After finishing another giant doorstopping fantasy novel, I was looking for a palate cleanser. Something not too interruptive but still with a bit of science-fictional meaty content.

I chanced on H. G. Bell’s Sleep Over in some listicle or other, and thought I’d give it a shot. The premise – humanity loses the ability to sleep – was intriguing. I’ve written a short story based on people needing to not sleep, so I found myself in the bizarre situation of knowing some of the science behind an sf book before I read it!

What I found was… fine, I guess? The science is certainly well-executed; the societal collapse which would occur if everyone were suddenly incapable of sleep would be both sudden and inevitable. Unlike the Zombie genre where some virus slowly infects more and more people, in this book everyone is immediately effected and the crash is immediate and devastating. The book is very like Albert Brook’s World War Z, being a collection of narratives from different people relating how their immediate surroundings were impacted.

At least, that’s what H. G. Bells was trying to do, the problem is that I don’t think she ever manages to stick the landing. Put bluntly, the real charm

of World War Z is the distinctiveness of the individual voices in the narrative (many years later, I can still ‘see’ the Russian woman, the Arab teen, the teenage girl in Alaska) but that’s almost entirely absent from Sleep Over. Other than a stray geographic reference, there’s nothing to suggest that these aren’t all happening in one small town or nation. This sameness ruins the effect of the book, I found myself skimming pages rather than reading the same repetetive plaints.

I did say almost entirely absent. There are two sections which are quite different, and these give some insight into what I think Bells was attempting in this book and mark her as a writer who could be worth watching in the future. The first is a letter written by an man who lives in England and has been attempting to get home from Frankfurt Airport, it is as well executed as anything in Brook’s book. The other is the very last section, which I won’t go into detail about, but it manages to be both intimate and mysterious, a mood which is quite different from everything else in the book. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that this was the very first part of the book Bells wrote, its voice is so utterly different.

I really want to say that I loved this book, as I thought there was so much potential here, but the reality is that it just doesn’t hold together. Two and a half stars is all I can reasonably assign to this, but I’ll certainly give Bells another chance in the future.