Nod

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For me, the story is excellent, dark and doom laden enough to encourage me to read on to the very last page, the characters well created and fleshed-out, this is one for those who like their doom extra dark and disturbing.

Nod is best enjoyed in the place that you want to sleep because you will eventually fall asleep—unlike the doomed souls in Adrian Barnes' novel. But the very act of not caring when people are dying is strange and Adrian could have made the character have more feeling (speaking from a loner who feels perspective) especially for his girlfriend. Gaps in Paul’s general understanding of what’s going on, as he tries to navigate a Vancouver made monstrous by an other-worldly insomnia plague, are fine with me. If your mind and body never again got its eight—or even four or three or any—hours of necessary rejuvenation.

In the end the mysteries are essentially left unexplained, which may upset some readers, but if they were to step back and try to imagine any denouement that would have satisfied them they might admit that none would and so Barnes was right not to try. Another strong point of Nod are that most of the secondary characters are more than just cardboard cut outs who behave according to the clichés of the genre.

The collapsed Vancouver of "Nod" ends up feeling a bit too much like the Collapsed London of "Twenty-Eight Days Later" or "The Day Of The Triffids" or "Empty World".

Perché, nel corso di una notte, la quasi totalità dell'umanità ha smesso di dormire e, come ci viene raccontato giorno per giorno, scivola rapidamente nella psicosi. The protagonist was so deeply and utterly unlikeable that I honestly hoped he'd die a horrible death at some point.

Their close bond pre the end of the world balances on the edge of ending before falling over the void into nothingness. His style was a breath of fresh air after some of the self-published rubbish available on Kindle these days. It isn't a difficult read and it isn't that long, I read most of it in one go, but then I put it down and could not bring myself to pick it up and finish it for another month. Taking a post-millennial jab at the zombie apocalypse trope, Adrian Barnes first novel ‘Nod’ pitches us into a world of the terminally sleep-deprived.Barnes’ ability to craft beautiful similes that immerse you in this crazy world is hypnotic, and the manipulation of words, turning them into nouns for characters, is akin to the adroit hands of Antony Burgess. Imagine if you can't sleep, you try as you might, but nothing works, and soon it turns you insane with the worry that you can’t and then the inevitable happens, you die. I did quite like the way Barnes wrote the ending, particularly the very last page (quite unexpected which was appreciated).