"A black moon had risen, a sphere of sleeplessness that pulled at the tides of blood-and invisible explanation for the madness welling inside."
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.
***
Black Moon is a book which wants to confuse you, and in that sense, it's a soaring success.
The thought behind its apocalypse is appallingly plausible: a plague of infectious insomnia has wounded the world, laying almost the lot of us low in the process. Without sleep, the larger part of the population is losing it. Unable "to distinguish fact from fiction," (p.3) to tell dreams apart from reality, the inflicted become zombies, of a sort. Thankfully they're absent that habitual hankering for brains, but "the murderous rage they feel when seeing others sleep" (p.44) has already led to indescribable violence on a scale that beggars belief.
It falls to the few who remain relatively rational to figure out what in God's name is going on:
Many in the scientific community were focusing on a known disease—fatal familial insomnia—the idea being that this was some kind of mutated strain of the already mutated variation called sporadic familial insomnia. Whereas FFI was believed to be hereditary and limited to less than forty families in the world, and took up to two years to kill the afflicted, this new iteration seemed to be some kind of unstoppable upgrade. Accelerated, resistant, moving through the four stages of demise at three times the speed.
But this was just the leading theory. No real connection had been made, and the medical community remained confronted by its greatest fear: a mystery. (p.35)A mystery that is very probably unsolvable, given the worsening condition of those looking into it.
Black Moon isn't a long novel. Nevertheless Kenneth Calhoun proffers three diverse perspectives rather than allowing readers to settle into a single just-so story. Of these, we hear from the easiest to like, namely Lila—a little girl sent her away for "her own safety" (p.78) who feels betrayed by her parents—the least. A shame: hers is certainly a familiar figure in apocalyptic fiction, but she's sweet and real and resonant in a way that the other pair of protagonists can't match.