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    The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters
    The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters
    The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters
    Audiobook (abridged)12 hours

    The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters

    Written by Gordon Dahlquist

    Narrated by Alfred Molina

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It began with a simple note: a letter of rejection delivered to Miss Temple on her maid's silver tray. But for Miss Temple, her fiancé's cruel rejection will ignite a harrowing quest for truth, plunging her into a mystery as dizzying as a hall of mirrors. Thus begins Gordon Dahlquist's spectacular literary debut, a novel of Victorian suspense that shatters conventions and seethes with danger and eroticism.

    Miss Temple's pursuit soon leads to a remote, forbidding estate where all inhibitions are laid bare and shocking discoveries lie behind its closed doors: men and women in provocative disguise, acts of licentiousness and violence, heroism and awakening. But she will also find two allies: Cardinal Chang, a brutal assassin with the heart of a poet, and a royal doctor named Svenson, at once fumbling and heroic -- both of whom, like her, lost someone at Harschmort Manor. The search for answers hurtles this unlikely trio from elegant brothels and gaslit alleyways to astonishing moments of self-discovery and ever-mounting peril. For the conspiracy they face -- a perverted alchemy of science, religion, and lust for power -- is terrifying beyond belief.

    By turns brutal and tender, shocking and deliciously romantic, The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters is a novel for the ages, a bold and brilliant work of the imagination.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 1, 2006
    ISBN9780743561891
    The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters
    Author

    Gordon Dahlquist

    Playwright Gordon Dahlquist was born in the Pacific Northwest and lives in New York City. This is his first novel.

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    Reviews for The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters

