The Dust of Wonderland
by Lee Thomas
Alyson Books. 316 pages, $24.95
FROM THE START of The Dust of Wonderland, whose tone is established in the introduction’s stalking scene, this tale is nothing if not unsettling. The reader is made to feel the main character’s despair and horror, his frustration at not being able to solve a near homicide. You aren’t sure if he’s hallucinating or if his visions are real, you think he might be in need of medical help, yet something malevolent is undeniably afoot.
The action begins when Ken Nicholson learns that his twenty-year-old son Bobby is lying in a New Orleans hospital in a coma. Ken rushes back to the city he’d left years before, tasting both fear and regret. Bobby, whose imminent wedding to a girl Ken never met would now have to be postponed, had been attacked by unknown assailants and left for dead. The fiancée, Vicki Bach, called 911 and then disappeared, leaving behind a phone number that was now disconnected, an address that was that of an abandoned mansion, and names that were supposed to be her parents but turned out to be completely false.
But Ken knows the significance of the address and the parental names. Back when he was single, before he married Paula and lived a lie, he engaged in a hedonistic life of partying, drinking, drugs, and nameless lovers in the gay underbelly of the French Quarter. Ken would do almost anything back then. Also back then, there was a club that everybody called the Wonderland, hidden out in the open in an old mansion, a place where boys slept with older men for fun, curiosity, or financial reward. The Wonderland incited fear in the hearts of most local men—particularly those who were gay—but the city’s most powerful and connected went there anyhow. Opulence, drugs, and sex were abundant there, but after an unspeakable multiple murder—rumored to have been committed by the Wonderland’s owner, Travis Brugier—the mansion was abandoned.
Ken had been at the club on the night of the murders—and now this is the address that Vicki Bach has given to Bobby. So who is Vicki Bach and how did she get so close to Ken and his family without anyone seeing her malicious intent? Does the moldering ruin of the Wonderland hold the key to Ken’s dreams and visions? “Tell me a story,” whispers a female voice in Ken’s ear. But this story is one he’d just as soon forget.
Like tiny dust motes in your grandma’s parlor, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Lee Thomas floats clues out and lets them swirl around this eerie mystery thriller, which can be a bit confusing at times but otherwise nearly guarantees that you’ll be checking the locks. As the plot unfolds, it’s confirmed that someone named Vicki Bach had a hand in what’s happening to Ken, but how and why she’s involved is impossible to fathom—even if you think you’ve nailed it down, you probably haven’t—until the slam-bang ending to this skillfully written mystery.
While all this will raise the hair on your nape, the evil goings-on sometimes come too fast and furious and seem to raise the confusion factor just for the sake of it. But finally, as with any good horror story, once the various plot lines fall into place, it all makes sense and the hodgepodge can be forgiven. Readers looking for a disturbing tale of New Orleans’ haunted underbelly won’t be disappointed by The Dust of Wonderland, which is a chilly, creepy wonder of a novel, not to be read on a dark and stormy night.
