An Ambitious Flight That Doesn't Quite Reach Orbit

William Pauley III's The Astronaut Dream Book, the third installment in "The Bedlam Bible" series, promised a continuation of its unique, perhaps surreal, narrative journey, delving into themes of dreams, reality, and the cosmic. As a reader intrigued by unconventional storytelling and speculative fiction, I was curious to see where this latest entry would take me.

The book's strengths lie in its undeniable originality and its willingness to explore complex, abstract concepts. Pauley III has a distinctive voice and a flair for creating vivid, often bizarre, imagery that can be quite captivating. There are moments of genuine philosophical depth and imaginative leaps that challenge the reader's perceptions of reality. For those who appreciate experimental narratives and a stream-of-consciousness style, the book offers a unique experience. It attempts to blend the mundane with the fantastical in a way that is, at times, thought-provoking.

However, despite its ambitious vision, I found that The Astronaut Dream Book didn't always coalesce into a fully satisfying read. The narrative, while intentionally fragmented, often felt disjointed, making it difficult to follow a clear plot or character arc. The pacing, while reflective of its dreamlike quality, could be quite slow and meandering, leading to stretches where I felt disconnected from the story's progression. While the abstract nature is a stylistic choice, it sometimes made the themes and messages feel too obscure, requiring a significant effort to decipher. The emotional impact, though hinted at, didn't consistently land with the resonance I had hoped for, making it hard to fully invest in the characters' journeys.

Overall, The Astronaut Dream Book is an imaginative and unconventional work that will appeal to a niche audience seeking something truly different in speculative fiction. While it showcases flashes of brilliance and a unique artistic vision, its fragmented structure and abstract nature might prove challenging for some readers. It's a book that invites contemplation but doesn't always provide easy answers, leaving a mixed impression.

I've tried a few books by this author now as they all sound intriguing, but unfortunately I just don't think he's for me.

I don't know that I've ever had a dream about astronauts, but to be fair, I've also never been poisoned. This was so enjoyably crazy!

This was a rather trippy book, but good overall. There were some great stories, and each contained were well plotted.

The author knows how to shock yet keep you reading. Overall, well done. The narrator was really great too.

Each book in this series are quick reads. They have a good amount of horror and sci fi. This one was about a poisoned astronaut. Well written and a good read.

I didn't know what to expect from this audiobook, but was very impressed! The length is perfect for keeping the listener engaged and the narrator is AWESOME! So much so that I'd listen to more of the series just because of how well his voice connects with conveying the story. A really great journey to listen to.

Thank you to William Pauley III and his team for allowing me to listen to this ARC. It was spectacular. Unlike anything I expected it to be. The story had me at the edge of my seat the entire time I was listening to it!

I didn't know this was the 3rd book of the ongoing series. I enjoyed the spooky narration. This was a short, frightening, bizarre, and interesting story!

The imagery of the cover offset by the bright colors made this 100% a cover read. Each short story was unique and sometimes has me questioning human nature. I recommend taking your time reading this so you can fully enjoy each story that is presented.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

It isn’t my usual type of read but I decided to give it a try. Not sure what I was thinking with this one. It was trippy to say the least.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher/author for providing me with an ALC in exchange for my honest review.

This book was exactly what I wanted it to be! I loved it. I will make sure to check out other books by this author. When I requested this I was just intrigued by the concept of it and I loved how it turned out. This story had a great plot and if you have read this and enjoyed it, This was so much. It was such a great story. I would say give this one a try. I will continue to follow this author. Way to go to this author for not letting me down.

I highly enjoyed the narrator of the audiobook. Kept me listening.

So weird again but so intriguing and things are starting to come together...
Thanks to NetGalley, the editor and the author for the opportunity to access this advanced copy.

An interesting collection of short stories in the vien of cosmic horror, with a more modern feel (I assume theres an actual term for it). This was my first foray into The Bedlam Bible series, and I will check out the others after this. The seemingly unrelated stories all worked together and intertwined brilliantly, offering an extra element to the collection.
I listened to the audiobook and the narrator did a fantastic job.

Interesting, creepy, weird, trippy, gripping. The ending was an unexpected twist. A real page turner,
Well done.

This is my second William Pauley III book. And each time I’ve read his books all I can think is “wtf is happening “ yet everything always comes and around and connects perfectly and yet you’re still left thinking “wtf”

I love this series and since I’ve already listened to 2 of the novellas, I will surely be reading more. Each book is weird and gorey. They are fast paced and intricate.

Audiobook ARC received by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is.... bizarre to say the least! I was intrigued by the description but I didn't know what to expect exactly. A lot of it felt like a weird, dark, at times confusing fever dream. I liked that the stories were connected and the narrator was very good. Ultimately I enjoyed the book but didn't love it, I don't know if it was for me. I would cautiously recommend it, though, and I'd give another book from the series a try (this is the only one I've read/listened to).

Thank you to Doom Fiction and NetGalley for a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.


This is the 3rd audiobook from William Pauley III for me and I will admit I liked this one. #1 was my favorite, #2 was too weird but this was was just weird enough. I liked that fact that this one did not have as much sexual content as the others. I like weird, but could do without the sex. This one had a connect to the prior Tower books but not necessary to read any others to follow this one.
Not recommended if you do not like weird, bizarre and gross.

