Agents of Dreamland

Agents of Dreamland is a novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan, the first book of their Tinfoil Dossier trilogy. It follows two agents from rival occult intelligence agencies as they investigate a cult being used by the Fungi from Yuggoth (from H. P. Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness") to instigate a fungal apocalypse.

Organizations[]

Albany: A secret intelligence agency, said to be all about "hiding the damage". So called because its headquarters are in Albany, New York, in the subbasement of the Erastus Corning Tower, but it has an extensive underground facility at Groom Lake, Nevada, in the military base known as Area 51. Also known as Dreamland. Its agents include the Signalman, Vance, and Jack Dunaway.
Y: Referred to as Barbican Estate, or as London. A British organization with offices in Dubai. Jack Dunaway complains they "spent the last hundred years keeping us in the dark." The Signalman admires its lack of "skeptical, rationalist mumbo jumbo". The agent we meet is Immaculata Sexton.
Moonlight Ranch: A cult on the shore of the Salton Sea in California. They use alien spores and messages sent via TV snow to turn themselves into the seeds of a fungal apocalypse.

Characters[]

The Signalman: An agent of Albany and an alcoholic. Born in 1960, he is 55 at the time of the story but looks at least ten years older. Gets his nickname from the silver railroad-style pocketwatch he carries. Known as "the one who never flinched". Has an apartment in the Santa Monica Hills.
Immacolata Sexton: An agent of Y. The Signalman refers to her as a "ghoul dressed up like a woman". She is active for well over a century, and experiences past, present, and future simultaneously.
Jack Dunaway: A hated colleague of the Signalman, 40 years old. He was recruited out of MIT. Recognizable by his "ferrety eyes and crooked nose, the thin lips and jutting chin".
Agent Vance: Another colleague of the Signalman. Becomes infected with the alien fungus seven days after exposure.
Drew Standish: The leader of the Moonlight Ranch cult. He is an agent of the Fungi from Yuggoth.
Madeline Nightlinger: Standish's partner in the cult, "a former Facebook executive who’d been missing since January 2013."
Chloe Stringfellow: A former heroin addict recruited into Standish's cult when he finds her in an alley in Westmont, California. Thinks of herself as Standish's favorite. She kills the other cult members with a shotgun out of jealousy that they were taken by the fungus before she was.

Timeline[]

352 B.C.: The Black Book placed in a tomb in Persia.
1839: Eli Davenport writes a monograph on the folklore of the White and Green mountains that includes oral traditions of the Fungi from Yuggoth.
1859: Alfred Russel Wallace identifies the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis in Brazil.
1888: The Signalman's watch is manufactured.
November 1927: Immaculata Sexton dissects a Fungus from Yuggoth in Townsend, Vermont.
1934: James Whale makes The Star Maiden. Five weeks later, the lead actress dies in an automobile accident.
1935: The actor who plays the alchemist in The Star Maiden dies of a morphine overdose after his affair with a much younger male screenwriter becomes common knowledge.
1936: The lead actor of The Star Maiden leaves acting and writes two science fiction novels.
1946: The Star Maiden actor found dead of a heart attack.
1960: The Signalman born.
August 17, 1968: As an eight-year-old boy, the Signalman watches The Star Maiden on late-night TV.
1971: Three astronomers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, all searching for a hypothetical Planet X beyond Pluto, dream of a cloud that swallows the Earth. One calls the monstrous cloud as Jörmungandr.
1975: The Moonlight Ranch television manufactured by Zenith.
1978: Apple Records sues Apple Computer, the first of several lawsuits between now and 2006.
February 13, 1979: Sexton investigates the crash of a spacecraft from Yuggoth at the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island.
1995: The last time the Signalman flies until 2015.
May 6, 1996: Chloe Stringfellow born.
October 12, 1999: Barbican Estates sends a report on Drew Standish to its offices in Dubai.
2005: The Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act mandates transition away from analog television.
2009: Standish reads in the Black Book of the monstrous space cloud.
2013: The Great Digital Switchover is implemented to prevent the dissemination of knowledge through static.
January 2013: Madeline Nightlinger, Facebook executive, goes missing.
June 28, 2015: “It’s so close now,” Standish tells his followers. “You really have no notion how delightful it will be."
June 29, 2015: Stringfellow stands on the roof of the Moonlight Ranch and looks at the Chocolate Mountains.
July 2, 2015: Standish promises his followers they are the Children of the Next Level. He tells Stringfellow she is "more ready than you can imagine."
July 3, 2015: Standish and Nightlinger leave the Moonlight Ranch before dawn. The Signalman later enters the house with Agent Vance and finds 13 infected corpses and Chloe Stringfellow.
July 4, 2015: NASA loses touch with the New Horizons space probe for an hour and 21 minutes.
July 5, 2015: Standish and Nightlinger have their brains removed and placed in cylinders.
July 9, 2015: The Signalman meets Sexton in a Winslow, Arizona, diner to exchange information.
July 10, 2015: The Signalman reads Sexton's dossier. Later, on a train back to Los Angeles, Jack Dunaway tells him that he's needed at Groom Lake--and that Vance is infected.
July 11, 2015: The Signalman talks to what's left of Stringfellow.
2032: Los Angeles largely destroyed by earthquake.
2043: The Pan-Asian Alliance drops nuclear bombs on South India in an effort to hold back the fungal plague. The Earth-Yuggoth Cooperative assassinates the titular head of the United States and burns what's left of Washington.

Publication History[]

First released by Tor.com in February 2017, Agents of Dreamland has since been issued in Spanish- and German-language editions, as well as in an audiobook format. It was included in the Tor omnibus Reimagining Lovecraft.

Gallery[]

External Link[]

Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlin R. Kiernan review at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein