good idea and curdle into archness.
- A slack second act. Party, smoothie, ominous remark, narrator declines to leave, repeat. That she cannot leave is the theme; it is still a long time to spend watching someone not leave.
- The reveal is a lecture. Seventy years of family history arrive in one long second-person address, and what should be the novel’s spine is delivered as a summary.
- A narrator who marks her own work. The book repeatedly tells the reader when to wince, and pre-emptive self-criticism is not the same thing as fixing the problem.
Set against that: the possessed man’s dream chapters are startling, some of the strangest writing Blake has published. A woman hangs upside down in a greenhouse and asks after his hobbies while mould creeps over her. A theatre audience of blinking eyes applauds while he mouths words that are not the ones he is trying to say. There is more genuine horror in those twelve pages than in the entire body count.
Where Dreamland by Olivie Blake Leaves You
The ending is where the novel finally stops performing and lands a real punch, and it involves neither the demon nor the murders. Without spoiling the mechanism, the last chapter reframes everything preceding it, then quietly asks who profits from a dead woman’s story and answers honestly. There is a domestic coda set in a rented house near the ocean that is one of the most unsettling things published this year, precisely because nothing in it is described as frightening.
Readers should know what is here first. Women are murdered in detail and their bodies posed. A child is groomed by a much older man who calls it love. There is sexual violence, a sex scene performed under threat of a gun, a character held captive and kept sedated for days, sex on the page that involves choking, black growths emerging from living bodies, more than one attempt by a character to end his own life, and one scene involving a corpse that most people will remember against their will.
If You Finish This and Want Something Else
Readers who finish Dreamland by Olivie Blake tend to want one of two things next, more Hollywood or more rot. The obvious next step is Blake’s own Gifted & Talented, which shares the caustic voice and the interest in inherited rot, though it plays the family as farce rather than nightmare. Readers who came for Los Angeles as a devouring machine should try L.A. Women by Ella Berman, and anyone who wants the same energy of a woman deciding she would rather be the monster than the victim will find it in Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch. Beyond the shelves here, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem is quoted in the epigraph and remains the source code for every hot wind in this book, while Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company supplies the glamour the novel spends four hundred pages dismantling. Come for the demon, stay for the argument. The demon turns out to be the least of what is wrong with this family.