Customer Reviews

Worst Nightmares

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In downtown Los Angeles homeless bum Albert K. Arnold accosts bestselling author Dermot Nolan at the latter's warehouse home. Dermot's first reaction is the visitor is crazy. Still, he accepts a manuscript from the derange person mostly to get him out of his face.

Nolan puts aside My Worst Nightmares, a journal of an abusive serial killer who catches his victims over his net site Dream Healer before committing atrocities based on the prey's biggest fear. When Arnold dies, Nolan takes a closer look at the manuscript. Suffering from writer's block since his last book was sold to Hollywood last year, Nolan and his wife adapt Arnold's book and publish it as his. However, there is one problem that surfaces with the plagiarism of the manuscript; evidence mounts that My Worst Nightmares records real homicides that make the writer a person of interest to LAPD, the FBI and a serial killer working the Internet to ensnare his targets.

Mindful of A Murder of Crows starring Cuba Gooding Jr., WORST NIGHTMARES is a terrific thriller as Nolan crumbling under writing pressure to produce his next novel takes a seeming shortcut that leaves him in a greater pressure cooker. Readers will know who his antagonist is, but not care as the fun in the tale is to see whether the novelist can extract himself and his wife out of peril from a lethal serial killer and with the law that believes he is the lethal serial killer.

Harriet Klausner

I didn't read the reviews before buying this. I just picked it up randomly at a book store and wanted to try out a new author, and the story synopsis seemed incredibly interesting. The book was a total bore. The Dream Healer was easily found out, the book tried too hard to be scary to the point of reeking of cheese. The main character was extremely annoying. The main character's wife had no personality. She let her husband run over her like he was a huge John Deere machine. I did not care for her, feel sorry for her. I only really ended up feeling bad for one character in the book toward the end.
The ending of this book was just horrible! I had to make up my own ending in my mind. There are some books that work with the "open-ended" type finality, but this just didn't work. There were a lot of moments in the book where people would do INCREDIBLY stupid things that you mostly see in cliche teenager-naked-in-the-shower "horror/slasher" movies.

The book, in the end, simply reeked of cheese. It's not the worst book I've ever read. I just wish it wasn't predictable, I wish the ending made more sense, and I wish the characters had more depth and were less annoying. The only good thing about this book is that it gave me something to waste my time with while recovering from a recent surgery. It gave me "hope" that something interesting would actually happen somewhere near the end.

/sigh

Award winning author, Dermot Nolan is under pressure. His half-million dollar advance is spent and he can't seem to produce results. An unsolicited manuscript ends up in his mailbox. It's written by Albert K. Arnold and appears to be a memoir of a serial killer. Nolan and his wife investigate the murders to see if these were based on real people. What he discovers is chilling.

When Arnold apparently jumps off a roof and dies, Nolan takes the man's work and publishes it as his own. Months later, when the book is a success and there is talk of a movie deal, Nolan gets a phone call. Seems like Albert Arnold wasn't the jumper on that roof and Nolan's worst nightmare begins to take form.

The ending of the book was left to the reader's imagination. Normally, I'd throw a fit when this happens. With this story, it worked. When I finished the last page, I was done. I felt I knew what happened next and I didn't want anyone to tell me different.

This phenomenal thriller and I can't wait to see what Shane Briant will come up with next!

Dermot Nolan is a New York Times bestselling author who is suffering from a bit of writers block. He's already spent the million dollar advance he received from his publisher His bestselling book is being made into a movie. All of this success should be inspiring, but his creative juices are tapped out.

Then one day, Nolan notices an old man depositing something into his mailbox. It's a manuscript detailing a series of horrific murders. Each murder is described in such vivid detail Nolan begins to wonder if they are real. The killer refers to himself as the The Dream Healer, and his Web site promises individuals relief from their nightmares. Unknowing victims log on to this site and reveal their nightmares, in real time, to The Dream Healer. Those suffering from nightmares due receive a release from their nightmares, but not the way they intended. The Dream Healer hunts them down and kill them by reinacting their nightmares.

