Disturb Not the Dream by Paula Trachtman (1981): Don't Try to Take My Knife Away

The only novel by author and teacher Paula Trachtman (1931-2019), 1981's Disturb Not the Dream (Ballantine paperback, July 1982) is middle-of-the-road mainstream bestseller pop fiction, competently written, with some mild Gothic atmosphere, and lots of cheap thrills. Although Trachtman's prose veers at times into heightened purple prose, she keeps the narrative at pace with only a few slowdowns. A family saga set in a ritzy village in Long Island's Southampton, based around a Victorian home estate called Mulberry... and the horrific things that happened there.

This is one of the least interesting paperback covers I've ever seen (which probably helped sell some copies) and its bland, generic back-cover copy seems to promise a by-the-numbers read. Shame the cover "art" is so uninspired, as several scenes within are gruesome and inventive enough to have provided some good lurid imagery for it. I mean, this book promises trash:

Yikes!

Admitted: I read a fair amount on autopilot; there's a lot going on but it's all rather dated: prologue with horrific domestic murders ("Eat it! Eat it, whore!"), then moving on to to early 20th century chapters, then after that to the modern Seventies. Part One of the novel centers on the unlikely, and quite dysfunctional, marriage of homely Evalynn Ambrose and rakish Evan Desmond; Part Two introduces the Bradleys, quite dysfunctional in their own way. As sister says to brother early on, "Going to jerk off, sonny-boy?" Oh god, no, please no. My least favorite "horror" trope of the era, incest. And Trachtman is determined to get as much cheap shock value from it as she can, regaling us with an all-too-topical scene of sex parties ("the Kinky Klique," it's called) and filmed blackmail...

                                                                                    Crown hardcover, 1981

I gave up and skipped to the end, and was not surprised by what I found. A final recursiveness, a foregone conclusion, and ending from the beginning. Any experienced reader of horror will know the beats and the payoff. But, like a lot of vintage horror, if a reader was barely a teen, then yes, the climax will be a good, serious shock. To be fair, I did pick the book back up and read the parts I'd skipped, and while nothing was surprising, I do think Trachtman wrapped up her tale in a fair, if not terribly unique, manner.

Overall, despite the general readability and graphic violence and illicit sex, it's all tiresome stuff. Typical affairs and locales, fodder for the unsophisticated reader who desires to read only what is already known from daytime tv and commercials for domestic products like coffee and laundry detergent (i.e., a soap opera!). References to high fashion and culture for folks who went to college. Boring-ass nuns and Catholic nonsense such as found in hohum "horror" like The Sentinel and John Saul.

Paula Trachtman (pictured above in 1981) wrote no any other novels, but apparently Disturb Not sold like half a mil in paperback, so not bad for a one-off piece of commercial product. This is the kind of midlist paperback that did the horror genre no favors, and there is even not one hint of real "horror" in it, not in the lineal sense of Poe, Blackwood, HPL, Matheson, Jackson, and so on and on. I'd link it more to imitation Gothic; and going by some online reviews, the subject matter of Dream is akin to the early novels of V.C. Andrews, whom I've still not read even after years of writing this blog. (Dare I...?)

Got to wondering if Trachtman had read some Gothics and horror novels of the Seventies and thought to herself, I can do better, or at least as good as, that! Common motivation, no? Plus in those days publishers were clamoring for these tales, so who can blame her, if that's the case? And after a quick Googling, I found an interview with her from 2019 in which she said: "One evening I read a best selling mystery novel, threw it across the room and told my husband it was stupid and that I could do better. ‘So do it,’ said he. So I did." Man, I just knew it!

Trachtman goes on, revealing more that my suspicions were true, and the book was conceived as market fodder: "I read Publisher’s Weekly for months and learned that successful commercial fiction often had 3 elements: horror, sex, and violence." This is the same formula John Saul (and his silent writing partner) used to come up with his unending bestsellers. I mean, sure, everybody wants to make money, and Trachtman does say Disturb Not the Dream is basically "a potato chip book." So, marks for honesty, but for true real horror fiction: none.