Don't Read This Book

I really enjoyed this book of short stories inspired by the RPG [book:Don't Rest Your Head|6037805]. In it, there are people who don't sleep so long that they become "Awake". The also become unwilling sometimes citizens of the Mad City, a place where nightmares are real and memories are currency.

I'll tell you about my 2 favorite stories, but you should know that there are more than a couple fantastic one, most are good, and there was only one that I didn't like altogether. Even not having read the RPG I enjoyed the collection.

"Don't Lose Your Shit" by Robin D Laws was hands-down my favorite story. It's about a guy in a convenience story trying to figure out which energy drink will give him a boost and which will make him crash. Other Awake are there trying to do the same thing, knowing that even two cans of the same drink could have different outcomes and if they were unlucky, they could end up asleep. The protagonist narrator has invented an invisible punctuation that is both a period and a comma. It lends an organized frenzied feeling to the story. And, as I had commented to my husband (we were reading this collection out loud) on the one story I didn't like, deviations from sentence/punctuation structure should serve a purpose. In this story, it does.

"Don't Spill Your Tea" by Josh Roby features a former Awake who now acts as a fixer for Awake who need things in the real world. I don't really know how to describe this one other than that I like stories about fixers in general. It indulges the desire to know about what kind of weird lives the Awake are living in the real world.

My biggest criticisms of the collection of a whole are that it is clear that this was an "invitation" collection and so, when multiple authors latched on to the same themes they ended up just going with it. There are a lot of stories about parenthood and dead kids (together and apart).

Overall though, it was good enough that I would recommend it as a solid themed horror short story collection.