Alas, Dreamland: A Love Triangle, a Lion and the Night Coney Island Burned

Alas, Dreamland is the novel I've spent the most time inside. It's set at Dreamland, the Coney Island park that opened in 1904 and burned to the ground on May 27, 1911, and it follows three people who work there. The whole current draft is up, and you can read it here. This is the story behind it: what it is, how it changed, and what's still loose.

What it's about

Minnie Thompson is a nurse in Dr. Martin Couney's incubator exhibit. That part is real history. Couney kept premature babies alive in glass incubators at the amusement park and charged the public a quarter to watch, which paid for the care hospitals wouldn't give. Minnie is engaged to George Dressler, a German lion tamer with a black-maned lion named Caesar who refuses to be anybody's act. Then James Harris shows up to keep the park's wiring alive, carrying his dead brother's stopped pocket watch and a past he isn't talking about.

That's the triangle. George is the man she's built a life with. James is the one who sees what she sees. The book runs seven seasons, from opening night to the fire, and the park falls apart right alongside the people in it: storms, winter repairs, money trouble, a rival park drawing the crowds, a lion who finally collects.

The history does a lot of the work. Dreamland really did run on a million light bulbs. There really was a ride called Hell Gate, and that's where the real fire started. And George owes a debt to Captain Jack Bonavita, a real lion tamer at Dreamland who lost an arm to one of his lions.

The draft I threw out

The first full draft wasn't this book. Somewhere in the planning it turned into a disaster-prevention story: James as a safety crusader organizing the workers to head off the fire, with the romance pushed to the edges. It ran about 125,000 words, it was complete, and it was the wrong novel.

What I'd actually had in mind went back to an old outline, where the lion tamer and the haunted newcomer had different names but the shape was clear. Minnie is already with George when the story opens. James is the one who disrupts it. The fire isn't a problem to solve. It's the night everybody finds out who they are.

So I shelved the thriller whole and started over with the triangle at the center. None of that draft is on the site. It's a different book that happens to share a cast.

How the current draft changed

The rewrite had its own first draft, and only a few chapters of it survive. They're posted as the earlier version on the chapters where they apply, and they show the biggest change.

In that first pass, George was already one-armed on opening night in 1904. It made him a striking figure in the ring, but it left him nowhere to fall. In the current draft he starts with both arms and his whole reputation, and Caesar takes the right arm in 1906. That gives him a real descent: the drinking, the jealousy, the long slide, and then the fire as the one chance he gets to be the man he thinks he is.

The frame changed too. The book now opens with an archivist finding Minnie's journals in a flooded basement in Bay Ridge, then cuts straight to the fire, with George and James fighting in the mud while the incubator building starts to crack. From there it goes back to 1904 and walks forward. The old ending was a scene in Miami Beach, thirty years on. The new one closes the frame instead, with the historian putting down the last journal.

The central image is prematurity: babies born too soon, a park built too fast, a love that arrives at the wrong time. In some chapters it's still laid on too thick. I've already pulled it back in a few, and more of that is coming.

Note

Four short interludes step away from the triangle: the night nurse Elizabeth, Dr. Couney presenting to a room of doctors who don't want to hear him, Charlie on his last maintenance rounds, and Richardson, the owner, counting what he owes.

What isn't finished

Plenty, honestly.

• Nine interior passages for Minnie, James and George are written but not yet worked into the chapters they belong to. They're not on the site.
• Three extra chapters sit outside the reading order: George getting sober, George and James building something together, and Couney alone with a diagnosis he gave himself. They need a home, or they need to go.
• The calendar wobbles. A few chapters jump a year ahead and back again, and one early chapter still describes George as one-armed two years before Caesar takes the arm.
• Small facts need deciding. How many babies come out of the fire? The book says twelve, the real record says six. What's James's real surname, and when do we learn it?

The book is complete, beginning to end, but it isn't done. When those pieces land, the chapters here will get updated and the version you're reading now will slide into the "previous" slot.