    3.5/5

    43 ratings42 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Great premise, good atmosphere, and some really original, startling scenes, but the whole doesn't seem to cohere. Might have worked better as a series of short stories (seems to have worked well as a serial.) Shame, really, but it is his first book, after all. I'll be keeping an eye out for more.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The plot is afoot and the sinister villains, who seem numberless, and who all have long, unpronounceable names, are out to corrupt everyone and rule the world. Our three heros (well, one is a heroine) ally themselves against the forces of evil for reasons that are never made completely clear (as is true of so much in this book) and, through an unbelievable and seemingly endless series of derring do rescues, hairsbreadth escapes, breaking and entering, spying through peepholes, wandering aimlessly around the manse, and generally getting beat up, mauled and seduced, they wend their way to the denouement of this story. This might have been a better book if it had been about 300 pages shorter (750 pages is a lot of derring do, especially when it sometimes seems to be set on automatic replay) and if the author had taken time to think through the logic of some of the situations. I won't be reading the sequel.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This was produced as instalments as well as being produced as a full book and I'm not certain that it wouldn't have been a better experience. It's an interesting story of conspiracy, steampunk, control and strange going-ons in a place that sounds like London but isn't.I found it interesting but somewhat flawed, it had shining moments but it also had moments that lagged and made me wonder if I should continue. Still it kept my attention and made me postpone sleep to find out how it finished.
    • 5/5
      This is not an easy read but its fully worth it. I love that the characters are flawed and believable and that you get to view events from each of their perspectives. The plot is rather complex which made it difficult to get into at first but once I got there i was hooked. A steam-punk inspired masterpiece!
    • 1/5
      OK, I like steampunk-y anachronistic murder mysteries with a supernatural leaning as much as the next guy (actually, probably quite a bit more, much to my boyfriend's derision), but come ON! There is no metaphor in the title here - they are ACTUAL glass books and people ACTUALLY eat dreams. The rest is a blur of silly costume parties and masqued balls where SOMETHING SINISTER IS GOING ON, usually involving half-clad ladies in a narcotic daze being subjected to the exploitative slaverings of outwardly respectable gentlemen. If you found the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut to be profound and philosophical, perhaps you are of a mind that can find some deeper meaning here. If not, and if it all just seems pretentious, empty-headed nonsense that far overreaches itself, come sit by me.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this book, even though it was over long and lost it's way at times.
    • 3/5
      The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is a promising fictional debut, but one that comes just shy of being able to keep its promises.It follows three interesting characters whose personal intrigues lead them to become entangled in a political intrigue involving the cult of an alchemist painter who has invented a process for removing a person's memories---thereby making that person into an empty shell and thus a subservient slave---and putting those memories into special blue glass books which allows "readers" to experience the memories contained therein first-hand. An interesting concept, with interesting characters...but not *too* interesting.The plot is a bit repetetive. The three protagonists go to the villains' headquarters independently, are captured, then escape. They meet up with each other, separate, each go back to the villains' headquarters, are captured...and so on. During each cycle, they all learn a bit more about what's going on, and then share their new piece of the puzzle with the others when they are reunited, but this pattern does grow a bit tedious by the end.Everything about this novel is "not quite." The super-advanced, quasi-mystical technology of the villains *almost* works (in terms of the reader's suspension of disbelief), but not quite. The characters are likeable, but not quite loveable. Their stories are readable, but not compelling. The author's prose style is more than competent, but not quite artistic or beautiful.Rather than slogging through the whole book, my advice is to just pick up the abridged version on CD from the library. Here's hoping that Gordon Dahlquist's second novel will be everything that this one could have been.
    • 4/5
      Too much running along corridors, repetitive shredded underwear and stuff done to bound women.
    • 4/5
      Started wonderfully, then got a bit too male action oriented for my tastes, but finally we have returned to the female character I was enjoying in the beginning. Interesting.
    • 3/5
      Decent read. I did like that the vocabulary is not written for a 5 year old. I am so tired of that. Interesting story and plot.
    • 5/5
      Glass Books of the Dream Eaters- by Gordon Dahlquist : Three of the most original protagonists in recent fiction reside within the confines of this dramatically over the top adventure story. Miss Celeste Temple, a very proper young lady of means has been jilted by her fianc?e, an event that propels her into action to uncover the reason for his perplexing decision, and eventually, into the company of two exceptional comrades, the military doctor, Abelard Svenson and the hired assassin, Cardinal Chang. The story takes you on a journey of perilous plots, unspeakably dastardly villains (including a villainess SO unspeakable you want to reach into the book and throttle her!) and a darling pair of green shoes, of sinister masked evening parties at equally sinister private estates, evil scientific goings on, and surprising erotic interludes. You'll never view the color blue quite the same way after you've read this terrific book!
