Steve Moore’s Somnium is a rare and affecting novel where all is not as it seems…finally completed five years ago, drawn from decades of detailed personal dream diaries, the book was published by Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor Press …the plot-line is a compelling mobius strip, without formal chapters. As layers of story within story, dream within dream, book within book are built up and burnished, the hard outlines between author, writer and fictional character meld and coalesce…for me, Moore’s prose is exquisite and alluring, swelling with subtlety and suggestion, and it will bear repeated reading.

“May not the stars be plucked and set into a sparkling crown? The tails of comets wove into a scarf that trails all sequinated through the sky?” (from Somnium by Steve Moore)

I say, the curling smoke-ring arabesques of dream-webs may be retted, carded and spun into black thread words on the white virgin sheets of a book. Only to unfurl and unravel again, speechlessly settling inside the moonlight of my imagination. Steve Moore’s novel tells me this much, at least, is possible.

A full version of Jean Dark’s review of Somnium by Steve Moore is printed here and in the Summer 2012 edition of Pentacle Magazine.

Other Book reviews by Jean Dark may be found here

Jean Dark
13th August 2012