DREAMLAND COURT
Available at Barnes & Noble or on Amazon
Set in the blighted industrial landscape of the Los Angeles basin,
Dreamland Court is a love story. Johnny Dalton, just released from prison, returns home to find his wife Jackie, the mother of his two small children, passionately involved with one of his friends. Determined to do everything in his power to win her back, Johnny blunders his way through one criminal enterprise after another. When the cops pick him up for being the only adult present at a wild teenage party, he’s sent back to jail.
The strange thing is, Jackie finds Johnny’s antics exciting, even irresistible. Reminiscent of the pathos in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the comedy of John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Dale Herd focuses his astute
gaze on lives that are ordinarily invisible, while turning the conventional love story on its head.
Short Story Writer and Novelist
ABOUT
Dale Herd was born in Spokane, Washington. At 18, he moved to California and spent the next 12 years surfing. He wrote EARLY MORNING WIND, his first book of short stories, in Seattle while working as a Pinkerton Detective. Moving back to California, then working everywhere out of casual labor halls across America, he completed two more collections, DIAMONDS and WILD CHERRIES. Returning to California he finished a fourth collection of stories, EMPTY POCKETS, and just recently finished DREAMLAND COURT, the novel. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Deborah, and their three sons.
REVIEWS
Robert Creeley, “Early Morning Wind”
“A world takes place here with extraordinary economy: articulate, fragile, heartfelt.”
Michael Lally, The Washington Post
“Reading herd’s short-short fictions leaves me sure I have experienced what early readers of Hemingway’s first short works must have felt: this writer is the real thing.”
Michael Elias
"Every once in a while a book comes along that enters the line-up of the 'great American novel'. Dreamland Court by Dale Herd is one of them. He writes America with the intensity of a hundred Twains/Hemingways/Baldwins and Algrens. His prose is so artfully written that it is poetry. Set in crazy Los Angeles, where love, sex, and crime co-exist, Dreamland Court grabs you immediately and doesn't let go until the last sentence. And, then as you are sorry it is over, you might be inclined to read it again."
Thomas Joyce, Chicago Review
“The comic writer doesn’t base his statement in the mere things in life. But his attitude or faith you might call it, emerges with the harmonious contemplation of them all. “Early Morning Wind” offers such a prospect. The ribald, the sad, the hateful, the precious, the seamy and the gross, everything’s legal here.”
Ed Dorn, on “Diamonds”
“...an exquisite, tasteful, perfect book.”
Keith Abbott, San Francisco Review of Books, on “Wild Cherries”
“Herd has an acute sense of what people say as against what they mean. This creates the tension in the prose: that something completely emotionally unbearable is being spilled out into completely bearable talk.”
Allen Ginsberg, Poetry Flash.
“...and I like Dale Herd for prose.”
Lewis MacAdams, Wet Magazine, a Journal of the Avant-Garde
“No one writes American better than Dale Herd.”
Lewis Warsh, American Book Review, on “EARLY MORNING WIND, “DIAMONDS,” and “WILD CHERRIES.”
“Herd’s art is the ability to create authentic voices while packing the greatest possible intensity into the smallest possible space. Whatever concessions Herd felt he had to make by creating a frame around his story by use of conventional narration have been jettisoned in favor of the aesthetics of extreme concision, a decision which is aesthetically “right” and also fraught with the kind of risks few writers would dare to contemplate, gives evidence that Herd has a perspicacity and a devotion to pure writing as unique as any American writer since William Burroughs.
Sara Selevitch, The Foxing Review:, “Empty Pockets”
“Herd’s pieces are tightly crafted, many honing in on a single scene or conversation. His sharp prose cuts cleanly in and out of the lives of his myriad protagonists. The reader is rarely told where these characters have been or how they got to where they are. We are left to guess at scenarios and relationships, but the gravity of the moment is so piercing and so present that the details don’t matter.”
Michael Wolfe, Electric Literature, on “Handcrafted Dolls” in “Empty Pockets”
“The seemingly beauty of the language – there is no flash here, just verbal magic of a special kind, If you love to read, you’ll be thinking, ‘This is what words in a story ought to do.’”