    • 5/5
      The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters contains, amongst other things,:the most wonderfully described tea-break, bags of mortal peril, an incredible amount of lip-licking, some sensual neck-lines, a solid dose of Victorian erotica, guns, daggers, big sticks, the loss of virtue, some very shady characters, a spot of running around in the dark, humour, intrigue, acumen and guile, a band of fearsome meglomaniacs, an unlikely trio of just and richeous heroes, and one of the best, most involved and consuming stories I've read in a long, long time.
    • 5/5
      An absolutely amazing debut. This book is hard to pin down as it has a bit of everything. It's a Victorian fantasy/mystery and just a plain good read! Highly recommended!
    • 1/5
      this was highly recommended to me - but I kept falling asleep while reading it. finally gave up and returned it to the library.
    • 4/5
      An amazing book by any account. Long, complex, fantastic ideas etc. Just a bit to drawn out. The scope was nothing short of breathtaking, a whole victorian city created and imagined with aplomb. Great Characetres, paticularly liked Cardinal Chang.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book, and although I did think it was a little too long, and after reading some of the reviews here, I could understand why readers both loved, disliked or didn't even finish the book. It did take me a while to read the first chapter (but I was on holiday in Vegas at the time, so there were many other distractions!) as the text was quite small, and the author does go into alot of detail, describing the most mundane things. However, I carried on through the next couple of chapters, immediately liking the Cardinal, and then when I got home off my holiday I really cracked on with it and couldn't put it down. Unlike others, I enjoyed the way that a chapter was dedicated to each character, and that when you found out what they had all been up to you could piece things together and fathom out why certain things had happened to each character, due to the actions of another. As soon as I finished this book I investigated when the sequel, 'The Dark Volume', was released, and was in luck as it was being released within a couple of weeks. I immediately bought it (in hardback too, although more expensive, I had to have it!) and it took me just over a day to read. I have since read the first (and second) book again, and enjoyed it just as much. When I was reading it for the first time, I couldn't help but imagine the book as a film and who would be in it, what the sets and costumes would be like, although due to the length and weaving of plots, I think the viewer would be quite confused.All in all, I really enjoyed this book, it is 'my kind of book', although I do understand why others wouldn't like it. Like others, I bought the book due to the look of the cover and the intriguing title, and it is one of my most favourite impulse, Waterstones 3 for 2, buys!
    • 3/5
      All in all, I suppose I liked The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, the debut novel by Gordon Dahlquist. The ideas behind the book were quite original?there's a group of bad guys who have a plot to take over the world, essentially, but they do that by using these blue glass books. A person's memories and experiences can be "distilled" into the glass books, and then the bad guys can use that for blackmail. They convince their underlings to go through a "Process" which makes them completely under their power, while at the same time the underlings think the "Process" helps them achieve their dreams. Also, one of the bad guys is basically an alchemist, and has plans for a new annunciation, using this blue glass; he turns three women into glass, and they can see inside people's minds. Very weird. Unfortunately, the execution of the novel was a bit lacking. I didn't think the characters were all that developed. There are three heroes: Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang (who is not an actual cardinal, nor Chinese; he simply wears a red coat, so it's his nickname, and his eyes are scarred so they look slanty), and Doctor Svenson. They each have their own reasons for disliking the "sinister cabal," and meet up with each other to bring them down. Miss Temple is presented as the main character (starting and ending the novel from her point of view), but she is the one who has the least motive to be a hero, I think. The book begins with her fianc?, Roger Bascombe, abruptly ending their engagement. More out of curiosity than the passion of a scorned lover, Miss Temple decides to spy on him to find out why he would break up with her, and discovers that he's part of the cabal (yes, this word is used many many times throughout the book; it means "a small group of secret plotters"). All of her actions seem to stem from aristocratic boredom, if you ask me. Also, the characters that make up the cabal weren't very fleshed out, either. They had very unusual names: Francis Xonck, Lord Robert Vandaariff, Oskar Veilandt, the Comte d'Orkancz, and the Contessa Rosamonde Lacquer-Sforza (I can't even pronounce half of them, lol!). Except for the Contessa (she being the only female), I kept getting them all confused. It was a very long book (760 pages), and there was a fair amount of sex and violence. One of the reviews on Amazon said that it was a novel filled with words without saying anything...I only partly agree with that. Yes, Dahlquist seems to love his thesaurus and know every single adjective in existence, but it did eventually get where it was going. And the plot was pretty original. If you like fantasy/adventure novels, you might like this. Diana Gabaldon highly recommends it, which is why I picked it up in the first place.
    • 4/5
      Reads like a Jules Verne novel.
