Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It was once argued that the future we could foresee, could never actually happen; that the dystopia was all the dream of the anarchist, the radical over thinker, or the doom-monger, the ones who delight in declaring bad news in the hope that they will be seen as bearers of prophecy when their predictions come to bear fruit.
The future is now, and we have paid for our ego, our belief, the hope, that the world will function as it always has, that humanity’s demands have not tipped the balance of a fragile entity and sent it on a collision course with our lives, with our very existence.
We stand on a precipice, the earth cracking underneath us, and yet there will always be one person who rises in such times, and who is willing to anything to offer the country, the world up in exchange for power and control. Never mind the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there is a fifth, one not mentioned in scripture or relics of holy thought, this horseman comes in the shape of opportunistic dominion, the seizing of the moment when all else has gone to Hell, there is still money to be made, and manipulation of the masses to be enforced.
In A J Reid’s near future apocalyptic novel, The Horseman’s Dream, the sense of dread is one of consuming and unnerving possibility, for what the writer has brought to the reader’s attention is not only a possible outcome of a Britain almost completely submerged by water, but that what remains of the land, the islands, parts of the Highlands, the greater conurbations of Yorkshire and the mountainous regions of Wales, is ruled over by a totalitarian state with access to a device that will bring certain change, a certain end to everything that had been taken for granted.
The point of such books is not to make wild statements and push the agenda of the doom merchant, but to subtly produce a tale which is likely, has all the possibility of actually happening, and as Britain has sunk beneath the flood waves, the fact that there are still wars happening in far flung places such as Syria, owes more to the genius of George Orwell, the belief that dystopia is only a moment away, driven by one such terrible and dramatic reason.
A J Reid combines passion and a driving narrative onwards, interweaving our own sense of punishment with that of the state as it finds ways to entertain the masses whilst keeping control, he places demanding characters such as the drunken Reverend McCole into the limelight, to be repulsed and to sympathise with in a fashion that is beguiling, and urges the reader to think, to acknowledge in their mind and heart that such a scenario is not only possible, but can happen in the blink of an eye.
A tale that insists on being read, A J Reid’s The Horseman’s Dream is not fantasy, it is reality waiting to happen.
Ian D. Hall