Totally Biased Review #5: Underworld Dreams by Daniel Braum

Most people have things they regret, things done and not done, failures, losses. Regret is the unifying theme of Daniel Braum’s third story collection, Underworld Dreams. The characters in these stories yearn for second chances, but no one gets them.

Two stories in this collection are set in Australia, three in the Americas south of the U.S. border, and the rest in New York. At least three are set in prior decades, two explicitly in the eighties. Most of these stories are first-person, and I remember most being in present tense. Stories that particularly stood out for me are “The Monkey Coat,” “Rebbe Yetse’s Shadow,” “Between Our Earth and Their Moon,” “Underworld Dreams,” and “Rum Punch is Going Down.”

In “The Monkey Coat” plays with a favorite trope of mine: the cursed object. When a woman, whose husband has abandoned her and their young adult daughter, checks what may be left in their storage unit, she finds a monkey-hair coat that belonged to her grandmother. She puts it on and soon she finds herself losing time as those around tell her she’s acting unlike herself, and it seems she never takes off the coat. Like several other stories in this collection whether or not anything supernatural is happening is left ambiguous.

“Between Our Earth and Their Moon” is a fantasy detective story and functions both as a stand-alone and as a sequel to “Across the Darién Gap,” a story in Braum’s first collection The Night Marchers. The narrator, Nate, regrets the death of a character in that prior story, but otherwise the plot of “Between Our Earth and Their Moon” is unrelated. In the story the narrator is hired “under the table” to banish some gremlins plaguing the construction new subway tunnels, one of which, he is told, leads to the moon. I really enjoyed this story. The concept alone is a winning one, and of course Braum executes it well. I’m a sucker for occult detectives, but I think Nate could easily join the ranks of Harry d’Amour or Dr. John Silence if he has any further adventures.

Another theme running through these stories to which I am partial is that of doubles or shadow-selves. Doubling is perhaps at its most dramatic in the title story, “Underworld Dreams,” where time itself—or perhaps just the protagonist’s experience of it—seems to split at a particular “crossroads moment” during a trip to Panama. As time loops backwards and forwards so does the prose, and though I am usually put off by repetition Braum keeps it engaging. As the title piece this story is the collection’s anchor, a job it does well as it brings the themes of regret and doubles seen throughout the collection to the fore while remaining an engaging read.

These are well-written stories of strangeness and magic. If you like strange tales (in Aickman’s sense of the term), magical realism, the fantastic, and the ambiguously supernatural, then you should read this collection. You can get it directly from the publisher here.