by Tim Waggoner

Let's backtrack a bit. The fragile beauty Damara is in her late twenties but hasn't been out of the house much, not since she was little and ran into the nearby abandoned amusement park. Her father followed her in that night, but he never came out. You see, Damara has a strange, unexplained power—she can somehow reflect people's dreams and hopes and not only make them come true, but exaggerate them in grotesque, unintended ways. For instance, local pervert Kenneth (who for fun watches little girls from his window while engaged in "self-abuse") suffers from a sexual dysfunction, but Damara's power reaches out to him like some sort of magical Viagra and a monster is born, both in his pants and in his head. Kenneth has been loosened from the moorings of tenuous sanity. But then, so has his wife, a frigid schoolteacher whose disdain for her students is only matched by her hatred of Kenneth. Wonder what her wishes might be.

Damara, who's lived with her mother since her father disappeared, doesn't know how to control her power, but has at least learned to keep it in check. But now the arrival of old neighbor and almost-boyfriend Tristan causes a spike in her influence, and (the street) Pandora Drive becomes a wildly horrific Pandora's Box of grotesqueness and evil. Damara's naiveté in dealing with her destructive power seems endearing at first, but assumes a grating quality when it becomes apparent that her suppression was at least as harmful as her lack of control—and perhaps therein lies the moral, if there is one, of this inverted fairy tale: we should strive to master our talents before they master us. After seeing terrible things befall everyone they love, Damara and the heroically-named Tristan find themselves on a quest to save young neighbor Autumn from a fate worse than, well, anything you can think of.

Calling upon his typical command of the surreal imagery so well-employed in Like Death, Waggoner cycles the horror from slow to Ed Lee-overdrive in the sort of frenzy reflected by the antagonist characters, whose recognition of their newfound purpose sends them into spiraling insanity the likes of which no one would enjoy facing. The supernatural elements remain mostly unexplained, which does seem to speed the action, though the logical reader may stumble in trying to comprehend this entertainingly nihilistic collage. Not as deep or psychologically disturbing as Like Death, Pandora Drive nevertheless serves up a feast of the grotesque and perverted for those of us who like some of our horror over the top. (Examples? Check out the "rainfall" near the climax and report back.) Though the plot tends toward the simplistic, the "Through the Looking Glass on twice the acid" approach yields some good chills and gross-outs, and the whole exercise becomes like a funhouse mirror-driven fever dream. If you wake up in a Tim Waggoner nightmare, try hard to fall asleep and tumble right out—or you may end up sucked into some character's black hole of a mutilated groin. And that may not be the worst of it.