Gary Marks has always been a hybrid writer, but Rain Dreams is where he stops justifying the mix and lets it detonate. Romantic impulse, philosophical unease, and street-level absurdity don’t take turns here—they collide, scatter, and keep moving. In earlier novels (The Dance and the Diamond Sky, Orbiting Chaos, From the Farthest Places), Marks circles moral gravity and metaphysics. This time, he hands the wheel to chaos, and rides shotgun.
Rain is everywhere—atmospheric, literal, emotional. Taylor, the novel’s narrator, keeps driving, half-convinced love might be waiting just past the next exit. What he doesn’t know is that Rainy is trying to escape—and that a detective is already on her trail.
The novel opens on a string of clean, disarming comedic beats before tilting hard into danger: stolen cars, lost notebooks, guns fired in motel rooms. Every laugh arrives with the sense that something is about to break.
Taylor narrates like a decent kid, believing that sincerity might still count. Rainy already knows better. She’s relentlessly self-directed, and always several exits ahead.
The novel’s quiet brilliance is that it never mistakes itself for an adventure story. Rainy’s cynicism is brilliant. Her beauty is real. So is her refusal to be caught.
And through it all, the book keeps laughing at itself, and raining, and occasionally dreaming on hilltops, hearts open, with sailboats appearing in an orange sky. Rain Dreamstravels to all those places, in time.
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