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eBook Category: Horror/Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: From Poe-inspired madness to Lovecraftian accounts of otherworldly horrors, the thirty-one poems that comprise Life Among the Dream Merchants will take the reader into rich dreamlands of mystery, fantasy, and unholy terror.

eBook Publisher: Coscom Entertainment, Published: 2005
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2005

2 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [709 KB], eReader (PDB) [87 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [39 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [56 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [206 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [112 KB], hiebook (KML) [308 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [325 KB], iSilo (PDB) [42 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [186 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [60 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [90 KB]
Words: 12291
Reading time: 35-49 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: 1-897217-09-9

I have had several false starts writing this essay. Maybe my health has faltered, and I have become delusional. Perhaps I am merely mentally and physically exhausted. After all, I have had too little sleep. But can you blame me for that?

Several times, as I hunched over my keys, I have peripherally glimpsed the inexplicable. It simply can not be. To my immediate right, there should only exist a dark little bedroom, unused by my family except for storage, books piled upon its mattress--a heavy body built of books slumbering there. But both last night and this, from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a brighter room beyond that threshold. And not so much a room, as a corridor, dwindling away into a haze of infinity. Flourescent lights sputtering above, sparks raining from one crackling fixture. Water also dripping down here and there, puddling on the floor. And there, in the center of the hallway, a wheelchair. A wheelchair without an occupant, though its seat glistens with dark stains. And standing behind the wheelchair, patiently awaiting a patient, a figure whose head seems to flicker like a candle flame. Is it the fluttering light that engenders this effect? No ... no ... it truly is as if that blurry-featured face is appearing and disappearing in jerks and flashes while the body upholding that ephemeral head remains only too solid and fixed--waiting to push that chair toward me.

And then my eyes fly open, and I lift my head from my arms, crossed before me on my desk.

There are works of prose and poetry that can hypnotize one into a trance, transport one into an altered reality. A variety of means exist by which to achieve this effect, and the writer Kurt Newton--equally talented at prose and poetry--has perfected these magic spells. He is a painter of mental imagery. He stirs our emotions with the chilly expertise of a surgeon, or mortician, probing amongst our more physical components. And he has mastered the cadence of words.

Newton's lines of verse can read like a mantra, using intricate echoes of sounds and repetition of words to make us coil and knot back in upon ourselves as we follow his hypnotist's bauble--not merely swinging back and forth, but tracing web-like patterns. An example of this mesmerizing skill, from his poem At the Mountain of Dreams: