The word oneiric has appeared in six articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 2 in the book review “Daniel Clowes Dreams of the Apocalypse” by Junot Díaz:
If, as the poet Nayyirah Waheed writes, our mothers are our first country, then for Monica it’s a country whose calamities she has never gotten over. Unwilling (or unable) to form real attachments, bereft of all past and without much of a future, a 40-something Monica finally resolves to locate her mother and uncover the truth of her abandonment — and, in the process, discover who her father was.
Because this is a Clowes story, Monica’s quest for origins — for a stable self — takes her on strange and twisting paths. She traces her mother through the decayed revenants of the counterculture, ending up at a bizarre cult whose leader might or might not be her father. There are oneiric interludes: In one, Johnny is a hard-boiled private detective in a city that’s being engulfed by a mysterious disaster; in another, a young man saves his hometown from a supernatural invasion only to be rewarded in the worst way possible. The Gothic, noir, war comics, even a glimpse of William Hogarth — all appear, and all are made very weird indeed.
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