Brief, grotesque and absurd. Exactly what I've come to expect from the Bedlam Bible series. I listened to this as an audiobook while playing video games and it's good fun! I don't feel like it has any greater depth or intrigue that would make me rate it higher, but it's a fun and quick horror story.

I saw one of the other reviewers mention this could be enjoyed as a stand alone, but I wonder if maybe some background from the previous books would have made it better, or if maybe this just wasn't for me. It wasn't awful, but I really couldn't bring myself to care about it one way or the other. It was a short listen, so I was able to finish anyway, but if it were longer I would have been debating whether or not to give it up. I am unfamiliar with the series, though, so maybe I am just missing something that might have made it more enjoyable.

Wow, that was weird.

William Paley III is a new discovery of mine, writing in a genre I didn’t even know existed until recently. The New Weird genre is a reboot of the Weird Fiction genre of which HP Lovecraft is the most popular specimen. Weird Fiction was sometimes called "tentacle fiction" because of its proclivity for strange creatures other than the typical werewolves/vampires/etc. The New Weird genre is notably eclectic and known for mixing mythology and urban, mundane and exotic, and this book is no exception.

I ran across this book on NetGalley and immediately just based on the cover alone I knew I had to read more. You’ve got this pink-suited astronaut chick with some kind of multi colored orb surrounded by pink skulls and luminous creatures floating in an apparently underwater world, which is itself encapsulated in a huge pink brain. The description is six words: “A poisoned man dreams of astronauts.” Uh. Ok, that doesn’t sound like much of a “premise”…

And that alone feels bold; everything about this feels bold and intentionally weird, like the author is saying: come with me, and I will bring you on a fever dreamish descent into madness where we see just how deep the rabbit-hole goes, my friend. To top it all off, the small press publisher, Doom Fiction, says its mission statement is to destroy the world through infecting minds by using weapons constructed only of paper and carefully placed words. Ha. The author’s bio reads: “William Paley does not exist.”

I immediately had a feeling this was the kind of guy who has a weird sense of humor that I (and few others) love. I checked him out on Substack and then discovered him pulling off some awesome shenanigans…he posted about how he had this dream last night that his Christmas tree ate his dog. This garnered some responses, to which he also responded, and in the comments, more macabre details came out of his horrific dog eating tree dream. He ended with something along the lines of, “I’m thinking about cutting it up into a million pieces and burning it. The tree, that is, not the dog.”

So I had to read this book.

And in many ways it did not disappoint. He has a way of describing things that gives you that growing sense of horror as more is gradually revealed. He also writes in a surreal style that reminds me of a dream. The characters sometimes can't believe it themselves and keep trying to either wake up or stop hallucinating, but no, unfortunately, it appears that they cannot escape from their experience.

Themes: dreaming, body horror, losing sanity, lucid dreams dripping with portents, and isolation. There are also sometimes Biblical undertones. Overall there is a sense of simultaneous wonder and horror at discovering monsters and/or locations that are terrifying and overwhelming to any mortal human. That's one of the things horror can do best: confronting us with the knowledge of our own mortality.

There is one story also that has a character with a hypersexual mindset. It's less explicit and more just disturbing. Disturbing is, really, the word for most of these stories. These stories are for if you want to fall down the rabbit hole with someone losing their sanity. The story I just referred to actually has probably the most compelling character in the whole book though, even though she isn't exactly a good person; she's negligent of her child and obsessive; she's an addict, and I can relate to her mindset because I have addictions too, and I understand that addiction brings us down to terrible levels much lower than who we were created to be. She's addicted to using her phone to try to hook up with guys, essentially. You get all of the misgivings, the back-and-forth, the self doubt, the rationalizations, all of that that makes humans in distress so nuanced. She's very human, although I do wonder if she is truly representative of the female mindset, I do feel that it represents the addictive mindset very well, although I don't know that the author ever uses the word "addict."

The first and last stories are not so much astronaut stories; they are both squarely inside Tower Block 8, a location filled with terrors. Both of those stories involve mysteries being revealed surrounding the Captain and the Bedlam Bible and feel like they tie more into the whole of the overarching story of othe the Bedlam Bible series. As for the other stories in between, these were more actually about astronauts, but it's less clear how some of them connect. One of them is very apocalyptic. I will say, I don't think that by the end of the book I had learned very much definitive information about the overarching story. But I don't think that's mainly what the author was trying to do.

How do I rate this book? The story about the addict made it worth reading for me. The other stories had their moments but ultimately I wasn't sure what to make of them. There's an interesting Hell story, and an interesting Church of Death on the Moon which was interesting but random. Normally I dock points from stories that feel like they have elements that are too random, but I also feel like that's kind of the point of this genre (I'm intuiting that)...it's like a bad dream. When the next striking thing happens, it's not logical, but it may be evocative and have great symbolic meaning...ultimately it gets hard though if you're never really sure what the symbols represent. I guess I didn't have enough to work with to make these stories feel truly "Great" to me; some of them remained feeling a bit random. One of them, about "negative waves," was not horrific.

So this collection wasn't perfect. Still somehow glad I read it; there were several very memorably, visceral, striking moments. The book is what it is. Ratings are all subjective made-up constructs anyways; I should just pick a rating and move on. I think I’ll round up because of how original the stories are.

I'm curious to read more by this author.