Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian is a document of disaster and recovery. The third volume in the Ghosts Trilogy, it joins Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist and Chasing the Last Whale, a fictional black comedy about love and suicide in contemporary, wartime America.
Like its two companion titles, Hallucinabulia explores the theme of overcoming a deeply traumatic past by transforming anger over loss into gratitude for what once was. Plagued by chronic nightmares until an incurable illness finally allowed him to achieve happiness, Wictor published this very private record in order to bear witness, banish, and entertain. The healing power of laughter is again demonstrated and affirmed.
Wictor's near-perfect recall allowed him to capture some of the most off-kilter, frightening, strange, and funny imagery that a twisted imagination could ever devise. The diary-divided into twelve chapters organized by subject matter-provides context to the memoir and the novel by presenting the nocturnal battles the author fought with his demons, as well as the salvation that his angels conferred. Straight from Wictor's subconscious, the dialog, bizarre scenery, and outlandish situations are preserved in the form of intricately detailed short stories.
The characters introduced in Ghosts and Ballyhoo and romanticized in Chasing the Last Whale are finally set free in Hallucinabulia, being no longer bound by law, nature, or even reality. The result is a book that travels an arc from incomprehensibly brutal to indestructibly optimistic, as intense evil gives way to infinite beauty and good.
About the Author: Thomas Wictor was born in Caripito, Venezuela, and has lived in Texas, the Netherlands, Norway, Great Britain, Oregon, Japan, and California. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Lewis and Clark College and has worked as a stevedore, library archivist, conversational English teacher, editor of the world's first online newspaper, voice-over actor, delivery driver, process server, field representative for a document-retrieval service, scale-model builder, and music journalist.
He is the author of seven books and is the planet's only expert on World War I flamethrowers, an accomplishment he attained completely by default, since nobody else is interested in them. A former Contributing Editor at "Bass Player, " he was once a semi-professional bass guitarist in Tokyo.
