Book review: “Perilous Dreams” by Andre Norton

Andre Norton’s 1976 book Perilous Dreams is frustrating for any number of reasons and also distinctive inasmuch as it is the book in which, every so briefly, Norton shows an unusual sensuousness in her writing.

Also, the George Barr cover on the original paperback is strikingly faithful to the story — up to a point.

The book looks like a novel, and its table of contents shows Parts One through Four.

The first two parts, “Toys of Tamisan” and “Ship of Mist,” involve the same characters, but the final two parts, “Get Out of My Dream” and “Nightmare,” are separate from each other and from the first two.

The thing that ties these four together is that they have to do with dreamers, women on the planet Ty-Kry who, for a small fortune, take a wealthy person into a dream created just for them.

Highly trained, a dreamer is hooked up via a head set to her client who then takes on a role and a new name and goes off on, say, an adventure in the dream that she has created. Think of it as a sort of telepathic video game.

The dreamer isn’t a participant but watches as the dream unfolds, ready at a moment’s notice to bring the performance to an end as soon as the client signals that he — apparently most if not all of the clients are men — is ready to leave out of fear or boredom or whatever.

 

Alternate history?

This is an interesting sci-fi idea, and Norton signals at various times in the four sections that the dreaming creates what might be an alternate history or at least another reality in which actions taken can have consequences.

“Get Out of My Dream” is about a client who has instructed the dreamer to create a dream in the far past and who has gone into that dream past to stop an evil force that is now threatening his world. If he succeeds, the threat to his world will disappear.

In the other three sections, an outsider invades the dream world, meaning that the dreamer can’t stop the dream and has to get involved with the client.

Norton’s ideas about the dreams and the dreamers are complex, and it appears from this volume that she never quite got them clear in her own head. These four sections read like drafts that she began and wasn’t able to finish.

 

The first two sections

To my way of thinking, Norton could have published the first two sections as a 125-page novel, and it would have been fine.  The second two sections don’t add much.

Those first two sections center on the dreamer Tamisan and her client Starrex and the efforts of Starrex’s cousin Kas to sabotage their dream.

In “Toys of Tamisan,” Kas creates a second dream to overlap with Tamisan’s and enable him to get in the middle of their action.  Eventually, Tamisan has to hack into Kas’s dream to figure out what’s going on. Finally, she creates a new dream — a third dream — for the three of them in the hope of breaking Kas’s hold on them.

As this section ends, Tamisan and Starrex are in the new dream. The dreamer wakes up to realize that, in this new place, she is Tam-sin, and her skin is no longer warmly brown but pearl white, and she has “small, high breasts.” And she is in bed with the new Starrex.

 

“Bare-bodied”

“Ship of Mist” opens the next morning as Tam-sin wakes up, feeling “excitement [that] warmed her scantily clothed, pearl-fair body.” Starrex, now called Kilwar, is waking up and talking to Tam-sin with “the silk coverlet half drifting from his body.” He stands up “bare-bodied” and Tam-sin’s body “melted against his joyfully.”

In terms of sensuousness, these descriptions are quite tame, but these are the sexiest descriptions I’ve ever seen in a Norton book.  Usually, she’s rather prudish.

As it happens, the climax of this section involves a naked Tam-sin swimming to a derelict wreck where Kilwar and others are being held prisoner by an evil force, and the dreamer, now an action star, saves the day.

 

The cover art

Here’s where Barr’s cover comes in:

It’s accurate in many of its particulars, including the evil force in a yellow-green ball of energy over a figure in a casket and in Tam-sin’s lack of clothes.

Dozens, probably hundreds, of covers of Norton novels show scantily clad or just plain nude girls even though the images never match Norton’s descriptions.  In this case, Barr does.

There is, however, one inaccuracy.  Barr’s cover shows Kilwar saving the dreamer, not Tam-sin saving him.

I told you Perilous Dreams is a frustrating book.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.13.25