A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamspawn

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A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamspawn
ANoES Dreamspawn.jpg
Author Christa Faust
LanguageEnglish
SeriesA Nightmare on Elm Street
Release number
2
GenreHorror
Publisher Black Flame
Publication date
26 April 2005
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages416
ISBN 9781844161737
OCLC 57527052
Preceded by A Nightmare on Elm Street: Suffer the Children  
Followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protégé  

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamspawn is a 2005 British horror novel written by Christa Faust and published by Black Flame. [1] A tie-in to the Nightmare on Elm Street series of American horror films, it is the second in a series of five Nightmare on Elm Street novels published by Black Flame and involves a group of high school girls who call fourth and attempt to control supernatural killer Freddy Krueger. [2]

Contents

Plot

Seven-year-old Rose Gibson lives in Bakersfield, California, with her drug addict mother, Laurie, and sexually abusive father, Ed Parker, a drunk who once made Rose watch as he killed her dog, Pepper. One night, the Gibson household is visited by Freddy Krueger, a serial child rapist and killer who, after being burned to death by angry parents, now haunts the Dream World. Freddy murders Laurie and Ed but fails to kill Rose.

Twelve years later, Jane DeHaan moves to Southern California. Jane, a teenager whose father died of AML, is an overweight goth who adores the Victorian era. Jane is bullied at Hemingway High, where her main tormentor is a promiscuous and alcoholic cheerleader named Amber Dunn. Jane befriends Lola Cole, a punk horror film fan, and together they fake Amber's kidnapping by dropping her off at a rehab clinic while she is intoxicated as a prank on her and her three sycophants, Ashley, Kayla, and Shayne. When Amber returns, she is rejected by the other cheerleaders and thanks Jane and Lola for helping her overcome her addiction, befriending them, and confiding in them about how she was rendered infertile by a botched abortion; the three outcasts are nicknamed the "Petticoat Mafia." Jane also becomes romantically involved with and loses her virginity to a member of the school's wrestling team, an artist named Brandon Ortiz.

Rose, having become a self-harming misanthrope since her parents' deaths, transfers to Hemingway and joins the Petticoat Mafia. After attending a party alone, Rose tells her new friends she was gangraped by the wrestling team and talks the other girls into helping her get revenge by performing a ritual to summon Freddy. The ceremony, held in the abandoned factory where Freddy was once employed, works, with Rose coercing Freddy into doing her bidding by withholding the bladed glove Freddy wielded in life as the "Springwood Slasher." After Freddy murders every member of the wrestling team besides Brandon, it is revealed Rose lied about being raped in order to get the Petticoat Mafia to help her revive Freddy, who Rose has been obsessed with since childhood, wanting to use Freddy to commit a grandiose murder–suicide that entails detonating a bomb full of knockout gas in Hemingway. With everyone in the school knocked out by the gas, a massive shared dream forms in which Freddy begins killing people by the dozens, including Amber and Lola, the latter of whom has her brain eaten by Freddy after he traps her in a nightmare recreation of Night of the Living Dead.

Freddy, after mocking Rose for believing she was "special" and could control him through his glove, murders Brandon and attacks Jane. Rose rips Freddy's heart out and incinerates it, the glove, and herself in a furnace, which vanquishes Freddy. Jane is confined indefinitely to a psychiatric hospital, where she spends all of her time staring blankly at a TV, after the Petticoat Mafia is blamed for the 461 deaths that occurred at Hemingway.

Publication

Author Christa Faust celebrated the book's release with a signing at the Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank, California, on June 12, 2005. [3]

In 2006, Black Flame reprinted Dreamspawn as part of Ripped From a Dream: A Nightmare on Elm Street Omnibus, a compilation that included  Suffer the Children and Protégé , the preceding and subsequent Nightmare on Elm Street novels published by Black Flame. [4]

Reception

In a dual review of Dreamspawn and its predecessor, Suffer the Children , he wrote for Science Fiction Chronicle , Don D'Ammassa concluded, "I wasn't really surprised by anything in either book, but both are quite suspenseful and do a good job of capturing the atmosphere of their inspiration." [5] Writing for The Boar , Reece Goodall lambasted the novel, which he noted felt like "a poor high school drama, full of caricatures of teenagers" and "two very different stories awkwardly stapled together." [6]

Related Research Articles

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A Nightmare on Elm Street is an American supernatural slasher media franchise consisting of nine films, a television series, novels, comic books, and various other media. The franchise began with the film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), written and directed by Wes Craven. The overall plot of the franchise centers around the fictional character Fred "Freddy" Krueger, the apparition of a former child killer who was burned alive by the vengeful parents of his victims, who returns from the grave to terrorize and kill the teenage residents of the fictional Springwood, Ohio in their dreams. Craven returned to the franchise to co-script the second sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and to write/direct Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994). The films collectively grossed $472 million at the box office worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Freddy Krueger</span> Horror film character

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<i>Wes Cravens New Nightmare</i> 1994 film by Wes Craven

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Nancy Thompson (<i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i>) Main character in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series

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<i>A Nightmare on Elm Street: Suffer the Children</i> 2005 novel by David Bishop

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Suffer the Children is a 2005 British horror novel written by David Bishop and published by Black Flame. A tie-in to the Nightmare on Elm Street series of American horror films, it is the first in a series of five Nightmare on Elm Street novels published by Black Flame and involves a group of teenagers who, after taking part in an anti-insomnia drug trial, find themselves being terrorized by supernatural killer Freddy Krueger.

<i>A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protégé</i>

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<i>A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers</i>

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References

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  2. Beverly Baer, ed. (2005). What Do I Read Next? 2005: A Readers Guide to Current Genre Fiction, Volume 2. Gale. p. 245. ISBN   9780787690229.
  3. "TODAY Come and enjoy a barbecue for..." latimes.com. Burbank Leader. 11 June 2005. Retrieved 14 August 2024.
  4. Lott, Rod (17 May 2006). "BL Publishing falls for more WARHAMMER, New Lines". bookgasm.com. Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 12 June 2017. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  5. "Critical Mass by Don D'Ammassa". Science Fiction Chronicle . Vol. 1, no. 261. United States: Warren Lapine. May 2005. p. 31.
  6. Goodall, Reece (6 November 2020). "The bizarre Elm Street spin-off novels: Ripped from a Dream". theboar.org. The Boar . Retrieved 14 August 2024.