Black Moon
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Imagine a world without sleep. A world driven to the brink of exhaustion. A waking nightmare.
The world has stopped sleeping.
Restless nights have grown into days of panic, delirium and, eventually, desperation. But few and far between, sleepers can still be found – a gift they quickly learn to hide.
Matt Biggs is one of the sleepers.
After six restless days and nights, Biggs wakes to find his wife gone. He stumbles out of the house in search of her to find a world awash with pandemonium. Sleep, it seems, is now the rarest and most precious commodity and there are those who would kill to have it…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even amid a glut of apocalyptic novels that imagine everything from nuclear meltdown to zombies, Calhoun's debut presents one of the most terrifying disaster scenarios of all time, perhaps because it's somehow plausible: a worldwide insomnia epidemic turns people into the real living dead, making them prone to hallucinations and fits of anger. In the wreckage of America, where life and dreams are indistinguishable, several characters struggle to find each other while battling insanity and the encroaching nightmare. A onetime ad exec named Biggs, one of the last people still capable of sleep, searches for his wife Carolyn in the pandemonium. Another sleeper, Lila Ferrell, is among the first to see the epidemic coming thanks to her therapist father's research; after her parents succumb to wakeful fever and threaten her life, she takes to the streets wearing an owl mask. Eventually, she meets Felicia, a lab assistant at a sleep research center determined to reverse the epidemic. Finally, there's Felicia's scofflaw lover, Chase, who attempts to take advantage of the situation by stockpiling sleeping pills, only to wind up embroiled in a surreal adventure involving a truck of stolen sheep. The characters and their intersecting narratives are largely a showcase for the author's almost unspeakably dark vision of a restless world. Calhoun's depiction of the collapse of language, reason, and love in a world without sleep is unflinching, and scariest of all it feels brilliantly contemporary.
