New Book Review: The Dreaming Collection

Title: The Dreaming Collection 

Author: E.C. Myatt

Date: 2026

Quote: "Chasing the fairytale again, are we?"

We are. These are a set of stories about couples for whom a physical attraction led into True Love. Unlike the boxed sets of six romances a month that made Harlequin/Silhouette/Zebra rich in the twentieth century, though, these romances involve people at different stages in life for whom Romantic Love works in unusual ways. In the first story a couple flop into bed, the woman wanting to break an engagement she's sensed will lead to a boring marriage, the man wanting to fight back against a chronic disease...

Achalasia. What's that? The name comes from Greek and means "no relaxation." It's one of those rare gastrointestinal diseases that seems to have become, recently, about ten times as common as it used to be; from something 1 out of 100,000 people have to something 1 out of 10,000 people have. The digestive tract fails to relax so that food can pass down. Government-approved medical sites don't offer an explanation for its cause, suggesting that some sort of genetic predisposition may be involved. Oh right. Glyphosate is known to cause ulceration of the digestive tract more often than it causes spasticity, but it can cause both. In the story Elliot, the character who has achalasia, does not explain his condition; Emma loves him enough to look it up, quietly, without telling us what she learned.

Anyway, Emma finds Elliot so attractive that she flops undeterred by the blood on his clothes and recent surgery wound on his abdomen. They become friends-with-benefits. Emma has an income and doesn't want to seem like a gold-digger. Elliot is rich. After twenty-five years, they get married.

Other variations on what seemed, when I researched the topic, to be the universal male fantasy blur into the "happily ever after" female fantasy in this book. There's a "water person" who lives on and near water and knows it's True Love when the other person, though less obsessed, is excited by skinny-dipping too. There's a couple who bond on a train ride. There's an elderly widow who ventures out into society again and straightaway finds a seccond Romantic Love. 

All of these romantic dreams are oh-so-very British (although some of them involve travel to Europe) and are written with just enough attention to body parts to make clear when the male fantasy--feel, flop, make babies, repeat--is being enacted. Or, in Southern Baptist dialect, the Ten Commandments are being broken. In real life this behavior would lead to guilt, buyers' remorse, pregnancy panics and probably bitter break-ups. In these stories it leads to long-term Romantic Love.

If stories where breaking the Ten Commandments is rewarded, rather than punished, appeal to you then you must have this anthology. It's a fantasy, like Santa Claus. If you remember that it wouldn't work in real life, but the fantasy gets you into the mood to welcome your husband home during the hours before the children come home, I say blessed be.