Amazon.com Review
Beyond the Wall of Sleep collects 10 years' worth of short prose and poetry by Andy Heidel, a young Brooklynite apparently influenced by the introspective fantasies of Ray Bradbury and Neil Gaiman. Cited in the 1997 edition of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Beyond the Wall is a peek into the diary of an up-and-coming heir to the world of dark fantasy--Heidel's stories are intensely personal, and full of intriguing snippets of ideas. His themes include death, God, sex, and the soul. Each is contained in a short portrait or vignette--like a series of intimate black-and-white photographs in a fascinating, but anonymous, photo album you found on the street. --Therese Littleton
From the Inside Flap
The nine richly imaginative stories inside Beyond the Wall of Sleep defy categorization. They run the gamut from esoteric to experimental fiction, drawing upon the personal mythos of R. Andrew Heidel and his views on life before living and after dying as well as the immortality of the soul and the creation of gods. In the short story Dead Drunk, the personification of Death is found alone in a bar after she has quit her job; in The God Makers, a simple fisherman is unwittingly responsible for his village deifying the sea; and an Interview with God is a tale about a soul applying for a Birth Visa before his incarnation on Earth. The poetry of R. Andrew Heidel is as eccentric as his prose, teetering between the epic and the simplistic, each containins a grain of truth hidden between the lines.
This collection of prose and poetry compiled from eight years of writing marks the first complete work published by R. Andrew Heidel.
