An endless Friday night in deadest, darkest winter is the arbitrary setting for I WAKE UP DREAMING: The Legendary and the Lost. The oddly compelling nightmare prose--terse and remorseless--that comprises this book originally spilled out of the pages of TV Guide, America's leading roadmap to the middle-of-the-night detours and byways of oru semi-waking lives.

Subterranean haiku for the Nuclear Generation?

This surreal mix of accidental poetry and lurid sensationalism may now be seen as the deep and vast emptiness that is the emotional ground zero for film noir: doom, depravity and the overwhelming futility of life itself, sometimes told in fewer than a dozen impossibly chosen words.

Thousands of descriptions of B films and television episodes have been selected and arranged for maximum morbid impact. Some of the least recognizable denizens of Hollywood's Poverty Row rub shoulders with neglected icons of the half-remembered past; a haunted parade of snow-tinged ghosts and a graphically unforgiving paean to the unrelenting power of suggestion.