Alvin Lu’s Daydreamers is a haunting, genre-blurring novel that occupies a liminal space between speculative fiction and noir, delivering a chilling meditation on memory, identity, and the dissolution of the real. Set in a near-future San Francisco fractured by mysterious disappearances and populated by psychic disturbances, the novel explores what it means to remain grounded in a world where reality itself is unraveling.

The story follows Lu’s protagonist, the brooding and disoriented Tomoyuki Kaneshiro, who is drawn into the mystery of his girlfriend’s vanishing—an event symptomatic of a broader epidemic in which individuals begin to "fade," first mentally and then physically. The so-called “Daydreamers” seem to slip into parallel zones of consciousness, their bodies remaining while their identities vanish. In response, the city teeters on collapse, with memory becoming a contested terrain and sleep no longer a refuge but a point of departure.

Lu’s prose is stark yet poetic, echoing the stylings of cyberpunk while evoking the disorientation of Haruki Murakami’s urban dreamscapes. But unlike the escapism suggested by its title, Daydreamers offers no easy exits. Instead, the novel functions as a critique of late capitalist amnesia—where the virtual overtakes the actual, and where the struggle to remember becomes an act of resistance.

The narrative, deliberately opaque and fragmented, mirrors the condition of its subjects. This can make for a disorienting read, but it’s precisely this destabilization that gives the novel its power. Lu is less concerned with conventional resolution than with evoking the texture of disintegration itself. Daydreamers is not a comforting book, but it is an essential one for readers interested in speculative fiction that challenges genre norms and confronts the psychic toll of our mediated lives. It lingers, like a dream you’re not sure you had.

I found this book hard to follow, not because of the metafictional elements but because of the fragmented characterization, descriptions and dialogue. You’re first introduced to the idea that the writer is translating a work that his father had written, which supposedly leads the writer on a journey. However, everything in this book just feels very clouded and the narrative keeps switching from LA to China to Taiwan with some references to Japanese culture as well. Another qualm is that some pieces of the writing felt like there was an overuse of thesaurus references.

Special thanks to University of Alabama Press and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest, independent review.

Daydreamers isn’t an easy book to pin down and that’s exactly its point.

Framed as a son translating his late father’s unfinished manuscript, the story slowly unravels into something stranger: a literary ghost story, a fragmented puzzle, a meditation on memory and authorship. The narrator and the author blur. The text questions itself. And at the center is Lena Wu, a woman who may be real, fictional, or just a shape others have projected their stories onto.

At times I got lost in the shifting forms, notes, fragments, interviews, references. But that confusion felt deliberate. This isn’t a polished novel; it’s what’s left behind. A manuscript haunted by its own gaps.

If you’re drawn to metafiction, unreliable narrators, and stories that push against linear storytelling, Daydreamers offers something unique and quietly haunting.

Thank you to University of Alabama Press and NetGalley for the ARC. for letting me be apart of this process.

I received the book as an e-ARC from net galley in return for an honest review.

I didn't find it unputdownable, but it is relatively short book so I didn't have trouble making time to read it either. Some of the formatting is better suited to a two page spread rather than the single page spread that might occur on a kindle or other mobile device, but I mostly found it easy to follow. A little bit floaty, but given that the book is a translation of events that happened in the past the floatiness felt right somehow.

Some of the words seemed a little bit overly academic, but again, if it's a translation of the words of an engineer that's not necessarily out of place. In some places the PoV character was not immediately apparent, but this was usually resolved within a few paragraphs.

Overall the story was interesting, the combination of 'real' memories and speculation on behalf of other characters merging into an ending that still felt a little bit like the main character's day dream.

i liked the writing and the sense of place and time that the writer brought to my mind's eye. I was a bit confused at times by whose point of view was being evoked.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC.

This is a super interesting look at the Chinese literary diaspora in California.

The way the book is written makes it read a bit dream-like.

I'm a little confused after finishing it and will definitely need to sit with my thoughts on it for a while.