Bernie Robertson’s nightmares are more than images. In dreams she’s being chased by an unknown killer through a snowy desert. She doesn’t know whether it is memory or fear, past or present. When her husband is arrested and her life unravels, she flees to Texas—the land of her adoption—hoping to find both her birth mother and a sense of safety. What she finds instead threatens everything she hoped to leave behind.
In A Casualty of Hope, Mooers explores how people try to outrun themselves. Bernie’s flight is physical and emotional. When she moves to Texas, she expects fresh air, open skies, possibly a new beginning. Instead, her past pursues her: strange occurrences, nightmares, secrets, deceptive people. Hope becomes a double-edged sword.
Bernie’s daughter anchors her—for better or worse. The maternal bond in Mooers’ work rarely shows one perfect parent. It shows sacrifice, fear, guilt. Bernie’s attempts to shield her child clash with her own doubts. Sometimes hope demands risking everything; sometimes it is only illusion. Mooers writes that tension deeply: love is powerful but not protective in all ways.
Also notable is Mooers’ use of setting to frame emotional geography. Texas is wide, open, but also isolating. The cold memories, nightmares, the sense of wrongness she can’t place—all of them more chilling than any snow. Similarly, the desert imagery in her nightmares is harsh, vast, empty—landscapes that mirror mindscapes.
Mooers doesn’t shy from ambiguous morality. Bernie’s husband’s arrest, the secrets of her new love interest Mike West, the possibility of guilt and innocence—they all blur. What does truth mean when memory might be lying? Who to trust when the past haunts even the safest seeming new beginning?
The recurring nightmare is symbolic. Is it trauma trying to break through? Or warning? Mooers uses it both ways. The tension builds not only in the external threat but in Bernie’s internal unrest. The more she searches outward, the more she realizes some dangers are inside.
What stays with me: in A Casualty of Hope, hope is not resolution. It is risk. It is courage. It is stepping forward in darkness. And sometimes the darkness fights back.