Black Moon

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun

The world has stopped sleeping. Restless nights have grown into days of panic, delirium and, eventually, desperation. But few and far between, sleepers can still be found - a gift they quickly learn to hide. For those still with the ability to dream are about to enter a waking nightmare.

Matt Biggs is one of the few sleepers. His wife Carolyn however, no stranger to insomnia, is on the very brink of exhaustion. After six restless days and nights, Biggs wakes to find her gone. He stumbles out of the house in search of her to find a world awash with pandemonium, a rapidly collapsing reality. Sleep, it seems, is now the rarest and most precious commodity. Money can't buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it.

This book appeared in my post all of a sudden. I hadn't heard anything about the release of Black Moon, the synopsis showed some very interesting idea's. A dystopian setting, not filled with zombies or a nuclear war, but a setting wherein the current world has stopped sleeping and every one is suffering from insomnia. Black Moon is written by Kenneth Calhoun who has previously written several short stories, but Black Moon is his first full length book. 

The first thing that felt to note about Black Moon was the setting that Kenneth Calhoun brings to the front. It's dark and creepy and not the standard type of dystopian story that I have read so far. The whole idea of people not being able to sleep anymore was very interesting and Kenneth Calhoun knew very well how to bring this to the forefront of his story. It comes to show that he has a lot of confidence in this idea and doesn't hesitate to share this with his readers. It's not only the idea of people not being able to sleep that inspires a certain doom feeling, it's also everything that is accompanying this plague, how the people start to react and how society is slowly spiraling down. In the start of the story Kenneth Calhoun lets the world come over with more "sunny" tones but as the story start to progress and picks up pace, the sun seems to disappear behind the clouds and Black Moon turns into an non-stop thriller, that if you hadn't had trouble sleeping, you will have it soon after finishing it. 

In the midst of it all there is Matt Briggs who is termed a sleeper, a person who hasn't succumbed to the insomniac threat yet. His wife, Carolyn, on the other hand is suffering from sleepless nights and it is slowly driving her crazy. Matt does his best to find a cure for Carolyn, but he isn't the only one, when he visits a pharmacy it soon becomes apparent that he isn't the only one. He does manage to get his hands on some pills that he uses to lure Carolyn into sleep, saying that they are a new type of drugs. However clever this idea might sound, it doesn't work and frustrations start to rise between Matt and Carolyn as he is still able to sleep and she, unfortunately, isn't. It goes so far as rage episodes (the murderous kind) against Matt. For the safety of Matt and Carolyn herself, Matt ties her down to a chair, Carolyn does escape from her position and Matt is now on the search for her, he wants to get her back. Soon after Matt leaves the house, Kenneth Calhoun nicely broadens the scope of his story by introducing several other story lines that each deal with similar consequences due to the insomniac plague. Lila is a young girl who stand, well stood very positive in life, Lila is also a sleeper but her parents suffer from the plague and soon the parents of Lila fear for her life and they cast her out of their house so they wont hurt her. The third one is by a young man called Chase, who is in search for the one girl that he loves, Felicia. Felicia herself works at a sleep center trying to find a cure for this now terminal illness, because without sleep, you can only manage so long... 

I really liked how Kenneth Calhoun managed to show his envisioned world by these different storylines each of them singular gave a nice grips on the story and showed just how dangerous the world has become. My only objection is that sometimes the book just jumped all of sudden into a different direction. And this caused me to think a lot of the how, why and if's of the story, in the broad sense you can clearly see the direction that Kenneth Calhoun steered his story into, and was terrifying at times, but the story of Black Moon could have resonated that much stronger if he would have dotted a few more i's. 

Now one thing that I particularly liked about the book was how Kenneth Calhoun let society run it's course. People are starting to feel the effects of the many sleepless nights and these effects are explored in full detail. The first signs were people getting grumpy towards one another but this soon turns out into rage and even further going toward the murderous kinds, the insomniacs start to kill and abuse the sleeper, who have the one thing they don't have anymore, that of a good nights rest. This latter part, the abusing of the sleepers really inspired a certain fear in the story for me. As you see Matt and Lila navigating through the dangerous world, being confronted by the insomniacs, they have to plan each and every move very carefully. Other aspects of sleeplessness were that people lost their coherence in speech and just started to blabber away, these inconsitancies in talk had me rereading several pages but was very nicely put together. And last but not least the hallucination aspect. This was definitely my favourite one. As you saw more and more characters suffering from their sleep deprivation, they started to see things that weren't there. Especially when you see how several characters went about by these hallucinations producing some beautiful moments right there. 

Black Moon has a very interesting story and many great idea's working in it's favor. It was great to see that Kenneth Calhoun steered away from some several "post-apocalyptic" tropes likes zombies and introduced his own sleep deprived world, where the insomniacs act as the out of control mob towards the people that are able to sleep. This is however only one aspect of the book and does come to show in the fullest. Besides tackling this theme in the detail, Kenneth Calhoun introduces several interesting storylines with the major one being that of Matt Biggs, who is in search for his runaway wife. The emphasis in the storylines are all that of how much will you do for your loves ones and the relation between the insomniacs and sleepers. Kenneth Calhoun nicely showed the impact of the insomniac plague by exploring several human emotions in the fullest making the main idea behind his story do come to life... Black Moon is definitely a recommendation for everyone looking to read something thought provoking and different from the standard dystopian books. And do make sure you get your nights rest... you never know when it might end...