    • 1/5
      Some good ideas, nice steampunk feel but the blow by blow approach to fight scenes was hard to visualise - overdetailed action descriptions involving awkwardly precise movements and interrelations slow the reader's pace badly. The author tried to give a detailed picture of the spaces characters moved in and it often seemed more like a minute description of a film (scripts leave more room) than a book (I have little doubt someone could film it and I'd probably enjoy a film version far more). I didn't find the main female character convincing as a woman of her period - this might have been better if her social values seemed consistent, or to change convincingly. Embarrassment over visible ankles seemed a desperate attempt at historical authenticity which doesn't jibe with her remaining behaviour, unless she was in a continuing state of shock from her experiences. The narrator jumps I wasn't terribly keen on, as the chapter structure (/editors formatting?) didn't make these easy to track and the failure to consistently represent social mores of the time pained me and also trying way too hard to be erotic (forcing it too often and too hard - too in your face (and (and some sections seemed inspired by Eyes Wide Shut). I had to push myself to read it through, and I don't normally have trouble finishing fiction. Then I almost threw it off the train when I came to the non-ending. Basically, the book ends on a cliffhanger and if following books in the series do so too that it seems really unacceptable to me. I read it over a year ago but still build a head of steam every time I think about it. There are better steampunk books out there.Part of what annoyed me was that the author had something there, it just got overworked and overblown. I may read something else by them in future but it won't be this series, no matter how pretty the marketing ideas.Try it if you must but don't say you weren't warned.
    • 3/5
      Oh dear. It started so well, if not a little slow, and began to disintegrate in the middle - still with 350 pages to go. Good ideas and fantasies, good sense of period but not place. I sensed that it was perhaps a vehicle for a film script, but yes, it would make a good film. Quite erotic in places, very violent, the baddies are all a bit cardboard though. At the end I had a feeling that perhaps I had wasted precious reading time.
    • 4/5
      I listened to this book on CD while at work, which was probably a mistake as there were so many characters with so many unusal names that I ended up getting confused as to who was who. Even so I enjoyed the book and the unique and unusual premise very much.
    • 5/5
      I certainly did not expect what was between these covers when I bought this book! It sounded like a fun premise, based on the blurb, but oh my! It has my favorite elements: mystery, fantasy, and a Victorian England setting. What more could you ask for? Maybe a bit of pulp, too. Before I start: the MAJOR criticism of this book is that it is too long. Well, what the heck do you expect when you buy the book and see that page 760 is the last page? If you aren't a fan of long reads, then don't pick this one up! It is LONG, but it is quite good. Yes, there are places where there might have been less said, less done, but isn't that true of every book, pretty much? So if you're not in it for the long haul, then don't bother. I remember when Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell came out -- it was also a rather long book, and people complained about its length at the time, but it was a sterling novel. Moral of this story is, don't buy the book at 760 pages if you're worried that it's "too long." I have to admit that from page one I was completely sucked into the book (and how ironic, but you have to read the book to find out why I say that). This is a totally fun semi-pulpy adventure fantasy based on alchemy, secret cabals, and conspiracy. Far from a pain to read, I found myself flipping pages, resenting any time I had to be away from the story, and staying up into the wee hours of the morning to finish it. I also have to say that at one point I realized how very much I was into the book on an emotional basis: I was reading, things looked very very bleak for our heroes and I had to close the book, saying to my husband "this is not going to come out well." I had to take a breather, walk around and brace myself for the inevitable before I could go back to it!I can't even describe the plot because I will wreck it all. Suffice it to say that you'll be reading a fun, erotic, tension-building story complete with heroes and villains, fantastical elements, a mystery or two, and that when you're finished, you may want to start over again!
    • 3/5
      Glass Books of the Dream Eaters was good but far too long for what it was. It's exciting stuff, with good characters, adventure, conspiracies, violence and a good helping of smuttiness, but it really needs to lose a couple of hundred pages.The cover quotes compare it to the works of H. Ryder Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. These authors, I note, wrote considerably shorter books!
    • 4/5
      in case you had not noticed, Harschmort is a house of masks and mirrors and lies, of unscrupulous, brutal advantage. We cannot afford illusion - about ourselves least of all, for this is what our enemies exploit most of all. I have seen notorious things, I promise you, and notorious things have been done to me. A steampunk adventure in which three disparate people (a hired killer, a jilted woman, and a doctor whose job is to keep a dissolute prince out of trouble) come together to investigate a secret cabal. It was rather long and could easily have been edited to a more manageable length. In my opinion the reader doesn't really need to have the same time period covered in tortuous detail not once but three times (from the point of view of each of the protagonists). And just how many times did the baddies leave someone to kill one of the protagonists and assume they were dead, only to have them escape and pop up just as the baddies are gloating over their death? More times than your average James Bond movie, I reckon!But I still enjoyed it, even though it took me well over a fortnight to slog my way through it.
