Dreamlives of Debris
The Minotaur in this retelling of the myth is not a monster with a man’s head & bull’s body, but a little deformed girl—she calls herself Debris—hidden away from public view beneath Knossos. A kind of living instrument through which sound & time travel, Debris possesses the ability to hear the thoughts & see the memories, desires, & futures of others throughout history as she roams her labyrinth without center or perimeter.
“Dreamlives of Debris is a stunning song cycle on the pixelation of memory in a hyperdigitalized universe, opening out into an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful meditation on nothing less than the erasure of time itself.”
— David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“Lance Olsen opens up an astonishing world of thought and emotion—a place distant but familiar that hangs almost out of the reach of our daily perception…. A beautiful and moving reading experience, Dreamlives of Debris is a unique and impressive achievement.”
— Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child
“Breaking boundaries of horror, science fiction, nonfiction, love story, and myth, this rare and brilliant novel reinvents the female ‘monster’ in the form of a disfigured girl. Subverting the hero’s journey, Debris goes on a quest to find her self within an impossible labyrinth where architecture mirrors the disfigured female body, imprisoning and revealing a girl monster who stands between humanity and the darkness. In this world where what seems to be monstrous is more human than human, the stories most difficult to tell are the ones we most need to be told.”
— Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman
“In a rapturous fusion of myth, premonition, philosophy, and human history, Dreamlives of Debris delivers us to the pure poetry of perception. I fell in love with Debris. Monstrous in form, radiant in spirit, she hears everyone: Sappho, Sophocles, Borges, Plato, a traveler on the Silk Road, Danielle Steele. Those who dare to listen this way will be transfigured, scattered through time and space, bewildered, ecstatically alive, forever lost in a vast labyrinth of infinite possibilities.”
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of Voice of the River