Imagine if one night you couldnt get to sleep.  Just lying there awake, unable to drift off.

Imagine if you couldn’t sleep the following night or the night after that, the days and nights begin to blur as your speech begins to slur, anxiety and frustration consume every minute and a desperation to just get some sleep drives you to do the most unthinkable things.

Imagine if the whole world was the same, everyone was suddenly unable to sleep apart from a tiny percentage of lucky ‘sleepers’.  No law, no boundaries, no safety and no sense.

Black Moon explores this strange phenomenon through the tired eyes different groups of people.  A married, childless couple, two college boys, a medical student and a young girl.  We follow these people as they struggle not only with the lack of sleep, but with the chaos raging around them.  Kenneth Calhoun creates a unique writing style to convey what is happening in the lives of the characters, particularly when relaying the conversations between people so deprived of sleep, with tangled, confused, almost Yoda like language expressing the torment these people are going through.

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Sometimes these characters cross paths and oddly, towards the end of the book some characters just appear in completely different locations with no explanation.  At first I thought this was maybe a mistake in continuity or a way to wrap the book up quickly, but I now think this is all part of the plan.  To give the reader a peek into the world of Black Moon, where memories are lost and confusion and frustration fill your brain.

The characters in this book are all relatable, ordinary and flawed, there is no real hero and plenty of loose ends which aren’t quite tied up.  I think the mark of a good book is when you are still thinking about the characters and trying to figure out certain endings long after you turn the last page.  Kenneth Calhoun did this with Black Moon and if you are looking for a book you get into straight away and not put down, then this is one for you although maybe its not the book to read at night when you can’t sleep!

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