Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately it’s not the book for me. DNF @ 23%.

#NetGalley #Insomnia #Summer2018
In a original way, the author introduces the world of a pandemic insomnia. Very creative and original. A good choice to read during the vacations.

https://youtu.be/fa8qkLX1p9g

Can you imagine a world without sleep?

As the sun rises in each time zone, people around the globe realize that no one was able to sleep the night before. There's no relief the next night or in the following days. Sleep Over is a collection of interviews with survivors who explain what it was like to live through the Longest Day.

No one knows what's happening at first. Maternity wards are swamped with expectant mothers, as even those tucked inside the womb aren't safe. Children are among the hardest hit and their reactions are a harbinger of the horrors to come. The Center for Disease Control investigates the phenomenon, but even their scientists are struggling with the effects of sleeplessness. Going twenty-four hours without sleep leaves a person in a state equivalent to being legally drunk. What starts off as a global summer party quickly descends into chaos. It only takes a few days for the established order to break down. Decades-long feuds boil over and a number of international incidents erupt, as governments take advantage of the situation or act rashly due to cognitive impairment. Terrorists and rioters bring violence to the streets. Spiritual groups enjoy a resurgence as people flock to them for answers and absolution.

The people interviewed are from a variety of backgrounds and countries. Everyone dealt with the situation differently. There are those who tried to keep everything functioning normally, opportunistic people who profited off the desperation for a cure, people who simply did the best they could to keep a routine, and the unlucky ones who drifted into oblivion. The insomnia plague ends eventually, but Earth's population numbers declined drastically. Could this second chance be an opportunity to create a better world? Will the survivors be able to convince future generations not to repeat the mistakes of the past?

I loved reading about how different people experienced a single, catastrophic event! The only issue was that everyone had the same voice, despite the fact they had diverse backgrounds and lived all over the world. I enjoyed the writing style, but my interest in collections like this plummet if there's not a ton of character variety. The most memorable perspectives were the ones where the voice most matched the character: the internet vigilante, the gamer, the five friends who made a bet to stay awake as long as they could before they realized they didn't have a choice, and the man who takes it upon himself to care for those who have ceased functioning. In terms of content, I was most interested in the perspectives of those who worked during the chaos: teachers, nurses, air traffic controllers, journalists, scientists, power operators, and the corpse collectors

How long could you go without sleep? I pulled an all-nighter once in college and that was enough to turn me off the concept for the rest of my life! Sleep Over is so relatable because (ideally) we all spend one-third of our lives sleeping. Most of us have also experienced the days after the nights where sleep didn't come so easily. The story is more open-ended that I would have liked, but it's a really interesting thought experiment. The imaginative scenarios that the author concocted show the expected and unexpected effects of a global insomnia plague. The testimonials are sometimes humorous, but always horrifying. Chilling descriptions of the humanity slowly draining from peoples' faces as the days passed will stick with me for a long time. The horrors and uncertainty experienced during the Longest Day show how important it is to support scientific research in the best of times, because it's already too late by the time the worst hits.

Book Review
Title: Sleep Over
Author: H. G. Bells
Genre: Horror
Rating: DNF
Review: What I can gather from the blurb is that Sleep Over is a collection of waking nightmares, a scrapbook collection of haunting and poignant stories from those trapped in a world where the pillars of society are crumbling, and madness is slowly descending on a planet without rest. In this world there are zombie, asteroids or anything otherworldly comes to destroy Earth but rather one night everyone on the planet loses their ability to sleep. Obviously because this is an oral collection, there are tons of short stories threaded together to create a collective image, the first story details the first few days where no one sleeps and how the onset of sleep deprivation can affect us far more than we realise.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, there are stories from people and companies blamed for the mass insomnia and for healthcare professionals trying to cope with the crisis themselves. It was very saddening to read about mothers going into early labour and the deaths of many babies in the process and how even the babies that were delivered safely died shortly afterwards. We see how people are affected and how certain individuals are already preparing for the worst, but mass panic hasn’t ensued yet, but it is building towards that especially since neither health organizations or the governments of the world have any answers for this strange condition. Children seem to be more affected than adults falling into deep hallucinations and they are known as Dreamers and these hallucinations even drive a few to suicide.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, I really enjoyed the way the novel looked at the media and how it handled the panic that came with the sleeplessness. The media reporters obviously narrating this story looks and their perspectives on the rising panic and riots as well as the investigation for causes and cures was interesting but as suicides voluntary or not start rising people begin to realise there isn’t anything they can do, and they rebel against it.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, the world is going down the pan and everyone from the everyday people to government officials are desperately searching for a solution while trying to cope with extreme sleep deprivation. Things get worse when the emergency services completely withdraw from society leaving people to fend for themselves. As people start experimenting with different drugs and remedies to try and sleep some succeed but the information is kept closed off from the public. Despite the apocalyptic nature of this novel most similar stories have happyish endings but this book was straight up depressing.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, the symptoms of sleep deprivation are becoming clearer and more and more people are looking for a way out. There is also a rise of religious fanatics praying and worshipping old gods like Hypnos; the god of sleep searching for answers that obviously aren’t there. After this point the novel became extremely confusing and I had to stop reading because I had no idea what was going on.

