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Book Reviewed by:For fans of The Age of Miracles and The Dog Stars, Black Moon is a hallucinatory and stunning debut that Charles Yu calls "Gripping and expertly constructed."
Insomnia has claimed everyone Biggs knows. Even his beloved wife, Carolyn, has succumbed to the telltale red-rimmed eyes, slurred speech and cloudy mind before disappearing into the quickly collapsing world. Yet Biggs can still sleep, and dream, so he sets out to find her.
He ventures out into a world ransacked by mass confusion and desperation, where he meets others struggling against the tide of sleeplessness. Chase and his buddy Jordan are devising a scheme to live off their drug-store lootings; Lila is a high school student wandering the streets in an owl mask, no longer safe with her insomniac parents; Felicia abandons the sanctuary of a sleep research center to try to protect her family and perhaps reunite with Chase, an ex-boyfriend.
All around, sleep has become an infinitely precious commodity. Money can't buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it. However, Biggs persists in his quest for Carolyn, finding a resolve and inner strength that he never knew he had.
Kenneth Calhoun has written a brilliantly realized and utterly riveting depiction of a world gripped by madness, one that is vivid, strange, and profoundly moving.
Black Moon's depiction of an insomnia epidemic is disorienting and convincing. These scenes and the illustration of intriguing characters wrestling with the problems of their frightening world would have been enough to create a fascinating read, but Calhoun takes his novel a step further. Perhaps zombie films and novels are so entertaining because their portrayals of people without humanity actually reveals to us what we prize most about it...continued
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(Reviewed by Sarah Sacha Dollacker).
Though Black Moon suggests an extreme scenario of a world without sleep, sleeplessness is a real problem in the United States. The World Health Organization defines insomnia as a "repeated difficulty with sleep initiation, maintenance, duration, and/or quality of sleep and results in daytime impairment." Insomnia is further categorized into three levels: Transient, lasting less than a week; Short-term, lasting 1-4 weeks; Chronic, lasting longer than a month. It is estimated that 50-70 million people suffer from a sleep-related disorder. Most of them are undiagnosed. Thirty to fifty percent of the general population suffers from either transient or short-term insomnia, while chronic insomnia appears in only 9-15% of the population. This last...
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Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Black Moon is the kind of book I envy as a writer, and seek out as a reader—a novel of ideas wrapped in a gripping, expertly constructed story, full of feeling and intelligence.
