Vietnam Veteran and Psychotherapist Thomas Corey Lucas Publishes Novel Written From a 1975 Dream Experiment

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Thomas Corey Lucas has released "detour," a novel built from an unconventional writing experiment he began in 1975, around the same time he was starting a career as a recording artist. According to the author, he set aside plot and theme altogether and let the book take shape from his subconscious, drawing on his reading of C.G. Jung and other writers on consciousness.

The result, per the announcement, is a narrative told by a self-reflexive narrator moving through dream logic, comic misdirection, and cultural satire, populated by images like a philosophizing pig that turns into bacon and glass figures that take themselves apart. The publisher describes it as fiction that deliberately avoids the structures Lucas says he came to reject in contemporary literature.

Lucas’s path to the book runs through more than one life. He volunteered for the draft at eighteen and served in Vietnam, where he received a Combat Infantryman Badge and a Bronze Star. After returning home, he built parallel careers in music and writing, later graduating summa cum laude from Hobart and William Smith Colleges with the college’s creative writing award. He went on to spend twelve years teaching writing at the university level and worked as a psychotherapist in multiple states and in Native American communities, alongside work as a social justice activist.

"I wanted to trust the creative process itself," Lucas said in the announcement, "to let my subconscious speak without the tyranny of premeditated structure, and to discover what emerges when we surrender our critical control to the dream mind."

"detour" is published through Newman Springs Publishing and is available at bookstores and through major online retailers including Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.

Studio CarryOnHarry is curious less about whether the book succeeds as dream logic and more about what a lifetime spanning combat, clinical psychotherapy, and music brings to a novel that was, by design, never outlined.

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