The first thing I have to say about <i>Sleep Over: An Oral History of the Apocalypse</i> (hereafter referred to as <i>”Sleep Over”</i>) is that I genuinely have no idea why I requested to read it. As a reluctant gift recipient of short stories/anthologies/essays/collections et al., I don’t seek out books that lack a cohesive, consistent storyline throughout. So, why I chose to read a book that is quite literally nothing more than a collection of narratives through dozens of viewpoints, all relating to the same period of time, is beyond me.

The second thing I have to say about <i>Sleep Over</i> is that I am genuinely thrilled that I requested to read it.

<i>Sleep Over</i> is a collection of first-hand stories by survivors of the event/plague/situation that almost eradicated humanity—no, it’s not nuclear war or SARS or global warming…it’s insomnia. What you may assume could pose no greater threat than irritability and malaise, insomnia is actually quite terrifying and insidious when observed through a more critical lens. Author H.G. Bells doesn’t have time for Doubting Thomas’ and makes quick work of your cynicism before you’re even 100 words in:

<p><blockquote>”The end of the world began not with something happening, but with something not happening. And because we don’t do well with understanding danger from absence, and most people didn’t know that going without sleep is fatal, the whole world began to die.”</blockquote><p>

What follows are accounts of “<i>the longest day</i>” by a veritable smorgasbord of characters, from a nighttime film projectionist, energy spray company owner, pediatric nurse, and taxi driver, to a coffee shop owner, teacher, cop, gamer, and monk. Initially people are just a bit curious and nonplussed about collectively being unable to sleep, especially considering that the difference in time zones means some people didn’t experience the insomnia until almost one full day after others. People are a little tired, grumpy, and maybe a bit sluggish, but it's more of an oddity than a pandemic at first. But as the days progress and sleep still eludes all humans (other species are unaffected), the danger becomes starkly apparent: Not just the pure biological ramifications, but the sociological and psychological ones as well.

This is where I’ll leave the remainder of the stories to the author (and contributors) and share the Good and the Bad of <i>Sleep Over</i>.

<b>The Good:</b>
-<b>It’s scarily relatable</b>: Bells does an outstanding job of verbalizing how you feel when you’re tired…and then exhausted…and then so beyond the feeling that the world starts to tilt on you. “<i>Words take so long to think of. Words take ages to form properly…if it takes too many more words from me I shall have to kill it, and with it, me.</i>” I found myself empathizing so much with the contributors that <i>I</i> was fighting off yawns and anxiety as their situations became ever more desperate.

-<b>It’s disturbing</b>: This may not be a “pro” for everyone, but I found it very effective. Not far into the book you learn that expectant mothers throughout the world are going into early labor and, without the body’s ability to heal, regenerate, and thrive through rest, 20% of mothers and 90% of babies die almost immediately after birth. In fact, kids are affected more powerfully sooner because their brains aren’t developed fully, so they’re the first group to exhibit the archetypes that develop: <b>Starers</b>(are technically living, but behave as though in a trance and need to be manually manipulated to eat and move), <b>Dreamers</b> (they see hallucinations, which often leave them open to danger, like jumping off of roofs), and <b>Screamers</b> (think Dreamers, but if the hallucinations were never-ending nightmares). That’s to say nothing of the other abhorrent behavior people succumb to when society starts to crumble.

-<b>The writing is haunting </b>: This book is full of pitch black poetry that is all at once horrifying and honest.
<blockquote>“<i>I opened the door, but outside was only a mirror. The man there did look like me, and had terrible wounds, and a tooth missing, gums bleeding. I will shoot him now.</i>”</blockquote>
<blockquote>“<i>For it’s not enough to say that we looked tired. It was like we were dead men walking. The slackness in our faces was broken through by micro expressions of extreme anguish and terror, and above all despair.</i>”</blockquote>
<blockquote>“<i>…a little girl that, if the circumstances had been different, if I had been a tollbooth attendant and they were passing by, I might have mistaken for being asleep. But the color was wrong in the face. </i>”</blockquote>

<b>The Bad</b>:
-<b>The resolution</b>: The fact that “<i>the longest day</i>” ends is not a secret throughout the book. But, without going into spoiler-zone specifics, I was very disappointed with how it was explained. Maybe it was the most realistic ending possible in a book so true to real life, but I guess I was greedy in wanting something more.

