I was desiring to read a thrilling and horrifying tale depicting the eventual breakdown of mind and body, community and society. Charles convinces the Awakened that this disease is only to purge the world of society’s flotsam, and that soon, there will be a uprising, a new beginning, and the Nod manuscript will govern their lives forevermore. It was a strange novel to read alongside the other novel I was finishing this week, HOW TO STOP TIME, which also is interested in the greater movements of human through culture.

Ama yine de içimde ufak bir burukluk var, sebebi de şu ki; bu fikirden hiç düşünmeden beş yıldız verebileceğim bir roman çıkmasını beklerdim.A sort of dystopia where the end of the world comes about because almost everyone simultaneously stops being able to sleep. 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. When I wrote Nod I was consciously trying to create characters and events that exist beyond my own consciousness—I’d invent people and places that are bizarre and then try to force them into my novel.

My favorite book is Alice in Wonderland, a story children have always loved—they feel like Alice themselves. I never normally just pick up books I see, as I have so many unread books already on my shelves, and I also get a heap of recommendations that I try and pursue. He describes one character wearing a suit as an 'autistic attempt to copy mad men', which is a dozen different kinds of messed up and honestly has no place in the 21st century, and believes another character later on can't possibly be a doctor because he's fat, and therefore CLEARLY spent all his time before the end of the world in his mother's basement playing video games. As the Awakers’ psychosis grows, the Awakers come to believe that drinking the blood of these children will cure their terminal insomnia.I think I’d certainly have preferred it if the second half of the book had been sacrificed for exploring the reasons why all of this was happening. 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. 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. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand, can still sleep, and they've all shared the same golden dream. His girlfriend considers him to be a 'geek', going by a few scenes-- this is one of the author's many, many shortcomings.

Yet the most endearing element comes from the death of a long term relationship between Paul (one of the few Sleepers - people who are able to maintain nightly sleep) and his is partner Tanya (one of the many Awakened, those in a perpetual state of insomnia). Mind, that also means three very minor but grating irritations; three entirely unnecessary distractions from the unfolding drama that could’ve been avoided. It succeeds only in being pretentious and forgettable, and in reminding the reader that they could be reading something actually good right now instead of this. The world takes on a very fantasmagorical aspect because of the psychosis brought by sleep deprivation or from the dreams the few who still sleep have.

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. There is a plot, of course, but I found it so sparse on actual story and so heavy with experimental tangents that I couldn't connect with what was going on. Now imagine that the entire world is afflicted with the same sickness, incurable, and endless—or for as long as you can live without sleep. Nod is a piece of speculative fiction about what would happen if nearly everyone in the world stopped sleeping. I was expecting quite a fast-paced read, as the font size was quite large and the premise made it sound like an energetic, action-packed, slightly scary piece of genre fiction.