Nolan's wife, Neela, and his long-time friend Nick encourage Nolan to use the manuscript as a basis for his new novel. Nolan begins to research this crimes and discovers evidence the crimes were real. He allows the book to be published and it's an instant bestseller. However, The Dream Healer hasn't stopped killing. When a number of crimes detailed in Nolan's novel take place, he becomes a person of interest. His life and the lives of those he loves are put in danger. What will it take to stop The Dream Healer?

I read Worst Nightmares while on vacation. It's not a short book, 352 pages, but I literally read it in one sitting. Briant's writing is chilling, his descriptions are so vivid and detailed that I literally had to stop and catch my breath. Not for the weak at heart, but a must for someone who craves excitement and a thrill. Be sure to lock your doors first though!

Shane Briant is definitely an author to watch. I hear a sequel is in the making and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy! And like Nolan's bestseller, I hope this one hits the movie screen!

The main character, Dermot Nolan, is an accomplished, award-winning writer who is also struggling with a writer's block. He and his wife have pretty much spent the fortune that his previous bestseller earned him and Dermot cannot deliver another smashing work of fiction. Things are looking really gloom for him as his agent and publisher growing impatient and the million-dollar advance is gone without one page to show for it. Only Dermot's beautiful wife Neela and his best friend Nick know the desperate condition Dermot is in. Therefore, when a mysterious manuscript lands in Dermot's hands, they all see it as a possible means to end the financial and creative troubles. The manuscript, titled My Worst Nightmares - My Delicious Memoirs, is truly horrifying and gives gory, nightmarish descriptions of each victim's death based on his/her worst nightmare. The author's mind is truly sick and twisted but that's not what's bothering Dermot and Neela the most. The whole memoir is written in a crude but strangely authentic voice. So authentic that they decide to dig a bit deeper and see if by any chance all those deaths are not imaginative but real. What they discover is at once chilling and inconclusive. Dermot finally decides that the incidences were not real and goes ahead and submits the improved manuscript to the publisher as his own. And that's when all hell breaks loose.
Let me just get what I didn't like about Worst Nightmares out of the way. I figured out who the murderer was one third of the way. In that sense, it was unfortunately pretty predictable. The most disappointing thing about it was not even that I figured out who it was so soon, but why it happened shortly after (probably half-way through the novel). I don't know whether it was due to the way the book was written or the fact that I read so many horror/suspense books that it's very difficult to get a shock reaction from me.


Now that that's done, let me move on to what I really enjoyed. Mr. Briant is a very skilled writer as far as character development and portrayal go. He managed to put the main character, who we are supposed to sympathize with, as really bad things happen to him, in a very bad light. Maybe I am just a little sick in the head, but I couldn't help thinking that maybe Dermot deserved what he got in the end. He is a self-absorbed, greedy and egotistic person who at the core will do what it takes to get to the finish line. On the surface he might seem to be struggling emotionally and morally with what he's about to do, but it's really all superficial. I have to say that I wasn't prepared to dislike and not sympathize with the main character so much. That was my element of surprise and I loved it. Besides that main factor, Worst Nightmares is really good. The premise is, in my opinion, fresh and quite shocking. The book starts off fast and the action doesn't slow down until the end and it's all written very convincingly. Suffice it to say that, while reading it, I decided that I better not have any worst nightmares (even though I do) that I could tell anyone of just in case...

Worst Nightmares opens with Dermot Nolan a novelist, suffering from writer's block. Just two short years ago he had written an award winning NY Times bestseller, there was even a movie deal in the works. But now working on his second book and with the deadline in sight he still has nothing to give his literary agent, Esther Bloom. Worse yet the million dollar advance for the promise of a new book has been spent.

Salvation is hand delivered one day in the form of a manuscript by a old man with a fringe of orange graying hair, cloaked in an old low-rider's coat which he stuffs into Dermot's mailbox. The manuscript reads more like a journal, a personal diary of a series of horrific murders. The reader soon discovers that this fictional serial killer goes by the name of The Dream Healer who has his own website, www.worstnightmares.net and promises his viewers relief if they tell him their nightmare.

Neela, Dermot's ever encouraging wife and Nick Hoyle their long time friend persuade him to use the old man's manuscript to help jump start his novel, a decision that when made leaves Dermot no way of turning back.