-<b>Uneven pacing</b>: The majority of the stories were short, some barely a page, others no more than two or three. But then randomly there would be pages and pages of the same story, which, more often than not, wasn’t nearly as interesting as the shorter ones. If the rest of the stories had been longer in length, this may not have bothered me so much, but as it was I found the change in momentum tedious and annoying.

-<b>A lack of distinct voices</b>: This was the weakest part of the book for me. While the writing was excellent and the characters spanned gender, age, social status, education, religion, nationality, and country, they all sounded essentially the same. As a matter of fact, I was pretty shocked to find out Bells is a woman, and not a man, as I felt the tone had a “white, middle-aged, middle-class man” affectation. I won’t pretend that taking on dozens of unique voices is an easy feat, but it did affect my suspension of disbelief throughout.

<b>TL;DR</b>:
Take it from someone who doesn’t even like this style of writing, <i>Sleep Over</i> is an engaging, haunting, disturbing, thought-provoking, unique read that you won’t want to put down…as long as you can manage to ignore the power of suggestion and stay awake. I think this has the makings of a real <i>sleeper</i> hit (ha!).

Thank you NetGalley for the copy of this book.
I thought it was a well written and original science fiction thiller.
I would recommend this book.

What if you couldn't sleep one night. Not unusual, it happens to us all occasionally. However what if it happens to us all on the same night? No one in the world sleeps. Most odd. Then again the following night, and the following night................

The format of this book is most unusual. It is written as a series of first person oral histories. Each chapter gives one person's snapshot of what is happening around them. The school teacher where the children are abandoned, the taxi driver who sees a way to make money, the doctor who sees hundreds of spontateous stillbirths, the general practioner where people come for pills to make them sleep but nothing works. These and a great many more people give their accounts of events during this period when the world fails to sleep. This is very clever and written very well with obviously different characters and styles of writing.

The downside of this format is that there is no flow to the book and the reader has no opportunity to get to know the characters. One chapter and the character is replaced by someone new. I found this slightly disjointed and it isn't the way that I would like to read books in general. However, as a one off book I found it very interesting & very much enjoyed being taken out of my comfort zone.

Hats off to the author. Not sleeping as an apocalyptic event made a nice change from a virus, zombies, nuclear war, world economic collapse or any of the other events which are generally used by authors writing in this genre. It was a great idea and I enjoyed reading about the effects on people all over the world. It is amazing to think how little it would take to really shut the world down and break delicate peace in various places.

I am very glad that I read this book. It was great to be made to think outside the box in my reading and challenge me to read a style that I wasn't familiar with. I would be most interested to see what this author produces next.

I received a free copy of this book via Netgalley.

Very interesting premises: one day, totally out of the blue, people can't sleep anymore - at all! The most affected are the youngsters and the old, pregnant women suffer spontaneous abortions or give birth to still-borns in most of the cases, less than 10% of the population managing to survive.

I very much liked how the whole event is presented, in the form of a collection of testimonials from different survivals, sharing their experiences during different stages of the calamity: some before, some during, some after.

The story touches on topics like morality and ethics, vigilantism, returning to primordial state, survival, dictatorship for the good of mankind. What I disliked was that most of the voices were not very distinct, the cause of the pandemic was not known and there was no real conclusion (fortunately the structure of the story implicated the lack of resolution, so at least that wasn’t strange).

The stories I liked best were the gamers’ and the one with the five friends at the end.

Great read! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

This novel can't help but be compared in form to the great 'World War Z', but it stands up to that comparison admirably. The plague of sleeplessness is just as frightening as any zombie or virus. The story is well-written and well-told, and my only complaint is that I would have loved to have names or even little bios for some of the characters, just to know more about them. I definitely recommend this for any fans of apocalyptic fiction.

In terms of creativity, this book was off the scale. A TEOTWAWKI story that doesn't rely on zombies, aliens, an EMP, or a standard plague = rare! I really enjoyed how things unfolded in the book. The stories were grouped into time frames, and each person's story revealed more details about what was happening. Each new story was unique, and the narration often jumped from country to country. For all that creativity, though, the "voice" in each story was the same, whether it was a Chinese farmer, a young gamer, a stressed scientist, or an air traffic controller. I wish the narration had been a little more unique for each person: different speech patterns, different personalities, etc. That aside, the fatal-insomnia idea made for an interesting read!

Thank you for the opportunity to review this book!

Interesting and well thought out, I loved the idea of using gaming goals to keep people active and aware. Would read more by this author