    • 4/5
      The three protagonists stumbles over a sinister conspiracy who wants to use a strange scientific method on humans in order to control them. The first thing that grabbed my attention with this book was the cover (it's embarassing to admit I often judge books by their covers), which I really liked. I'm happy I picked it up though, because I really enjoyed it. It's a very dense book, and a lot of stuff happens in it but I never thought it got boring. I enjoyed most of the characters and felt they had interesting backstories and personalities. There is something about the author's view of sexuality that feels weird, but I can't pinpoint what it is. The book might have benefitted from more editing, but all in all I liked this book.
    • 4/5
      Why have the baddies run the risk of doing illegal things for money when they could sell the glass books like Apple does and live happily ever after?
    • 3/5
      Like many, I found this book engaging to start with, but struggled as it went on and our two heroes and heroine continued to battle through anterooms, secret passages, and occasional train compartments, becoming more and more bloodstained, scarred, injured, and (especially in the case of the heroine) scantily dressed. There are only so many encounters with daggers, revolvers, sabres, and the like that one can manage, and the plot was over-complicated by multiple locations. The shifting viewpoint between the main characters worked well to begin with, but in the later part of the book the dislocation in the chronology (and the failure to keep the shifts confined withint chapter divisions) became disruptive. The plot grew repetitive (as some reviewers note, it probably worked better in instalments) and the sheer number of evil characters with overlapping and conflicting motives became bewildering. The constant gratuitous erotic (often practically pornographic) component became cloying: by the time I reached the end of the book it felt as though my hands might be sticky from some disgusting combination of lipstick, perfume, over-sweet liqueurs, and bodily fluids. Some scenes did indeed read like film scenarios rather than plot sections for a novel.Reading the reviews, I was amused by the number that described the setting as an alternate London. This is not London, not even in a dream. The setting is Ruritanian and has very little English resonance apart from the names of a couple of characters (Temple and Bascombe). The whole paraphernalia of city hotels, dragoons, and minor aristocracy with unpronounceable names, together with the geographical hints of canals and salt marshes, point to somewhere in northern continental Europe.MB 7-viii-2013
    • 3/5
      Having had this book recommended to me and then read the very mixed reviews about it here, I'm not sure what to expect...but will give it the benefit of the doubt.
    • 5/5
      This massive (760 page) book weaves together the adventures of three people: Miss Celeste Temple, Dr. Abelard Svenson, and Cardinal Chang as they try and thwart the plans of a cabal which is working to take over England, a portion of Germany called Macklenburg, and eventually, I?m sure, the world. They have come into possession of some unique technology, which allows them to both suck the memories out of peoples brains and give them power over those people. Ultimately, it allows them to do much more. Set in an alternate Victorian England, this book is pure steampunk. Brass goggles, huge laboratories, airships, crazy chemistry- all they would need to make it perfect would be a robot or a ray gun. Miss Temple is a rich mans daughter, recently sent to England from the islands she grew up on and even more recently jilted by her fianc?e. Dr. Svenson is attached to the Prince of Macklenburg?s retinue as both doctor and glorified babysitter for the feckless Prince. Chang is a professional criminal and assassin, hired to kill a member of the cabal- only to find that the man is already dead when he gets there. Thrown together by fate, this odd trio sets out to find out just what is going on- and it turns out to be far more than they could have anticipated. I really enjoyed this book and did not want to put it down, but it did have slow spots. For instance, the train ride sections were rather tedious, but most of it is like an Indiana Jones movie (it would make a great movie), with the protagonists running from one bad situation to another, making daring escapes, and, in Miss Temple?s case, sometimes losing her clothing. Each of the protagonists prove themselves to be more than what their surface promises, all finding depths of energy and courage that they did not know they possessed. The plot peels away like the layers of an onion, at times baffling even the cabal members. It?s a blood soaked, tension filled novel that takes your breath away.
    • 2/5
      If I were in a good mood, I would call this a sprawling behemoth of a novel. If I were not, I would refer to it as maundering tosh. In either case I can tell you for a fact that I got bored and skipped about 200 pages (as it's over 700 pages long, I'm still counting it as 'read', if only for the hours I'll never get back), and still managed to keep up with the plot. This is largely because it's written from three points of view, and any time the characters meet they are at pains to tell one another what's been happening in their particular story thread, usually in some detail. Somewhere within those 700 pages there is material for a halfway decent graphic novel. Elsewhere there is a heck of a lot of padding. Oh, and here and there some would-be erotic bits, apparently thrown in at random, and which have all the effect of a five-year-old saying 'fuck' at the dinner table. Yes, dear, very shocking, now put it away and finish your broccoli.