A post-apocalyptic world where houses and malls have been ransacked and the streets are deserted ... save for the fearsome image of people wandering about, a danger to themselves and all others around them.
Kenneth Calhoun takes us to a world where prolonged insomnia has ravaged the minds of people affected by a phenomenon - the cause of which remains unexplained, the remedy to which, a distant hope.
Starting from a slight flutter of a black shadow at the corner of their eye, to a breakdown in language, to that final descent to madness which sees a horrific clash between the sleepless and the sleepers; the best part about this story was the fact that nothing is fully explained; we are neither told where and how it all started - nor are we given all encompassing answers in one grand finale.
Through different points in the tale, we follow several key characters as they deal with this nightmare ... we see Biggs desperately try to find a cure for his wife Carolyn ... we see Lila's parents with just enough sanity left to chain themselves to a table and send their daughter away for her own safety ... we see Adam and Jorie, married couple, and that horrific incident involving their new born baby ... we follow Chase and Jordan, high school friends on a road trip, and we see Chase slowly succumb to the madness (that final lap with a truck full of sheep and the axe-wielding maniac that he becomes, was truly terrifying) ... and we see the scientist Kitov become the first to test a possible cure to the disease ... Much like the hallucinatory experience of the insomniacs, I too got sucked into this eerie dystopian world where terror and despair rule.
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