Dreamland

The headlines are calling it the "summer of exsanguination" in LA—girls are being murdered, the Santa Ana winds are blowing a strange energy into the city, and all signs point to fire season.

More pressing for Anya Morris, though, is the drudgery of living at home, working part time at the family store, and contending with her mother's disdain for the acting career Anya knows she's destined for but that feels more impossible by the day.

It’s in this suffocating late summer heat that Anya receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, an invitation to work for the de Witt family, one of LA’s most influential film dynasties. Soon, she’s spending her days and nights at their strange villa high in the Hollywood Hills, where she meets Jude, a recluse who is both the family’s heir apparent and its most closely guarded secret.

There’s a magnetism to Jude that Anya cannot resist, despite warning signs that scream like sirens in the night. Because the villa holds generations of bloodstained history, and an occult family curse may even live within its walls—or within Jude himself. When Anya comes face to face with a devil of her own, she’ll learn just how far she’s willing to go to get everything she’s ever wanted.

This discussion guide was shared and sponsored in partnership with Tor Books/Tor Publishing Group.

Book club questions for Dreamland by Olivie Blake

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

Dreamland begins with a director’s note that includes these instructions: “Play love as if it is delusion. Play it earnestly. Play it doomed. … Love as in helplessness; love as in sickness; a viral, fever pitch. A very real and propulsive spell. Love as in escape.” How do these descriptions reflect Anya and Jude’s experience with love?

When you met Jude in “0008 Awake,” what were your hunches about the nature of his condition?

Despite red flags, Anya accepts the high-paying job offer from Emmanuelle, who continually dangles the prospect of being cast in a great part. Have you ever wanted something so badly that you were willing to take extreme risks to achieve it?

We learn the ancestral stories of both Jude and Anya. How is Anya influenced by the legacies of her immigrant heritage and the women who raised her? How does Jude’s origin story reflect the real-life tragedies of families destroyed by selfishness and jealousy?

How does the environment of Anya’s apartment complex contrast with the setting of the de Witt villa? What does this suggest about expectations and reality when it comes to social mobility, immigration, and wealth?

Discuss Los Angeles as a character in the novel, echoed in the title Dreamland. From the weather and the architecture to the storied history, how does the setting influence the cast of characters in Dreamland? How does the novel approach the city of Los Angeles as a figure caught between the threatened film industry and the burgeoning tech industry?

“You have a devil on your back,” Tita Linda tells Anya. What do you think the novel suggests about the nature of evil?

How did you react to the novel’s shifting points of view?

During the climactic scenes in chapter 22, “When All Is Said and Done It Always Ends in Flames,” what did you discover about the nature of the de Witt family’s shared fate? What was William de Witt’s ultimate vulnerability—and Anya’s ultimate strength?

How does Dreamland enhance the kaleidoscopic experience of the human psyche that you have enjoyed in Olivie Blake’s previous fiction?

Dreamland Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Dreamland discussion questions

“A gothic masterpiece.”—Alix E Harrow, New York Times bestselling author of Starling House

“Thrilling and subversive.”—Alexis Henderson, author of An Academy for Liars

“An intoxicating, Hollywood gothic.”—Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Lucky Day

“A dizzying and atmospheric fever dream of a novel.”—Monika Kim, award-winning author of The Eyes Are the Best Part