Missy jumped up from her bed. She felt like she was listening with her skin, with her whole body, listening for a sound that would tell her who was there, though it had to be Val. She imagined him standing in the yard, looking up at the house. She could see him doing that, just standing there, waiting.

Under this body Within this body

demons memory the past...

"Something very new!" -- the Salt Hill Review.

In A Dream with Demons, Edward Falco invents a world where bruised adults attempt, over and over, to rewrite the violent scripts of their childhood.

Preston Morris is an accomplished lawyer and novelist who writes painful, provocative stories to shore up fragments of his own desperate life. One of Preston's works, which forms the core of A Dream with Demons, tells of a sadly streetwise adolescent named Missy who struggles to come of age during the short space of a weekend when her mother finally leaves her tortured, brilliant lover, the artist Val Rivson.

Preston's genius -- or is it Falco's? -- is the accuracy with which he portrays the sublime compulsions of several tortured yet resilient people. Holding everything together is the unique hypertext structure of A Dream with Demons, which dramatizes a theme evident throughout: how the past can compel the present, through the fragmentary, unreliable, but ultimately persistent medium of memory.

Edward Falco is the author of numerous works of poetry and fiction, including Winter in Florida, Plato at Scratch Daniel's & Other Stories, and Acid, winner of the 1995 Richard Sullivan Prize. His short story, "The Artist" was a 1995 Best American Short Story. Sea Island, Falco's collection of interlinked poems, was published last year in the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext. He is professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic and State University.

A Dream with Demons was created using Storyspace.

A Dream with Demons
by Edward Falco
ISBN 1-884511-31-7
for Macintosh or Windows . . . $24.95.