Philip Fracassi

Published by JournalStone Press, 2016

Paperback

103 Pages

***

When a savage earthquake rocks Los Angeles, buildings crumble and highways fall apart. Matthew Calvert, a young family man on the job interview of his life, finds himself at ground zero of the destruction - his building collapses beneath him and he wakes to find himself buried under a mountain of rubble, badly injured, trapped in the dark.

As his injuries worsen with each passing hour, he clings to memories to fight off the fear of impending death, the hope for salvation. Soon, however, the memories turn dark and his terror escalates.

There are things with him in the dark.

Trying desperately to hold onto his sanity, Matthew clings to the barrier between this life and the next, his mind flipping between reality and delusion, before confronting a final horrifying truth:

Sometimes the hallucinations are real.

***

Praise for Fragile Dreams:

"Fragile Dreams is anything but fragile. It's harrowing, all rough edges that can hurt you, like the stuff our hero's trapped in. And claustrophobic as hell..." -- Jack Ketchum

"Fracassi mixes scenes of intense physical drama with deftly-drawn moments from a life lived in the shadow of a heartbreaking absence. Along the way, he never lets the suspense slacken, even as his narrative rockets to its harrowing conclusion." -- John Langan

"Disturbing, frightening, unnerving - Fragile Dreams syphoned me into the mind of a character with such vivid clarity that I felt buried alive." -- Mark Booth, author of The Secret History of the World

"Fracassi...is one of the rising stars in the field of modern horror fiction...Fragile Dreams is a tour-de-force of storytelling, atmosphere and creepiness." -- RisingShadow.net

"Fracassi's linguistic prowess is nothing short of brilliant, his love of language evident in every carefully crafted sentence, every paragraph constructed of some of the most gorgeous, poetic prose I've seen in along time... I had to remind myself to take a breath, so intense was the imagery and the sense of a brooding horror." -- GingerNuts of Horror

"...thanks to the wonderful writing talent and dark imagination of the author, we are guaranteed a suspenseful and terrifying trip." -- This is Horror