a novel
by Brian Feutz
(coming soon)
ABOUT:
Jinx is an emotionally troubled New York City bicycle messenger who believes she has the ability to travel through time and change history. A reluctant heroine, she, with the help of an alluring companion, struggles against stubborn realities, personal demons, and a powerful antagonist who covets her purported skills. Finally, perched on the brink of a sterling utopia, Jinx faces an impossible choice: Save mankind, or save herself.
RUNNING IN DREAMS is a fast-paced science-fiction thriller that explores the interstitial space between reality and illusion, and asks the reader if a world without bigotry, tyranny, and oppression could exist—or is cruelty intrinsic to mankind’s nature?
Subscribe for more information and release updates
Opening excerpt:
Last night, Jinx went to bed with a pounding headache and an overwhelming sense of doom. She tossed, twisted, and traveled to a pestilent village in Eastern India, two hundred years in the past, where she met a man, fell in love, and cheated death. Her doctors would call it an acute dissociative psychotic episode like they always did, but she knew they would be wrong.
Jinx recognized the idea of nocturnal time travel scored high on the ridiculousness scale, yet this wasn’t the first time a dream had carried her away in such a manner. On prior trips she had visited frigid settlements in ancient Siberia, primitive tribes in the Amazon, monks in Tibetan monasteries, and other remarkable places a sane person would never seek out. What set last night’s episode apart from the others, however, was its vivid milieu and sensorial splendor. She didn’t wander unobserved like before, rather this vision unfurled in kaleidoscopic glory and intimate delight. Either she had improved her time-traveling skills, or the sickness had worsened.
In the mornings after one of her distinctive dreams—inversions she called them—she bounded from bed into the realm of awareness with the energy of a bull and the timidity of a guilty child. Her body sparked with determination to conquer the world.
She sped onto the street from her flat in Queens and pedaled her bicycle effortlessly across the Queensboro bridge into Manhattan. On a normal day, Jinx would have gone straight to work, but today she took a detour to the city’s southwest corner where she often went when dreams encroached upon her sanity.
Jinx wheeled her bicycle to the watery memorial where Tower Two of the World Trade Center once stood. She shivered in reverence and indignation. Three thousand innocent lives cut short by a madman’s decree in an act of ethnic vengeance. Three thousand honest, hard-working people, mercilessly slaughtered in one hour and forty-two minutes of wretched terror.
Already, in the light of dawn, scores of somber visitors lined the railings, shaking their heads in disbelief, paying respects. The walls appeared like sheets of falling pebbles and their chittering sounds obscured the crowd’s hushed murmurs.
With an index finger, Jinx traced a victim’s name, Annie, engraved on the bronze parapet. She traced another, Yenenah, then Antonio, Paul, and Catherine. The names stretched on forever. Calvin, Sharon, Lacey, Jose, Chin, Ian, Leonard, Yuguang, Hilda, Wilson, Ada, Eric, Robert, Kris, Lawrence, Dana, Ruben, Zoe, … too many to trace. Too many to remember.
—to be continued