ISBN: 979-8-950930-05-8
Rain Dreams: A Comic Adventure Novella by Gary Marks
Novella. Author: Gary Marks
2012
Genre: Voice-driven literary fiction
Sub-Genre: Comic adventure / existential drift
Two adventurers attempt to escape their small town. Only the rain, the past, and an ex-cop relentlessly tracking them down, can stop them.
Read Rain Dreams:
A Rain-Soaked Road Trip
In this absurd but tender comedic novella, nineteen-year-old Taylor Morrison lives in a small town where very little happens. He spends his days wondering if life has somehow forgotten to begin. One day he meets Rainy Robinson, a sharp-tongued runaway with a notebook full of secrets and a talent for turning every simple situation into part of her ultimate plan.
What follows is a rain-soaked road trip involving gold coins, cheap motels, abandoned dreams, and Uncle Jimmy—a former police officer, now a failed detective, and the enthusiastic carrier of loaded firearms, who refuses to let Rainy out of his sight.
He has his reasons. So does Rainy's mother, who hired him. It isn't all about money exactly. Okay, it's all about money.
The farther Taylor follows Rainy’s attempt to escape, the less certain he becomes about where they're going, what they're doing, or why he keeps saying yes.
Yet somewhere between arguments, improbable coincidences, more rain, and plans that collapse into nightmares, he discovers that some people are worth following, and trying to hold on to.
This quirky comedy—that Taylor hopes will become a love story—quickly becomes anything but. He has an adventure, which he later calls a quest. He is temporarily kidnapped. He witnesses stray bullets fired at paintings of fruit. And he drives through days of rain without a clue where he's going—because love sometimes makes us do crazy things.
Pure Dayz Magazine: “Review of Rain Dreams by Gary Marks: Laughing as the Rain Falls,” February 2026
“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 Dreams travels to all those places, in time.”