The Story Behind the Book: The Story Behind Captain Clive's Dreamworld by Jon Bossoff

Captain Clive's Dreamworld

By Jon Bossoff

A few summer’s ago, I had a terrifying and traumatic experience: I went to Disneyworld with my family. Don’t get me wrong—my kids and wife loved the place. But it wasn’t for me. There was just too much happiness, too many smiles, you know? We also spent time in this little town called

Celebration, which is just outside of the theme park. It was initially developed as some sort of utopian company town. In fact, back in the day, they were even going to place it inside a climate-controlled dome. That didn’t come to fruition, but today it still feels like a Stepford Wives town, with perfect streets and perfect paths and perfect lawns. And so I started thinking: what would have happen to a town like this if Disneyworld ever collapsed? That initial mumbling in my bread, eventually led to Captain Clive’s Dreamworld, a nightmarish little novel.

My first several novels all had derelict settings, from the slaughterhouse town in The Disassembled Man, to the post-industrial wasteland of Factory Town, to the horrifying mountain shacks of Corrosion. But, in many ways, the setting of Captain Clive’s Dreamworld is the most terrifying of all. Because there’s something disconcerting about this juxtaposition of lovely houses and beautiful parks and smiling faces with the darkness beneath. I always loved the opening of David Lynch’s movie, Blue Velvet. You have this pristine town with well-maintained houses and gardens, lovely flowers—everything is so colorful and cheerful. And then a man collapses, has a heart attack, and we get a close-up of the grass where there are insects crawling through the dirt. The beauty is only an illusion, the American dream is only an illusion. That’s what I wanted Captain Clive’s Dreamworld to depict. The vast gulf between that American Dream and our collective failures.

The style of this novel is expressionistic, even surreal. I wanted my protagonist, a hired deputy named Sam Hardy, to be not some all-knowing and ethical lawman, but a deeply flawed and bewildered outsider. And so he is. He begins investigating the town of Angels and Hope, begins investigating the machinations of the amusement park, and he discovers the secrets the town has buried. Unfortunately, the town soon discovers the secrets that he has buried.

About the Book

After becoming the suspect in the murder of a young prostitute, Deputy Sam Hardy is “vanished” to a temporary post as the sole police officer in Angels and Hope, an idyllic town located in the middle of the desert, miles from any other sign of life. Hardy soon learns that Angels and Hope was constructed as a company town to support a magnificent amusement park – one to rival Disneyland – known as Captain Clive’s Dreamworld. When he arrives, however, Hardy notices some strange happenings. The park is essentially empty of customers. None of the townsfolk ever seem to sleep. And girls seem to be going missing with no plausible explanation.

As Hardy begins investigating, his own past is drawn into question by the people in town, and he finds himself becoming more and more isolated. Soon his phone line mysteriously goes dead. His car’s tires get slashed. And he is being watched constantly by neighbors. The truth – about the town and himself – will lead him to understand that there’s no such thing as a clean escape.

Straddling the line between genre fiction and something more bizarre, Captain Clive’s Dreamworld is a terrifying vision of the collapse of the American mythos.

Praise

“Captain Clive’s Dreamworld winds its way through an eerie, Lynchian landscape, populated by Stepford citizenry, cursed lives, and all the bleak sensibilities of the most dire Cormac McCarthy tale. Bassoff’s latest is a must read for fans of the genre, or any reader who prefers their fiction with a sense of the off-kilter. Highly recommended!”

-Ronald Malfi, author of Bone White

“Jon Bassoff’s nightmarish bizarro novel Captain Clive’s Dreamworld reads like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone mixed with Twin Peaks mixed with Dante’s Inferno. Unremittingly dark, this roman noir is a trenchant attack on the empty promises of capitalism…a hopeless rebuke of the bright plastic flesh built around the broken, crumbling skeleton of the American Dream.”

-Jeffrey Thomas, author of Boneland

“Jon Bassoff mines an imaginative seam that remains unexplored by any other writer I know working today. I wish I knew his secret, but I’ll settle for reading Captain Clive’s Dreamworld.”

-Tony Black, author of Summoning the Dead

“Captain Clive’s Dreamworld is a masterfully rendered, very disturbing cautionary tale of pathological consumerism and nostalgia for a mid-century America that never was. Jon Bassoff’s vision is relentless and unsparing, his prose like a bone saw laying bare the corruption and perversion lurking beneath society’s superficial pieties.”

-Roger Smith, author of Dust Devils

“In Captain Clive’s Dreamworld, Jon Bassoff has created a haunting, suspenseful masterpiece that straddles the line between mystery and horror with expert skill.”

-S.A. Cosby, award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland

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About the Author

Jon Bassoff was born in 1974 in New York City and currently lives with his family in a ghost town somewhere in Colorado. His mountain gothic novel, Corrosion, has been translated in French and German and was nominated for the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, France’s biggest crime fiction award. Two of his novels, The Drive-Thru Crematorium and The Disassembled Man, have been adapted for the big screen with Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild; Once Upon a Time in America) attached to star in The Disassembled Man. For his day job, Bassoff teaches high school English where he is known by students and faculty alike as the deranged writer guy. He is a connoisseur of tequila, hot sauces, psychobilly music, and flea-bag motels.