Dreamland by Olivie Blake – A Book Review by The Bookish Elf
Anya Morris plays a game with herself. Every room she walks into, every canyon road she drives, she runs the same private calculation: Could I Survive It? She is twenty-two, half Filipina, an actress who has just lost the streamer pilot that was supposed to make her, and Dreamland by Olivie Blake is the story of what happens when she stops doing the arithmetic and starts wanting the danger instead. What follows is a Los Angeles horror novel that is caustic, extremely funny, structurally overstuffed, and entirely aware that you have read this story before. A Job No Sane Person Takes At a charity gala she does not belong at, Anya is befriended by Emmanuelle de Witt, sister to the movie star William de Witt, who smells faintly of overripe fruit and offers her ten thousand dollars a month to keep an eye on someone called Julian. There is an NDA. Her phone is confiscated at the door. She is handed a baby monitor and discovers, several drinks in, that Julian is a grown man, …
