Dreamland Court: A Novel

Author: Dale Herd Publisher: City Point Press (2022) Just out of prison, Johnny Dalton returns home to find his wife Jackie, the mother of his two small children, passionately involved with one of his good friends.Doing everything in his power to win her back, Johnny blunders his way through one criminal enterprise after another. When the cops pick him up for being the only adult present at a wild teenage party, he’s sent back to jail.The strange thing is, as far as Jackie is concerned, Johnny’s maneuvers actually work.Reminiscent of the pathos in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the comedy of John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Dale Herd focuses his astute gaze on lives that are ordinarily invisible, while turning the conventional love story on its head.“No one writes American better than Dale Herd. His writing is like some bastard offspring of a liaison between Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion—unflinching and streetwise as Bukowski, but with Joan Didion ’s unfaili