By Leonora Desar

BEST BEAUTIFUL NIGHTMARE
Steampunk Haunted House
“Have I stepped into a dream or a nightmare?” you ask yourself when a hand reaches out and pulls you across the threshold of a life-sized looking glass. Suddenly, you find yourself separated from your group and faced with the ghostly presence of Alice Liddle, who guides you into Third Rail Projects’ ethereally macabre rendering of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. This is not your blood-and-guts haunted house. Instead, your pulse quickens when you find yourself nearly alone and displaced in an image-saturated purgatory that is part immersive theater, part neo-Victorian fashion show. Everyone’s experience is potentially different. You may find yourself led into a lush sitting room where the Red Queen, a shimmering apparition in blood red, pins you down with her gaze. Or perhaps a masked knight will challenge you to a game of chess, the doors shutting tightly behind you. In any case, even as the dream begins to dissolve, you are already wondering what would happen if you returned for a second spill down the rabbit hole.
Through Oct. 31, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. (at Pitt St.), 212-598-0400, www.steampunkhauntedhouse.com; $10–$50.

BEST FAIRY TALE YOUR MOTHER NEVER TOLD YOU
NIGHTMARES: Fairy Tales
You slip a blindfold over your eyes. “No peeking!” Rapunzel admonishes as you grab hold of her coarse rope of hair and tread into a pop-up storybook world. These are not your childhood bedtime stories. Here, the iconic and familiar fairy tales of youth are boiled down to their most climactic moments or, in a few instances, twisted into something nearly unrecognizable. You enter the story but also become a character in it, acting as both witness and complicit accessory. In the absence of relentless stalking by the characters, you can pause to appreciate the aesthetic delights of the world coming to life around you. On the other hand, though, there is also time to register its inauthenticity—the flat, two-dimensionality of the set design, the permanent environment beyond. Suspension of disbelief never fully takes hold, especially after the first half ends and you are ushered back into the well-lit main lobby—and effectively out of the narrative—before embarking on the second half of the experience. But overall Nightmare: Fairy Tales, while not riveting on a visceral, gut level, teases the intellect and engages the senses.
Through Nov. 5, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St. (betw. Delancey & Rivington Sts.), 212-352-3101, www.hauntedhousenyc.com; $30–$100.

BEST HEART ATTACK DOUBLING AS DARK COMEDY
Blood Manor
Suddenly the creature—you don’t know what else to call it—is leaning in for the kill, her breath hot on your neck: “I bet you taste soooo good. Just one little bite? Come back here…NOW!” This is just one example of the relentless torment awaiting you inside the bowels of Blood Manor. There is no time for reflection, from the moment a looming monster lures you inside to your final mad-dash escape through machine-gun fire. The momentum builds quickly with constant sensory overload—a whirling green laser vortex, glow-in-the-dark 3-D zombies—but through it all, you still manage to catch glimpses of dark humor that, while hokey, elicit a chuckle in the midst of all the action. A blur of newspaper clips scream campy headlines, while in another scene vampire strippers of three sexes—male, female and other—slither up and down silver poles in a From Dusk Till Dawn-inspired montage. If Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino had collaborated on a sick joke, they may have very well come up with something like this.
Through Nov. 5, 163 Varick St. (at Charlton St.), 212-290-2825, www.bloodmanor.com; $28.50–$50.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice in the classic children’s story by Lewis Carroll. The well-known phrase became an adage for 9-year-old Jeryl Brunner when she wandered into Central Park and discovered the sculpture of Alice atop a bronze mushroom reaching for the White Rabbit’s pocketwatch.

“I remember looking at the statue and thinking of all the possibilities and all of the magic in the city,” Brunner, 46, author of My City, My New York: Famous New Yorkers Share Their Favorite Places released in October, said. A seasoned celebrity journalist, she asked over 300 famous New Yorkers to share their favorite New York fix.

I met Brunner in the garden at St. Luke in the Fields in the West Village beneath a crabapple tree. It’s a scene straight out of a Carroll fantasy.

“Can you believe you’re in Manhattan?” she said.

The quaint garden is also from the first sequence of her book, this site being actor and director John Cameron Mitchell’s favored oasis, where he rehearsed for his role in the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The gamut of New Yorkers who share their ”fixes” in the book ranges from Tina Fey to Hugh Jackman to New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz.

Growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, Brunner wanted to be an actress. She attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and majored in drama and politics.

“I really wanted to be an actress,“ Brunner said.

However, the inconsistent paychecks eventually changed her mind.

“I got scared of starving, I was scared of the struggle,” Brunner said. “I thought, well if I can’t be an actor, why not talk to other actors about their craft?”

After attending law school, which Brunner quickly found wasn’t for her, she found a job as a one of the first staff members at InStyle magazine. After a nine-year stint there, Brunner needed a change of pace.

“I hit a limit. Nine years at a magazine is measured like it’s in dog years,” Brunner laughed.

As a freelancer she wrote for publications such as O, the Oprah magazine and National Geographic Traveler. In 2002, she wrote an article for the latter about what notable New Yorkers would do if they had one hour to spend in the city, which became the seed for her book.

After a decade of tiresome rounds with publishers, Globe Pequot finally accepted her proposal. By March the following year, she had a finished manuscript, but continued to contribute celebrity quotes up until this August.

Brunner’s book captures nostalgic New York and reminds us why we continue to put up with aggravating subway delays, hour-long lines to buy groceries and outrageous rent. Her book offers readers glimpses into the places where celebrities let loose and find calm, like Saturday Night Live’s  Will Forte and Jason Sudeikis’ late-night karaoke sessions at Sing Sing and Matthew Broderick’s favorite bike route up the Hudson River pathway.

When I ask Brunner about her own New York fix, she said she’s on the same page as Broderick. Twice a week, if her busy schedules permits, she takes bike rides along the Hudson River to Fort Tyron, bringing along a basket of health food purchased from Fairway market.

“It feels like Oz up there—it’s so pristine and special.” Brunner said.

Photo: Jeryl Brunner in St. Luke in the Fields. Photo by Andrew Schwartz