Dreamdogs

Joint winner of the 2021 Bath Children’s Novel Award

“Scary and exciting and moving and highly original.”
– Sam Copeland, 2021 Bath Children’s Novel Award Judge, Director RCW Literary Agency

“Dreamdogs is about five kids and their dogs who have 24 hours to save everyone in their villages from a sleeping sickness. It’s a pageturner with a sinister atmosphere, real sense of mystery and was thrilling to read.”
– 2021 Bath Children’s Novel Award Junior Judges’ summary

Dreamdogs is a contemporary technological thriller set in a rural moorland community.

Age Group: Middle Grade

“Fern!  Fern, no, that hurts!”

The other dogs were gone.  There was only Bell and Fern and the horror of betrayal as she fought to free herself from the red dog’s slavering grip.  But no, no, they weren’t alone – as she twisted in pain she saw Fern doubling and feathering like something in a hall of mirrors, each limb haunted by reflections in green, yellow, silver, blue as if in her madness she was all the dogs, all five of them snarling as one… and Bell could feel it in herself as well, fourfold echoes of her own desperate movements, lending her weight and strength.  But it changed nothing.  Blood poured from her wrist, shockingly red, excruciating.  She might lose her fingers if Fern didn’t let go.  She might bleed to death.

All at once it came to her:  This is a nightmare.  I’m having one, at last.

There’s a plague of nightmares across the Moor and no-one knows why, five villages along one lonely road afflicted with nightly terrors – all except twelve-year-old Bell Haynes.  In Bell’s dreams a strange blood-red dog named Fern walks beside her, keeping her safe.  Worried for her family and ostracised at school, Bell takes comfort in the bleakness and beauty of the Moor – until one fateful morning when she has her first nightmare and finds to her horror that she cannot wake her family.

Chased across the Moor by sinister armed men, Bell finds four unexpected allies – four more children, each from another ‘nightmare village’, likewise immune to nightmares.  Now all five villages are locked in unbreakable sleep; as they evade pursuit, hiding in moorland caves and ruins, the children discover a unique and powerful bond and must brave a surreal dreamscape to end the cruel, bizarre experiment.