Theron Blum
“Herd focuses in on stories across America, zoomed in stories, not to show the vastness of the country, but to show how little the vastness is. It is a wonderful juxtaposition that is made specifically by the collecting of little bits of people's vast lives (impossibly vast). It does not pretend to be able to tell all of it, it presents itself as it should be.”
Davis Freeman on “Empty Pockets”
"A whole world in a few pages or even less. That's possible be- cause the story happens between the lines."
Kelly Harwood, Queen’s Mob Teahouse
"Herd's anonymity has made discovering “Empty Pockets” even more special, like finding the next great band and hearing them play in a hole in the wall bar instead of a sold out arena.”
Jim Hartz, Poetry Center Director, San Francisco State, on “Dreamland Court”
“Those already familiar with the sharpness and precision of Herd’s short prose works resembling exquisitely wrought Swiss Watch collections, no two the same, will delight in the expansion of his formidable talents in the novel form.”
Kevin Opstedal, Blue Press Books, on “Dreamland Court”
“Known for his brilliant short prose pieces Dale Herd is a meticulous recorder of the language we move around in, and he posses the skill and guys to take it all the way. His underground novel “Dreamland Court” is simply a masterpiece.”
Michael Wolfe, poet, author, filmmaker
“Dale Herd's “Dreamland Court” is that rare thing-- first-rate literature in a completely original package, all of it disguised as a comedic report from the trenches of hardscrabble California. If it's real literature it doesn't matter where and it doesn't matter when. You've never met the people in this book, but you will recognize them instantly. The characters are the narrators. In life, they all need interventions, but on the page they present themselves as if they had no need of an author. Just what American fiction has been waiting for! A publisher will need some nerve to put this book between covers, because it can't be pitched in comparison to anything you've read.”
Maureen Owen, on “Dreamland Court”
“I’m loving how the format brings each character to stage front looking right at one and speaking, It’s really, wonderfully out of the box work!
Michael Lally ― Lally's Alley
"Back in the early 20th Century there was a lot of talk in the literary world about "The Great American Novel." Some thought it had already been written in the previous century (e.g. Moby Dick) or claimed newer titles (e.g. The Great Gatsby) or midcentury (e.g. Invisible Man) or later ones (e.g. Beloved). In this century it seems like the absurd game it always was and who cares anyway.
But if we were still playing, I'd throw Dale Herd's Dreamland Court into the mix along with the examples cited above and others. A series of mostly overlapping monologues by a varied crew of smalltime drug dealers and thieves and general fuckups and their partners and lovers and spouses and friends, Dreamland Court may not sound inviting, but once you've met them and been drawn into their stories by Herd's original styling and eye and ear for character, you're hooked,
Reading Dreamland Court is like watching one of those streaming series that you can't help binging on because you want to see what happens to these uniquely distinct individuals that you've come to know so intimately. Someone once wrote about Hubert Selby's achievement in his novel Last Exit To Brooklyn being that he got readers to care about the "lowlifes" he was writing about. In Dreamland Court the characters themselves seem to write themselves and their stories into existence, and so authentically they continue to live in my consciousness long after I reached the end of the book, which I was sorry to. -- "
Jeremy Prynne, on “Dreamland Court”
“…not since Raymond Carver has stuff been so raw and true, It leaps out from the page and bites with tender fury.”
Summer Brenner, author of the Missing Lover
"Dreamland Court is a book that could be described in multiple ways: its cast of hapless characters; its seedy world of petty crime, mayhem, and sex; its vivid descriptions of place that include jails, sex clubs, and abusive home life; its unusual format of monologues; and its howling brand of humor. In fact, all of it could be called a comedy of errors, miscalculations, foolish assumptions, poor judgment, bad luck, and stupidity. For me the most outstanding quality of the novel is its language. In less capable hands, it would have been trivial and trite, but in the hands of a superb writer, it's dazzling street art."