We ’re living in a golden years of apocalyptical books right now , with everybody from Margaret Atwood to Cormac McCarthy to Colson Whitehead evidence apocalyptical tales . We ’ve had aplague apocalypse , and an apocalypse wherechildren ’s vocalism are toxic . But the insomnia plague in Kenneth Calhoun ’s Black Moon is still uniquely persistent .
https://gizmodo.com/a-post-apocalyptic-book-that-raises-the-bar-on-bleaknes-5936732
https://gizmodo.com/with-flame-alphabet-the-bar-has-been-raised-for-weird-5879311
Top image : Johnny Takes Pictures .
Some pamperer ahead …
InBlack Moon , people just stop being able to sleep , and there ’s no real account . People speculate about a mutated form of Fatal Familial Insomnia , or some kind of change in amino group acids , or a version of huffy Cow Disease . But really , nobody have a go at it , and as in one of the early chapters we see someone ’s brain tardily unraveling from deficiency of sopor , as the possibility about the causes of the insomnia get more and more bizarre and insubstantial , until it conclude with :
Maybe it was food becoming a airplane propeller for food , the rise of corn and its many guises perhaps it was the fluoride in the water maybe the author of us all decided to see what would happen mayhap it was a distant comet dusting us with its tooshie of poison shabu the lunar month was having its revenge someone uttering a combination of syllables that should never be uttered maybe it was the kids who were n’t give a hazard maybe it was the fingerfucking of the priests the rise of autotune the plagiarization the orgy of violation all the bad script and movies the shift to decentralization the egress of collective intelligence the flattening of the cosmos . Maybe it was the turtleneck on whose back we all live slowly shift its feet the Sasquatch sending out vibes sharks swimming far upstream the game we inhabit had a glitch . Maybe the angel ’s horn had finally been blow .
Later in the account book , a scientist proclaims it to be “ an attack on the cathedral of the human mind , perhaps of alien line . ”
Whatever the cause of the insomnia blight , it tears the humanity aside just as sure enough as any atomic explosion or zombi outbreak . People quickly start to misplace their minds and become almost like wild animal .
This turns the novel into something like a zombi story , as roughly half the friend we travel along are able to catch some Z’s , but are constantly in danger of waking up to a rampaging family . Finding a good place to sleep , where you wo n’t be murdered , becomes a huge incubus . And yet , this is also a living dead story where we get inside the headway of some of the zombies , since two of the four major viewpoint characters are insomniac .
The heavy metier of this novel is that it ’s dead terrifying and poetically beautiful at the same time , and the two things give on each other . Calhoun captures the way that people ’s sentence structure tends to degrade and become more tormented when they have n’t sleep in a long time , lead in dialogue that feel like something out of William Carlos Williams or something . citizenry falter over condemnation and import out thing that do n’t necessitate to be spell out , say things like , “ turn over me that axe with your own hand . ” The unravel mental res publica of the insomniacs is enchanting and kind of beautiful , but also completely appall — and it ’s hard to say which is scarey , being one of the insomniacs or being hunted by them .
As the script goes on , even the mass who are theoretically able to slumber are living in a kind of bloodcurdling aspiration world , because nothing makes sense around them . As one character says towards the closing of the book , the final effect is almost of turning people inside out — our dream worlds , no longer accessible through sleep , burst out into the real world and people set forth seeing hallucination straight out of their dreams wherever they look .
Without the ability to log Z’s , and thus process things in our unconscious minds , the whole framework of reality breaks down — and in fact , mass become worse than animals , because we but ca n’t navigate . citizenry betray into stranger ’s house , ineffective to reckon out that they ’re not at home plate , and then tear the planetary house apart looking for something familiar . There ’s one horrible scene where a couple ca n’t see their baby and they keep hallucinating that they see it , but it ’s just a computerized axial tomography or nothing at all . Worse than any kind of nanotech apocalypse , the want of sleep deconstruct the real world and turns it into dross .
And the deeper into the waking dreamstate you get , the more you clear that our identities are work up on dream and our remembering are restore by them . As one quality says in a flashback to life before the insomnia shine , “ Everything arrest mixed together as you go : The past tense and present , dreams and memories . ”
A peck of authors , with such a weird premiss , would play it as straight as potential — but to Calhoun ’s reference , he advertise the weirdness as far as he can , in a elbow room that feel horribly plausible . The surrealism gets kind of consuming — one character , suffer from spirit of sexual inadequacy , admit an overdose of Viagra and wind up with insomniac priapism , wandering around with a distich of wading bird and a truck full of sheep . Another character , who ’s lash out for her power to sleep , wears a mascot ’s giant owl mask for a calendar month . Yes , this book is actually kind of batshit insane on top of being shuddery and generally dreamlike . The whole thing really does feel like kind of a lucid dream , and yet you ’ll go forth from its Thomas Nelson Page terrorize that you wo n’t be able-bodied to kip .
But the other part of this novel that bind with you after you ’re done indication is n’t just the raw terror and the sense that our humanity is more fragile than we like to intromit — it ’s also a terrible sadness . Another yarn that run through this novel is one of unsustainable relationships , which were already doomed before the pest struck but which threaten to drag masses down . One man searches for his miss wife , in her onetime art films and in the places she haunt , while a cleaning woman who ’s been “ cured ” of insomnia reconnects with her bad - for - her ex - young man . family are demolish , or worse . As the owl - mask char says , “ Everyone is an orphan now . ”
Black Moon show how the inability to dream demolish us . But it also shows why we keep go through novels like this : Because even in the most terrifying incubus lies the essence of our most wanted dreaming .
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