Worst Nightmares will leave you double checking your door locks for weeks to come; just the thing for those long hot summer nights when you can't sleep anyway. It's a heart pounding ride to the very end.

Having enjoyed Mr. Briant's work as an actor (in Hammer horror films, the tv drama "The Naked Civil Servant", and Dan Curtis' "The Picture of Dorian Gray"), I was surprised to learn that he's now an author living in Australia. "Worst Nightmares" is his debut in America as an author, and should be the start of a very successful career in the U.S., as his new book is an intense and dread-inducing psychological thriller.

"Worst Nightmares" is very engrossing and effective. The night I finished reading it, I could not go to sleep! The visceral horror of the last chapters hit me so hard that I was unable to get the awfulness of it out of my mind; it had a power worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. (But don't dare skip ahead to the outcome before you read the rest of the novel; the story very carefully and intricately winds it way to the conclusion, and won't have the same power if you cheat.) From the beginning, the book kept me racing to finish it.

The novel develops the characters of Dermot Nolan and the mysterious figure called "the Dream Healer" very well, and I desperately wanted to read a sequel when I finished. (And it turns out I'm going to get my wish; Mr. Briant was so intrigued by his characters that he has completed a follow-up to the novel.) The two characters are fated by events to be entwined with other in ways that reminded me of the story of Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Nolan, like Frankenstein, is led in pursuit of the Dream Healer, who is, in some ways, Nolan's creation. (I can't spoil the mystery and reveal just how.) As in Shelley's novel, the two main characters are tragically flawed. Nolan, like Victor, is marked for a downfall by hubris, and the Dream Healer is twisted in his hate-filled obsession with his 'creator.'

It's not without flaws. In an early sequence, one victim is attacked by scorpions and tarantulas in ways that aren't truly believable, dangerous as they are. (The scene seems written with a CGI-fx sequence in a possible film version in mind.) But other images Briant creates linger in the mind.

At times Nolan does things so unwise--just like characters will do in horror movies sometimes--that you want to roll your eyes and scream at the character. However, the plot is so engrossing, and the characterizations of the driven Nolan and the vengeful Dream Healer (a character as clever and as memorably evil as Hannibal Lecter) are so well-developed and interesting, that a few lapses in likelihood don't matter. But Mr. Briant has said that he had Nolan only do things that he felt he was himself capable of doing in the same situations, and the Nolan character finds himself in some pretty extraordinary circumstances.

In the world Shane Briant creates in his novel the lines between dreaming and waking, between fiction and terrifying fact, become blurred. Few books or films ever unsettle me, but "Worst Nightmares" did, its resonant shocks a testament to the skill and imagination of Shane Briant.

I highly recommend that you buy this book.

***Possible Spoiler***

Very good book. I could not put it down and had to keep reading, long into the night. I love the way the ending makes you wonder what will happen next (in the sequel, I guess). The most vicious and unique villian since Hannibal Lechter. Great job, Mr. Briant.

Psychological thrillers are my favorite category of reading and so I've read a great many of them - and this would have to be one of the best ever. It was a little slow at the start but the further you read, the better it gets... the last part of the book was absolutely mind blowing!

I won't comment on the plot as others have already done that - all I can say is, just read it for yourself. Oh, and don't let the few critical reviews put you off - I honestly don't understand why anyone would feel that way about this book and I'd be really interested to know which books those reviewers DID enjoy!

I have ONLY read 2 books straight THRU THE SHINING and WORST NIGHTMARES it is a book you cannot put down.it is litrally a page turner and I read it in 5 hours in one sitting!! I have only done that with THE SHINING most horror/thrillers cannot hold my attention long enough to do this..well SHANE BRIANTS writing is CHILLING..because this could REALLY HAPPEN..alll the events that play out in WORST NIGHTMARES will give you chills and if you frighten easily..dont read it alone!! Shane has weaved together a plot so full of twists and turns that each page is a suprise and the ending..NEVER SAW IT COMING..blew me away..I suggest that if your in the mood to read something to keep you on the edge of your seat pick up a copy of WORST NIGHTMARES and PLEASANT DREAMS..he-he-he-