The Dream Sequence

Amnesia is tricky business. Forget everything, and anything that strikes you as familiar can feel like an unlocked door. Anyone could be a friend, anyone could be an enemy.

Such is the dilemma in which Kate Hunter’s New York protagonist finds herself: Memoryless and with no sense of where to begin to piece things together, she must trust and mistrust everyone. A man calls her and asks if they’re still meeting at a coffeehouse near her apartment. Once they meet, this presumed friend—now a stranger—tells her that someone has placed a curse on her and if she doesn’t find a cure soon, she’ll die. He gives her the address of a witch doctor in Brooklyn who may be able to help.

Of course, Brooklyn witch doctors aren’t the most trustworthy chaps, and the doc begins leading her down a tortuous path, telling her that he’s seen another cursed woman with memory problems, and has given her drugs to discover who has cursed her. He only tells the protagonist a piece of the story at each of her visits, and she must return each day to hear more. Should she solve the riddle he’s spinning, she may be able to save herself.

Hunter is striving for a sort of Paul Auster–esque creep factor—a spiraling mystery that plays out largely in the head of the narrator. She doesn’t quite achieve the level of complexity Auster hits on so easily, but she has crafted a bizarre tale that gains particular force when her protagonist attempts to reconstruct her memory from what she sees in her dreams—as unreliable a guide as could be imagined. The prose is a shade too purple at points, but what Hunter lacks in linguistic skill she makes up for in crafting a tight quandary.

Amnesia, bereft of any sense of who is good or bad or right or wrong, has created a moral vacuum in the life of the protagonist, one that’s impossible for her to fill.—Jonathan Messinger