Chasing Nightmares

by James R. Kincaid

Chasing nightmares, deliberately embracing terrors, isn’t what you and I are likely to do. But you and I are not the four central characters in this novel, pretty typical college kids who sense that their lives are so predictable they hardly seem present in them. They are determined not to succumb to the commonplace scripts set out for them, pathways that are so comfortable they might as well be padded, Musak softly playing.


So, they set out from Los Angeles, trying to find the perilous. They try hard to render themselves unprepared, open, desperate to vivify their minds and senses. They make it only as far as Lake Tahoe and the nearby Donner Pass, where they do succeed in attracting horrors, certainly not the ones they had, despite themselves, anticipated.


But the nightmares they wrap round themselves also contain a good deal more than shivers, and the calls on their resolve demand more than simple courage (or foolhardy consistency). Without knowing how it happened, they are drawn into a different strangeness, asking for and yet reluctant to receive something very much like love.

286 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2017

About the author

James R. Kincaid is an English Professor masquerading as an author (or the other way around). He’s published two novels (Lost and A History of the African-American People by Strom Thurmond — with Percival Everett). He is also the author of a couple dozen short stories, and ever so many nonfiction articles, reviews, and books, including long studies of Dickens, Trollope, and Tennyson, along with two books on Victorian and modern eroticizing of children: Child-Loving and Erotic Innocence. Kincaid has taught at Ohio State, Colorado, Berkeley, USC, and is now at Pitt.