Nod

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I suffer from bouts of insomnia myself and so this premise is especially terrifying and interesting, in equal measure. We never find out why this is happening, and we never see anybody actually die except Tanya, which wasn't a natural death. Meaning the ensuing half-a-chapter about how she and the protagonist had first met and what they were like together and blah blah blah was utterly pointless. A harsh insomnia overthrows the daily grind, replacing it with a hazed infused horror fun-house that strips the characters down to their basic need to just survive.

He makes an offhand reference to Star Wars (which literally couldn't be more wrong and is surprisingly insulting to Leia, the only prominent woman in the original trilogy). The destruction and breakdown of civilization is only part of the story, a necessary sacrifice to deliver a narrative rich with religious, ethic, and philosophical dichotomies, in particular, "good and evil". Sometimes the main character seemed to have thoughts that were a bit too philosophical and non essential to the story which lost me quite a few time. Early on in Nod, Tanya, an Awaker, desperate for sleep as anyone would be after several days of watching the moon make its slow crawl across the sky, demands sex from Paul, because she hopes that will get her to sleep. It was probably meant to be a mercy killing, but it didn't seem like one because I got the impression the MC wanted to do it, probably because of what a slut she had turned into.Of course, it will lead to the same as usual in the genre: infrastructures collapse, economy collapse, relationships collapse, etc.

Only a handful of people have managed to sleep, and every one of them has had the same strange dream involving an odd golden light. It has science in the background, obviously, because the collapse uses the findings of sleep deprivation experiments: the human body can endure four weeks of sleep deprivation before death. The idea that only a select few people in the whole world retain their ability to sleep is one that has a lot of mileage, and I was really excited to see what would come of the story.The desire of sleep is the catalyst to behavioural explosions where being morally positive is consumed by the morally negative. So you're following a man who can sleep as he watches the world descend into chaos and total madness. The author spends a lot of time dehumanizing and degrading her--my favorite example of this being when she, for some unexplained reason, got it into her head that if he fucked her she would then be able to sleep. S. has been forced to look at how it moves as a group rather than simply what it is like moving through the world as an individual.

His style was a breath of fresh air after some of the self-published rubbish available on Kindle these days. Over the last year my skull was chopped, my brain lumps were chopped out, and I was drugged and radiated month after month. Even as our hero Paul manages to sleep—one of the few—the world of the book gets more and more dreamlike, with characters behaving in unexpected ways and surprising developments occurring out of the blue. As the title refers to the land of Nod, the novel takes a look at the after effects of a global event which makes people unable to sleep. I felt the danger that lurked within each individual come increasingly to the surface as sleep continued to evade them.

Plot is full of holes; the premise is half-baked; the characters are one-dimensional (female characters are half-dimensional); the writing is detached, smug, and trying too hard to be clever. This novel is a debut, poignantly so — Barnes died of a brain tumor shortly around its release, and my paperback copy included a moving afterward by the author talking about his diagnosis and how it related to the novel.

I’m giving Adrian Barnes‘ “Nod” 3 stars for its strange unanswered second half and perhaps, as I’ve heard they exist, I’m going to have a look into alternative sleep related apocalypses. The author didn't know that a year after writing these things his life would take a turn that would throw those issues into such sharp focus.

Nod is a piece of speculative fiction about what would happen if nearly everyone in the world stopped sleeping. At the same time, I felt it was crammed too tight with the author's demonstrable intellect and frame of reference that it became an overwhelming read. I thought it had the potential to be very unique, and the first few chapters kept my expectations high. The veneer of civility is thin and threadbare, after just a few days of no sleep for 99,9% of the world's population, all is chaos. Nod chronicles the devastating side effects that occurs in the Awakened , with the world changing into something unrecognisable.