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Everyone! In the Dream! Is You!
These six stories, full of dangerous magic, fractured men, and broken families, explore the macabre reality of masculinity and the lives it destroys. A teenager becomes trapped in a cyclical dreamscape, turning a high school crush into an absurdist nightmare. A promising sculptor uses a new technique to mold his lover into the perfect woman. A deserted child’s search for his missing father leads him to the sinkhole on the outskirts of town—which his classmates say leads straight to Hell. Spanning the breadth of genre and blurring the lines between reality, dream, and nightmare, the stories in Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! show us that beneath the hardened shell of masculinity is a broken, wailing humanity, desperate to be free.
208 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2023
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11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 14, 2023
Spooky! Moody! And also a book that points a mirror at the bizarreness of masculinity and the impossible expectations it puts on people.
September 19, 2023
Dove’s first book was a dark delight - an indulgent mix of cynicism and innocence. I enjoyed the range of this book - each story came with new characters in a new world, with its own trials and unique predicaments. As differentiated as the stories were, common threads of masculinity, fragility, destruction, and psychological terror connect the stories and made for an interesting inter-chapter dialogue.
Although many topics were twisted and haunting, Dove breaks tension and dispels misery through his clever use of humor and quirky ridiculousness. This book left me with lots to think about. As someone raised as a girl, this book invited me to imagine growing up and being socialized as a boy/man. The variety of perspectives helped me explore different aspects of boyhood and see its progression into older age. The feelings in the stories are so raw and palpable, it’s easy to be drawn into the surrealist fantasy worlds Dove constructs through vivid imagery. He made foreign, distant places feel personal and relatable. My favorite stories in the book were Heap, Unstable Ground, and Boy Magick.
I highly recommend you read this if you have any interest in psychology or gender. I’m excited to see where this author’s next literary endeavor will lead to! Everyone! has been a very promising first publication and it feels like just a taste into the mind of Adam Dove and his terrifyingly alluring fantasies.
Although many topics were twisted and haunting, Dove breaks tension and dispels misery through his clever use of humor and quirky ridiculousness. This book left me with lots to think about. As someone raised as a girl, this book invited me to imagine growing up and being socialized as a boy/man. The variety of perspectives helped me explore different aspects of boyhood and see its progression into older age. The feelings in the stories are so raw and palpable, it’s easy to be drawn into the surrealist fantasy worlds Dove constructs through vivid imagery. He made foreign, distant places feel personal and relatable. My favorite stories in the book were Heap, Unstable Ground, and Boy Magick.
I highly recommend you read this if you have any interest in psychology or gender. I’m excited to see where this author’s next literary endeavor will lead to! Everyone! has been a very promising first publication and it feels like just a taste into the mind of Adam Dove and his terrifyingly alluring fantasies.
September 1, 2023
This is a mind bending fantastic ride. Each story is a unique perspective with hidden layers of depth, some more abstract than others. It feels like it has secrets to uncover. The author did a great job of making me feel uneasy but intrigued throughout. I can truly say I have never read anything like it. Its one of those books you put down each chapter and ponder quietly to yourself thinking about the meaning behind it all. Imagine a Salvador Dali painting about modern masculinity come to life and its a good starting place for Everyone! In the Dream! Is You!
June 26, 2025
Adam Dove’s Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! is a sharp and intimate collection of interconnected short stories that grapple with identity, masculinity, memory, and the messiness of love. Told in a poetic yet plainly honest style, the book moves between dreamlike surrealism and raw psychological insight. From sculptors binding lovers in clay to children descending into the earth searching for their lost fathers, Dove’s stories weave together fragile characters trying to anchor themselves in shifting emotional terrain. The title story is both a literal and metaphorical encapsulation of the collection; everyone, in every dream, might be a projection of the self.
What struck me most about Dove’s writing is how intimately he writes about emotional discomfort. The dialogue has the cadence of real relationships, awkward, evasive, and occasionally brutal. The prose feels lived-in, worn at the edges like a favorite coat, which makes the moments of beauty hit even harder. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy in every story, but it’s not melodramatic. It’s quiet. It creeps in during a pause between conversations or in the way a character stops mid-sentence. I found myself rereading passages just to sit in the strange sadness of them.
Dove doesn’t shy away from power imbalances, codependency, or emotional manipulation, especially between men and women. At times, I questioned whether the intimacy bordered on claustrophobia. But that discomfort seems intentional. Dove isn’t trying to offer easy takeaways or comforting conclusions; he’s holding up a mirror, and not everything in it is pretty. And that honesty, to me, is what makes the book worth reading.
I’d recommend Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! to readers who appreciate literary fiction that takes emotional risks. It’s perfect for fans of Raymond Carver or Carmen Maria Machado. If you’ve ever loved someone too hard or felt yourself coming undone trying to be who someone else needed, these stories will resonate. They left me feeling unsettled and weirdly grateful. And that, I think, is the mark of something good.
What struck me most about Dove’s writing is how intimately he writes about emotional discomfort. The dialogue has the cadence of real relationships, awkward, evasive, and occasionally brutal. The prose feels lived-in, worn at the edges like a favorite coat, which makes the moments of beauty hit even harder. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy in every story, but it’s not melodramatic. It’s quiet. It creeps in during a pause between conversations or in the way a character stops mid-sentence. I found myself rereading passages just to sit in the strange sadness of them.
Dove doesn’t shy away from power imbalances, codependency, or emotional manipulation, especially between men and women. At times, I questioned whether the intimacy bordered on claustrophobia. But that discomfort seems intentional. Dove isn’t trying to offer easy takeaways or comforting conclusions; he’s holding up a mirror, and not everything in it is pretty. And that honesty, to me, is what makes the book worth reading.
I’d recommend Everyone! In the Dream! Is You! to readers who appreciate literary fiction that takes emotional risks. It’s perfect for fans of Raymond Carver or Carmen Maria Machado. If you’ve ever loved someone too hard or felt yourself coming undone trying to be who someone else needed, these stories will resonate. They left me feeling unsettled and weirdly grateful. And that, I think, is the mark of something good.
August 4, 2025
It's pretty rare to find a story collection with no low points, and this one pulls it off beautifully. The stories share enough thematic substrate to feel like they belong together, and each of them takes some kind of surreal slant view on reality (some slantier than others). At the same time, they're each distinctive enough in terms of voice, characters, and setting that they don't read as repetitive, and each one is able to shine on its own merits. It's hard to pick a favorite, but the grotesquery of "Heap" might put it at the top, although if you asked me tomorrow I might have a different answer because there's something about every story that I absolutely loved. Definite strong recommend for anyone who enjoys dark slipstream and magical realism.
February 4, 2025
I loved this collection of short stories - each was more riveting than the last. I even imagined some as (classic) Black Mirror episodes. Engaging, dark, and definitely left me thinking. Highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews