Normally, I post what I would call a Book Recommendation, but I didn’t feel that this was one I would actually recommend. I will let you decide for yourself.

As many of you know, I work as a Sleep Technologist. When I saw the title of this book, I wondered if it might be something about sleep or dreams. When I saw that it was a novel, I read the synopsis. Here is the Goodreads synopsis:

What if the whole world fell asleep…and didn’t wake up again?

Dave Torres, a night watchman in a placid coastal town, knows all about sleep troubles. Since childhood, he’s battled terrors and nightmares. Sometimes those battles leak into his waking life, with disastrous consequences for those he loves. Now Dave lives alone and self-medicates to neutralize his dreams. It’s not much of a life, he knows.

The morning after Independence Day, Santa Mira, California, is so quiet Dave can hear the ocean from miles away. Traffic signals blink from red to green over empty intersections. Storefronts remain locked up tight. Every radio station whispers static.

And all over town, there are bodies, lying right where their owners left them. Dead right where they slept.

Dave―along with his ex-girlfriend, Katie, his best friend, Matteo, and Linda, a nurse he’s just met―struggle to unravel the mystery before sleep overtakes them all.

Except the answer to the mystery might lie in the one place that frightens Dave His twisted, unnerving dreams. Now Dave and his friends must straddle the liminal boundary between life and death as they fight to save everyone they’ve ever loved―and to keep their eyes open.

Because if any of them falls asleep now, it will be the last thing they ever do.

Let me start out by saying that this had so much potential. I really had high hopes for this one. I read it based on the synopsis and the hope that it would be more of a rush to solve the mystery. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was left scratching my head wondering what they heck I had just read.

After I finished, I had to know if I was the only one who felt that way. I was not. The reviews were mixed. People either loved it or hated it. I won’t say that I hated it, I was just really disappointed with the way it ended. It didn’t make any sense to me. It almost had one of those “Tales from the Crypt” or “Creepshow” kind of endings.

I was surprised to find that in describing this book, Goodreads labels it: Fiction, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller, Fantasy and Mystery. To a degree, I can see where it might fit into each of those categories. It did have a little of each, but it was almost someone was trying to make a bunch of genre readers happy. It misses the mark, though.

I found out as I prepared for this blog that the book was made into a TV series of the same name. On IMDB it states: This a drama in podcast format. It was announced in April 2021 that popular YouTuber Mark Fischbach, aka Markiplier, is set to star in, and executive produce a TV series of the same name based on the podcast created by Chozen writers Jake Emanuel and Willie Block.

I don’t know want to knock the premise stemming from a podcast, because with the right stuff, it could be very entertaining. I don’t know how the show differs from the book, and I’m not sure I want to watch it to find out. If you would like to see for yourself, from what I can tell, the TV show can be watched on YouTube.

2 out of 5 stars from me.