Even the hungry lost dogs wandering the streets without their owners are approachable and toddle off easily with a pair of tween girls with absolutely no aggression. Which leads to the question: where are the hideous, terrible people who would take advantage of the sleepers, the dreamers, or of the homes they leave behind? Where is the anarchy, the violent chaos, the stealing, lying, cheating, murderous instincts that aren’t paranoias, but essentially human? There’s a little bit of the negative present, of course, but much of it is merely hinted at. If there is adversity, it comes in the form of the sickness, not other people. All the ones we spend time with are essentially good folk. Walker’s cast really is just full of nice people. It’s romantic, in many ways, and sentimental and sweet - like most of its characters. It’s a quiet, intimate and deeply introspective narrative.
It’s not your standard post-apocalyptic scenario, nor is it a disaster story or a medical thriller. Walker delves into the hearts and minds of each character, exploring their hopes and dreams and fears when faced with this strange crisis. There are the college students who somehow don’t fall sick even though they spend much time in direct contact with the infected sleepers the young parents who are terrified they will fall asleep and leave their newborn baby entirely alone the daughters of a survivalist father who has prepped them for all sorts of disasters except this unimaginable one the doctor attempting to understand the sleeping sickness who is quarantined in Santa Lora, away from her young son and the shy, reticent roommate of the first girl who fell asleep.Īlso read | Sleepless in New Bharat: A Guide to Combatting Insomnia
The Dreamers features a larger cast of characters, though with equal introspection into their emotional lives. Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers follows her bestselling debut novel The Age of Miracles, which was about a young girl growing up in the face of the changes and challenges brought about by a change in the earth’s rotation and its effects on everything - from gravity to human behaviour, moods, tides and cosmic rhythms. If this is the apocalypse, it’s a quiet, subversive sort. People simply go to sleep deeply and stay that way. There is no sudden catalyst for this sickness, or at least, none that can be found or understood. This unidentified sleeping sickness spreads through the quarantined student residence in Santa Lora, a small college town in California, before it spreads further out from the students on campus and reaches others in town. She doesn’t die she just does not wake up. It starts with a college student who comes home exhausted from a party and falls asleep, only to never wake up.
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