Title: In Dreams and other stories
Author: Andrew Leggett
Written: 2026
Pages: 211
Structure: A novel in 24 chapters, plus seven short stories
Set in inner-city Brisbane, In Dreams is both beautiful and deeply unsettling. It combines lyrical poetry with scenes of shocking violence, all wrapped in an atmosphere of gathering dread.
Leggett presents familiar Brisbane locations as the backdrop for a psychological thriller. Neurologist and poet, Garrick Willis works at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, lives in an apartment on Dornoch Terrace at Highgate Hill, and regularly commutes by rail to Logan for psychiatric consultations. His girlfriend Jade lives in Kangaroo point and becomes entangled with a seedy, drug dealing bass guitar player who haunts the strip clubs and bars around Brunswick Street in Fortitude valley.
Somehow he made it up past the Laundromat on the corner of Harcourt and Brunswick Streets, crossed the road, jumped the gate and through the main entrance. He charged down the poorly lit corridor of the old boarding house. A termite-infested staircase with a broken bannister and a rift in the middle led to the upper level on the left, just inside the entrance.
The Brisbane of this novel is recognisable, but distorted through anxiety, trauma and foreboding. Ordinary places become sinister and dreamlike.
Garrick is haunted by a series of premonitory dreams that seem to foretell disaster for both himself and those he cares about, though he is powerless to prevent it. These dreams develop their own parallel narrative alongside the main plot, creating a persistent sense of doom, much like the ominous score of a psychological thriller.
Garrick-in-the-dream blinked… he could make out a figure advancing towards him… ‘Turn, Garrick Willis,’ she commanded in that same brown voice. ‘You are too quick to forget. A friend in trouble is spurned too soon. You readily embrace the new, but with the gift, remember, something old with something new, and something tinged with a touch of blue. Death, too soon, will follow. Go now, or death will come, with you too late.’
Set against this darkness is Garrick’s moving poetry. He composes a sonnet for a woman he meets in a cafe, performs in a slam-haiku competition in a Valley nightclub, and writes a haunting elegy for a friend killed in a West End arson attack.
…After the fire
that burned out the salon
my hairdresser’s eyes
were blackened windows
to a shut down soul
still open for business
but closed to kindness.
Woven through the novel are several clever parallels to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Like Dostoyevsky’s novel, In Dreams begins with a railway journey and includes an epileptic character named Myshkin. In both stories, the protagonist is a fundamentally decent man attempting to navigate a corrupt and damaged world. Garrick is torn between two women, including one regarded as “fallen,” and suffers greatly through the selfishness and cruelty of others.
Andrew Leggett is an associate professor whose research has focused on psychiatry and psychotherapy, and that expertise gives the novel much of its psychological authenticity. He understands epilepsy, emotional trauma and the subtle ways people break under pressure.
That authenticity is what makes the novel so powerful. Leggett leads us not only through recognisable physical settings, but through believable emotional and psychological terrain. He writes with sensitivity and intelligence, even while confronting the reader with brutality and despair.
This is not a novel for the faint-hearted. It contains sexual violence, gore and murder. Yet despite its darkness, there is real beauty here too. The characters feel authentic. The locations feel lived-in. The tragedy feels painfully human.
I’m glad I read it, and thoroughly recommend it.