A Man Lies Dreaming

How do you make sense of the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of so many people for the sole fact of belonging to a different tribe? World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar's (Osama) answer is to create a world of his own and place Adolf Hitler smack dab in the middle of it. The Communists win in Germany in 1933 and Hitler flees. In 1939, now named Wolf, he's a none-too-successful private eye operating out of a rundown office in a neighborhood populated by losers and whores in London. Oswald Mosley's fascist Blackshirts roam the streets terrorizing people: Mosley is about to be elected prime minister. Then a beautiful woman approaches the failed führer and asks him to locate her missing sister. Mosley wants Wolf to find out who's behind assassination attempts against him. Meanwhile, in Wolf's neighborhood, someone is killing prostitutes. Elsewhere, in Auschwitz, Shomer dreams, talks to the dead, anything to numb his thinking of his own loss. The two narratives merge in a Chandler-esque mystery, which is also a lurid S&M thriller and a jarring tale of a grim, gray alternative world.