Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun
My rating: 4/5 cats
and it is great.
but i get that it’s not a crowd-pleaser. it is necessarily hallucinatory in places, there are several story lines to follow (although they do overlap at points), it is unremittingly bleak and fairly violent, and there aren’t a whole lot of answers at the end of it.
but it is still an incredible journey.
at its best points, it reminded me of Zone One, in its various scenes of a lone figure walking through a nightmare landscape and coming across the tableaux of people in their final moments, or people so transformed by their circumstances that they may as well already be dead.
to back up a little: so—insomnia epidemic. a prolonged insomnia epidemic, into the middle of which we the reader are dropped—where so many people have been without sleep for so long that society has already fallen apart. people are completely dissociated; wandering the streets muttering to themselves, sleeping pills have no effect, everything is broken and scattered and most of the world is existing in a completely personal and isolated state of perpetual living dream. except for those who are somehow unaffected, who can still sleep. and these people become targets. the sight of someone sleeping causes the insomniacs to fly into violent rages and try to tear the sleeper apart with their bare hands if necessary. parents will try to kill their sleeping children, and feel awful about it afterward as long as they still have their moral center, but as they fall deeper into insomnia-dementia, people become increasingly violent, and anything goes, my friends. as long as they stay awake, the unaffected can move through the streets in relative safety, but there are very few places where it is safe to sleep.
and there is nothing scarier than being woken up out of a deep, restorative sleep by people trying to kill you. especially if it happens to be at the hands of a loved one.
there are many angles to this story. it is part love story, part sci-fi tale, part psychological suspense, and part post-apocalyptic survival story. some of the most important scenes are elided and only later revealed in anecdotes from another character, which i kind of love, but seems to be irritating to other readers.
all i know is that there is one chapter in here, involving two characters who never again come into play, that is SO chilling, it pretty much made the whole book for me.
but it did make me feel exhausted, reading about the exhaustion of others. perhaps not the best book to read late at night. or the very best book to read late at night. you decide.
read my book reviews on goodreads
