Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian is a document of disaster and recovery. The third volume in the Ghosts Trilogy, it joins Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist and Chasing the Last Whale, a fictional black comedy about love and suicide in contemporary wartime America.
Like its two companion titles, Hallucinabulia explores the theme of overcoming a deeply traumatic past by transforming anger over loss into gratitude for what once was. Plagued by chronic nightmares until an incurable illness finally allowed him to achieve happiness, Thomas Wictor published this very private record in order to bear witness, banish, and entertain. The healing power of laughter is again demonstrated and affirmed.
Wictor’s near-perfect recall allowed him to capture some of the most off-kilter, frightening, strange, and funny imagery that a twisted imagination could ever devise. The diary—divided into twelve chapters organized by subject matter—provides context to the memoir and the novel by presenting the nocturnal battles the author fought with his demons, as well as the salvation that his angels conferred. Straight from Wictor’s subconscious, the dialog, bizarre scenery, and outlandish situations are preserved in the form of intricately detailed short stories.
The characters introduced in Ghosts and Ballyhoo and romanticized in Chasing the Last Whale are finally set free in Hallucinabulia, being no longer bound by law, nature, or even reality. The result is a book that travels an arc from incomprehensibly brutal to indestructibly optimistic, as intense evil gives way to infinite beauty and good.
