The cast-- save for the homeless guy nobody likes and a bunch of similarly flat characters who get, at most, one or two scenes apiece-- is rounded out by the protagonist's girlfriend. A harsh insomnia overthrows the daily grind, replacing it with a hazed infused horror fun-house that strips the characters down to their basic need to just survive. His style was a breath of fresh air after some of the self-published rubbish available on Kindle these days. I did manage to finish Nod, mainly because I was playing the "how many ridiculous words in one sentence can I find" game.

Barnes at one point takes the opportunity to name drop half a dozen other dystopian novels, which served no purpose beyond making me think to myself 'hey, maybe I should throw this mess in the trash and read one of these actually good books instead'.He is a man who has always mistrusted what lies beneath the surface, has always expected collapse, the onset of chaos. One thing this book is is a chronicle of a love story that could have been epic for him if his lover had been bothered enough.

The lovely thing about this was the disjuncture between reading a tale told in words while being confronted by a new world in which words are becoming defunct. This novel is a debut, poignantly so — Barnes died of a brain tumor shortly around its release, and my paperback copy included a moving afterward by the author talking about his diagnosis and how it related to the novel.

I was born in England but grew up in Canada buried in suffocating suburbia, which made me angry and fueled my flight, first to the city and then to the bucolic rural climes of the West Kootenay region of British Columbia where people mostly live like human people.

The way in which Paul's personal interests end up shaping the collective madness of various people he encounters in one corner of his city works pretty well, but there are too many other things which Barnes has put into the story because he thinks that they will be cool, only to discover as the story runs down to his conclusion that he doesn't quite know what to do with them. Gaps in Paul’s general understanding of what’s going on, as he tries to navigate a Vancouver made monstrous by an other-worldly insomnia plague, are fine with me. The idea that only a select few people in the whole world retain their ability to sleep is one that has a lot of mileage, and I was really excited to see what would come of the story. Sappiamo che la deprivazione del sonno è stata riconosciuta come una forma di tortura e da origine, poco alla volta, ad irritazione, stress, allucinazioni. I thought this was really rather good, and I was sad to realise that the author, Adrian Barnes had died not long after publication.I was desiring to read a thrilling and horrifying tale depicting the eventual breakdown of mind and body, community and society. Oddly, I’ve been thinking like this since I was a teen, when I used to try to find poems beyond the real world. Not only is that revolting and unnecessary, but that and other instances like it throughout the book give disturbing insight into the author's view of women. Bir sabah insanlar evlerinden ayrılıp güne başladıklarında fark ediyorlar ki; o gece dünya üzerinde hiçbir insan (en azından biri hariç) uyuyamamış.