While the world is full of doors and hallways, they exist in a world of logical expectation: this is where I’ll go, this is whom I’ll see there, this is what they’ll say. However, a dream is, in a sense, an escape from predicting. Remainders of waking memory spread into farther doors and farther hallways, mazes we might never see beyond our sleep—unless, somehow, they can be rendered in waking methods, such as images or text.

It is not by chance association that author Jesse Ball is well versed in the practice of lucid dreaming. His gift of consciously manipulating the unconscious is a talent quite clearly carried over into his new second novel, The Way Through Doors—a stunning sleep-logic lockbox so incantatory in its telling it can change the frame of where you are.

—Blake Butler