Sideshow

Soleil Browne is an intelligent and attractive museum librarian who wishes she'd never "volunteered" to participate in one of the more unusual exhibits of a Boston museum. Dreamscape consists of a small, cell-like room in which a person lies sleeping, while the electronic images the subject's brain creates are translated into sights and sounds, projected for all to see. It's a multimedia extravaganza, and if Soleil hadn't been coerced into participating, she would never have imagined herself sleeping on display while hundreds of people stream by - especially when she discovers that Andy McKey, the mastermind behind Dreamscape and the man she once loved, is the one who will be monitoring her dream world. Soon Soleil's unease turns to terror as her dreams relentlessly take her into the life of a young girl born sixty years earlier. "Shoe" Arnett is twelve, an orphan whose face was ruined in an accident, left alone in the harsh world of a Depression-era farm. She doesn't know it yet, but she's in great danger. Shoe is taken in by a kindhearted older woman, one of the few people in town who can see the good beneath the marked face of the girl. But Shoe still can't escape the peril that haunts the small Midwestern town, and the man intent on punishing her for being in the wrong time and the wrong place ... and Soleil may be her only hope of salvation. Soleil finds herself torn between dreading the lab and her terrible need to be there. Tormented in her waking world by her mother's impending death, Soleil is also haunted by worries about "The Sweetheart Strangler," a headline-making killer who is stalking the women of Boston. As the boundaries between nightmare and reality blur, she's also drawn back into her relationship with Andy, the one person she feels she can trust with the terrible burden of her dreams. For Soleil knows that only she can save Shoe, whatever the cost to herself - but only love will save her.