Please Welcome Novelist Bruce Hartman

with Bruce Hartman

We are delighted to welcome novelist Bruce Hartman to Omnimystery News today.

Bruce's new tale of madness, music … and murder is The Rules of Dreaming (Swallow Tail Press, May 2013 trade paperback and ebook formats).

We asked Bruce to introduce us to his book and its cast of characters.

— ♦ —

Years ago I imagined a story about a patient in a mental hospital who sits down at the piano in the patient lounge and flawlessly plays a difficult piece of classical music. Although this usually requires years of instruction and practice, the patient's psychiatrist discovers that he has no musical training or experience. So the question I started with is: Where did this music come from? Where does any music come from? Does music come to you as a kind of inspired madness, or does it come from outside the human mind?

Photo provided courtesy of
Bruce Hartman

The Rules of Dreaming takes off from that idea. Hunter Morgan, a 21-year-old schizophrenic with no musical training or experience, performs a fiendishly difficult piece for his young psychiatrist, Dr. Ned Hoffmann, whose life soon begins to spin out of control. Another patient — a beautiful graduate student named Nicole P. — suspects that the psychiatrist is ruled by the fantasies of a poet who's been dead for two hundred years. Meanwhile a blackmailer named Dubin stumbles on the isolated town where the hospital is located and finds enough crimes on its conscience to keep him busy for the rest of his life. As the characters become enmeshed in a world of deception and delusion, of madness and ultimately of evil and death, they begin to focus on the schizophrenic pianist's mother, the opera singer Maria Morgan, who hanged herself seven years earlier on the eve of her debut at the Met. The opera she was rehearsing — Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann — seems to be taking over the lives of her children, the doctors ho treat them and everyone else who crosses their paths.

The female hero, Nicole, is a 28-year-old Irish graduate student in literature at a university in New York City. Following her breakup with an abusive boyfriend, she has moved to Egdon, a small town about two hours northwest of New York, where she combats her anxieties and struggles to find a topic for her dissertation. Fearing that she is losing her mind, she checks into the private mental hospital located nearby, where she is treated by Dr. Ned Hoffmann. Recovering quickly, she is discharged two weeks later, but not before Dr. Hoffmann has secretly fallen in love with her.

Nicole is a beautiful young woman with red hair, emerald eyes and a free spirit who attracts the attention of men, while in her own mind she feels inconspicuous and often on the verge of desperation. She knows she's a little wacky. When she's discharged from the hospital she returns to her dingy garret and types a "To Do List" on her computer:

Bread, milk, eggs, corn flakes.
Pick up dry cleaning.
Find a thesis topic.
Keep from going crazy.

The last item on the list, she realizes, must be her highest priority: Keep from going crazy. She wants to accomplish this in her own way, without any help from the pharmaceutical industry, so she flushes the pills Dr. Hoffmann has given her down the toilet.

Now, she thinks, I'm on my own.

— ♦ —

Bruce Hartman lives with his wife in Philadelphia. He has worked as a pianist, music teacher, bookseller and attorney and has been writing fiction for many years. His first novel, Perfectly Healthy Man Drops Dead, won the Salvo Press Mystery Novel Award and was published in 2008.

To learn more about the author and his work, please visit his website at BruceHartmanBooks.com.

— ♦ —

The Rules of Dreaming
Bruce Hartman

A tale of madness, music — and murder …

A beautiful opera singer hangs herself on the eve of her debut at the Met. Seven years later the opera she was rehearsing — Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann — begins to take over the lives of her two schizophrenic children, the doctors who treat them and everyone else who crosses their paths, until all are enmeshed in a world of deception and delusion, of madness and ultimately of evil and death.

Onto this shadowy stage steps Nicole P., a graduate student who discovers that she too has been assigned a role in the drama. What strange destiny is being worked out in their lives?