I really liked this book. Thought-provoking and emotional. I would definitely recommend it for anyone looking to think about a book and really experience the story.

K.G. Broas’s The Fallen Dreamer is a surreal, haunting descent into the unknown—a genre-bending blend of science fiction, horror, and coming-of-age that reads like Stranger Things filtered through the mind of David Lynch. Lyrical and unsettling, it’s a novel that doesn’t offer easy answers, but instead pulls the reader into a deepening spiral of mystery, memory, and transformation.

The story begins with a rupture: Jake, a seemingly ordinary teenager, witnesses something impossible—light moving with sentient speed, a boy levitating over a pond, a memory shifting before his eyes. But rather than launching into an exposition-heavy explanation, Broas does something bolder: he lets silence speak. Reality doesn’t unravel so much as it slips sideways, and Jake’s perception of the world begins to fracture in quiet, intimate, terrifying ways.

He’s not alone. The novel quickly introduces a cast of complex, deeply human characters—Brooke, Emma, Juan, Carl, and Johnny—each of whom brings their own strength, trauma, and mystery to the table. Their bond forms the emotional core of the story. While they each encounter the strange in their own way, together they begin to uncover a presence that is neither magical nor scientific, but something older—something watching. Something waking.

What sets The Fallen Dreamer apart is its refusal to flatten its mystery into a neat genre box. This is speculative fiction with teeth and heart. Broas’s prose is poetic and disorienting in the best way, giving the story a dreamlike, often nightmarish quality. There are echoes of Jeff VanderMeer, Madeleine L’Engle, and even early Stephen King in its atmospheric tension and spiritual unease.

But beneath the cosmic dread and shifting timelines lies something tender: a meditation on friendship, the fluid nature of memory, and the terrifying beauty of growing up in a world that no longer makes sense. As the group delves deeper into what they were never meant to see, they begin to change—not just physically, but emotionally, psychologically. The power they gain is both a gift and a curse.

Verdict:
The Fallen Dreamer is a haunting, elegantly written novel that lingers in your mind like an unfinished thought or a half-remembered dream. It’s about what happens when the veil lifts—when reality cracks just wide enough to let the unknown seep through. Fans of cerebral, emotionally resonant speculative fiction won’t want to miss it. Just don’t expect to come out the same.

I liked that the ideas were imaginative, and I liked that there were some deeper meanings that could be explored in the narrative.

However, I thought it was quite slow paced and repetitive for a teen/young adult book (especially considering the short attention spans now) and some of the characters were described quite stereotypically. If these aspects were intentionally maintaining the school-like atmosphere, it may have been beneficial to show additional characteristics that "break the mould" or to possibly see why these characters were this way. For instance, Brooke's appearance is focused on in the earlier scenes and it comes across that she's only a love interest, and Emma's weirdness is touched upon, along with the fact that she possibly self-harms, but this is never raised again and does not seem to provide any advice to teens in the same situation.

Additionally, I felt like some of my exasperation came from the fact that the characters didn't seem motivated to find out what was going on, or how these things suddenly came to be. I understand that they wouldn't have known where to turn, but they do mention someone older and we do suddenly have an extra character later on who could've brought this element in. In the second half, it felt a little pointless to have this extra character when something else is doing the job for them in the first half, and it also felt disconnected when the characters started talking about the importance of relics that hadn't been mentioned either.

I do feel like there's potential here, but unfortunately it also feels unfinished.