At Pleyber-Christ

The Case Against the Dream
Armel Dagorn

This is one of those reading experiences you are confident you will remember in future dreams as well as reality. A train driver dogged by his own ominously recurring dream, and the anxiety of shadow when his train approached a certain area of the track, and, while in regular conversational cahoots with an old timer, he even travels his own train on his days off. “…though he hadn’t once looked out the window the whole time he’d been in the cab, he must have felt each rail, each bolt in his bones, and known exactly where we were.”
All factored into by memories of his late grandfather’s model railway in the attic, into the centre of which he and his grandfather had risen — a magically realistic panoply of cardboard reality around them, with backstories, some model people in black. A cardboard reality and a postcard’s ‘disjunction’…But not forgetting the buck stops here, at a place called Pleyber-Christ.
A story on its “trompe l’oeil” track, its “thrum beneath my feet.”

My previous reviews of this ARMEL DAGORN: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/armel-dagorn/

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Full Vastarien context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/vastarien-vol-5-issue-1/#comment-24907