Warner, $6.50, ISBN 0-446-60654-5
Romantic Suspense, 2000

Boy, sometimes I’m glad I’m not living in this author’s stories. Her characters don’t just have problems, they have cartloads and train carriages of them. If these are what count as “emotional intensity”, these endless hand wringing and psychoanalyzing and neuroses running free, count me out.

Watch out cowboys, the Navy SEAL population boom is catching up with you virile chappies! Chase Mattingly is a former Navy SEAL superhero suffering from neuroses that can give a male shrink his first multiple orgasm. He can’t remember what happened in his last diving expedition that resulted in him being crippled, scarred, and mentally twisted. He now has nightmares and hallucinations of scary thingies about that traumatic dive, and he is tempted to use the razor blades.

“I can do better!” his neighbor Calypso Carlson declares. Her Mommy died young, leaving her traumatized. Her daddy is a useless, negligent man who died in a boating accident. Now Cally has a fear of the sea. She clings too hard to her brother and gets mentally hysterical each time he goes out to sea. “The sea will kill you!” she keeps thinking. Oh, and she doesn’t trust men too – remember how useless Daddy was? That’s all men to you. Useless buggers, them all.

I’m not surprised when Cally turns out to be a shrink.

When Cally’s brother and his friend are arrested for the murder of a stranger, Chase and Cally band together to play Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew. Chase starts making advances at her, and Cally predictably shoos him away, and in the meantime, someone tries to kill everybody.

After I Dream has a decently put-together suspense story line, but it also suffers from too much trauma dealt with in a very dull and predictable manner. You know the sort – she screams at him to scram (all men are useless!), he acts patient, she screams even louder for him to get lost, he gets lost, she weeps in self pity, the usual. As much as I try to sympathize with Chase (he’s quite nice and patient), Cally is exasperating because she’s the typical Ally McBeal-type begging for antidepressants.

But I must say the depictions of the sea as both a cruel and kind deity is a nice touch. That, and the suspense, almost saves this one from being a complete melodrama of whiners. Almost.