The Nightmare Machine

by John Nicholas Datesh

Wealthy industrialist Thomas Jordan had acquired a vengeful enemy. That enemy entered Jordan's bedroom one night as he slept. Come morning, Thomas Jordan did not wake up. His heart had imploded that night.It was Thomas Jordan's own generosity that killed him. Researcher Raymond Carleton had developed his dream therapy computer system with a Jordan foundation grant. Raymond's machine had not impressed Thomas Jordan or his board enough to keep the grant money flowing, but they hadn't known the half of it. Raymond's machine could do a hell of a lot more than count sheep.Accent on Hell.His ingenious device inserted Raymond himself inside any dream, live, and with the power to frighten the dreamer to death.Old man Jordan's death opened the way for Raymond's only real hope, the old man's brilliant daughter, Madelaine. Raymond was confident that eccentric Madelaine was contrary enough to be his ally, to reverse her father's foolhardy decision.Raymond was positive he had Madelaine analyzed... Right up until the last second when she underestimated him and put him on the street.Raymond tended to overreact to disappointment. Of all of them, Madelaine should have understood his genius. Fine. He had the means to help her realize her mistake... Right up until her last second.But underestimating works both ways. So did Raymond's machine.Raymond did not expect Madelaine to be waiting for him. Inside her head.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Born in 1950, the author lived mostly in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At Brown University, he took courses in writing as an institutionalized rationale for doing just that. At Boston University School of Law, he learned to mix in the phrases It Depends and Hereinafter. It is unknown when he developed the compulsion to to use italics every third paragraph.

In Spring 2009, he moved cats Lila and Lucy Liu to a condominium one mile in from the east side of Naples Bay in Florida. He left his Pittsburgh career in law, business and product development in favor of writing fiction, going to Happy Hours and cultivating beach chairs, presumably in that order of dedication.

He began writing fiction with a pencil and published, on paper with actual ink, his first three novels: The SF/Mystery The Nightmare Machine based on an endlessly recurring dream; the Soft-boiled Detective The Janus Murder a sequel to his (lost) high school play; and the International Suspense The Moscow Tape set in that city and based on the US participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympic that never happened.

Also available are his short stories The Pro Station (WWII without the fighting); The Final Equation (SF), Reruns ad Infinitum (SF/Fantasy) and and a collection of posts from his satiric blog EmptyGlassFull entitled The Very First Blog Posts of All Time. The author's harrowing, wry Christmas short, You Could Call It a Christmas Story was first published as a post.

His first work written wholly in Naples was a screenplay entitled The Last Three Minutes. The story was based upon an actual unsolved three minutes lost on his laptop. Attempts to market the screenplay succeeded so well he decided to turn it into a novel in 2016.

2013’s epic The Girl in the Coyote Coat burst out of its original Mystery genre and page count. No one would call it a Romance, either. With its real estate and finance backdrop, the novel exposes how love, sex, money, scams, drugs, house-breaking and -shopping and fur coats can affect the lives of intriguing characters and even kill a few.

The Girl in the Coyote Coat was rebranded in 2016 as A Need Apart, with identical content and a more Literary cover, featuring the same model and coyote, to reposition the novel as decidedly literary.

November 2016’s The Body in the Bog as a Sunset Noir mystery novel, set as it is in a town that gets dark after beautiful sunsets. It is the first novel fully a Naples product from concept to publication. It is also the first in the author’s planned Death by Condo mystery series starring prematurely retired lawyer Ian Decker, who coincidentally lives in village bordering Naples.

Remember unsuccessful screenplay The Last Three Minutes. The novel version was released in December 2016. It is a techno-ghost story, squarely in the cyber supernatural love story thriller genre, assuming there is one.