ight-year-old Horty Bluett lives with a monstrous local politico named Armand Bluett, who adopted him for the publicity value but turned abusive after losing the election anyway. Horty is cruelly mistreated by Armand; his only consolations are his
unnaturally strong bond with his toy jack-in-the-box, Junky, and his more understandable budding love for Kay Hallowell, the pretty girl next door.
Then Horty is discovered under the schoolyard bleachers eating ants, a habit he has hidden for some time. The enraged Armand smashes Junky, which causes Horty real physical pain. Armand also slams a closet door shut on Horty’s hand, severing three fingers. Horty bids a hasty farewell to Kay and runs away, taking the smashed Junky with him. He quickly falls in with a traveling carny, whose freaks are so touched by his story that they elect to take him in. A beautiful lady midget named Zena takes charge of him, carefully disguising him as another girl midget to fool the carny’s monstrous owner, Pierre Monetre.
A disgraced ex-doctor who hates humanity and would destroy it if he could, Monetre has discovered an intelligent alien life form living in great numbers on Earth. It takes the form of intelligent jewels capable of creating copies of terrestrial plants and animals. The jewels make these copies while dreaming, which is why so many are distorted in unpredictable ways; the flawed copies account for many, though certainly not all, of the apparent genetic mutations that populate freak shows like Monetre’s. Monetre, who has already learned enough to seed plague and suffering in the carny’s wake, believes that commanding the jewels will provide him with the means to create a disease that will wipe out all of mankind.
Zena, who knows of Monetre’s plans, has recognized Horty as the key to the doctor’s insane ambitions. But Horty is also the key to stopping him ... as long as Monetre doesn’t notice that the supposed girl’s fingers have grown back.
Love saves the world, again
Though its many admirers would no doubt cringe to hear it described in this way, The Dreaming Jewels can be read as a superhero story. After all, it has both a mad doctor plotting to destroy the world and a half-human, half-alien boy whose unearthly abilities may provide the only key to stopping him. The characterizations even possess some of the limited depth attributed to superhero comics of Sturgeon’s era; Monetre, nicknamed Maneater, is so single-mindedly evil he achieves operatic scale with his villainy, but Bluett is just a nasty cartoon, so awful in every way that he seems a precursor to the oafish stepfather more recently seen bedeviling Harry Potter.
But driven as it is by Horty’s destiny to oppose the grand machinations of Monetre and the more tawdry villainies of Bluett, The Dreaming Jewels is nevertheless first and foremost a story about love. Horty may not be, strictly speaking, human, but he's still a decent kid with decent instincts, whom self-appointed guardian Zena raises to respect the life that Monetre wants to destroy. It's a calculated form of love, in that Zena shapes it to form Horty into the kind of adult she needs him to be, but it’s genuine love all the same.
Sturgeon, who was of course one of the great giants of science fiction and fantasy, wrote only a handful of novels. One of those, More Than Human, is an all-time classic of the form. Another, Some of Your Blood, is one of the all-time great twisted love stories. The Dreaming Jewels is not quite in the class of either; sorry to say, it simply has not aged as well. But it is still a heartfelt fable with an engaging love story, containing one of the most imaginative alien life forms in science fiction history, and--several times a chapter--deft little bits of description elegant enough to make the reader want to read them again immediately.
