Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

This story is written partly in reaction to H. P. Lovecraft's story The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath but also his other, shorter Dream Cycle stories (Celephaïs, The Silver Key, The Cats of Ulthar) which avoid the cosmic horror he is best known for, yet still feature gods of vast power in the dream realm and other beings which can pose mortal peril. So when the protagonist is sent off on a quest in the opposite direction, going from the dream world to the mysterious waking world there is plenty of suspense to undergo along the way. There isn't so much of a Big Bad to go up against though, at least not in the foreground of the story. Randolph Carter from the Lovecraft stories puts in an appearance many years after his youth, giving the middle-aged Vellit Boe a good chance to reflect more deeply on the experience of aging and the tension between settling down and exploring, and an unnamed cat hearkens back to the time and space traveling cat stories in a neat way too. The quest is a picaresque tale with stretches where side characters are sketched out, play out some part, and then are never seen again, in keeping with the model set forth by the Dream Cycle stories. The author made a good show of worldbuilding the dream world in what I thought was a satisfying way, which I didn't fully realize until the last quarter of the book where Vellit reaches the other side and experiences a multitude of psychic shocks at how strange, yet oddly familiar, it felt to her. For me the story really had a satisfying payoff, open-ended as it was as to the inciting plot action and whether it was resolved or not, which I really did not see coming.