Customer Reviews

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

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This (novella-length) book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, even though it begins with the narrator emerging from unconsciousness. Unconsciousness, induced by a beating from soldiers after a night of drinking, starts to be replaced with an admixture of memory and hallucination, evolving into sensation and hallucination, then consciousness with occasional hallucination, and finally true awareness.

There is no effective way to describe the narrator's thought evolution without giving away the plot. Suffice it to say that the plot elucidates briefly, as the length of the work requires, the constraints on freedom and human life imposed by the more extreme interpretations of Islam.

While never feeling that I was in the presence of great literature, the story moved along and kept me reading. The author is clever if not profound, and this book is a quick way to get a sense of life in a strict Islamist society. (While emphasizing that not everyone voluntarily conforms to the standard of such a society.)

If the general topic interests you this novella is worth reading.

I was provided a copy for review by the publisher.