Laura Elliott - Awakened

Highly recommended by reviewers, I was attracted to Awakened despite my usual rejection of the horror genre. It's pretext sounded intriguing. In a future Britain, a small group of scientists hide out in the Tower of London, protecting themselves from what is essentially a zombie horde outside. The difference here is that the zombies are the result of experiments by the scientists themselves to make people more efficient and profitable by eliminating the need for sleep.

As I said, it's intriguing. The story focuses on the arrival of a stranger, one of the sleepless, who seems to not be quite the same as the others. With him arrives a pregnant woman, proving perhaps that things outside of the Tower are very different. The impact of this arrival on the community, and in particular the narrator, Thea Chares is the subject of the rest of the novel. Thea has her own secrets and reason for her presence in the Tower. She's a scientist, one of those brought in by the eccentric billionaire who developed the chip that ended sleep. Thea's transformation through her developing relationship with Vladimir, the name adopted by the monster from outside, is the core of the story. Unfortunately I found it difficult to follow, events being confusingly described at times, and perhaps deliberately, Laura Elliott ends of drowning out the individual storylines with brooding menance. I had to read the ending several times to really work out what was being said, and found myself not that impressed. Ironically I didn't think the book was that much of a work of horror. It is, perhaps, more of book of implied violence. But I did also think that Laura Elliott had hit upon a good point to start from - if the billionaires could find a way of making us work through our sleeping hours they would. And they'd market it as a good thing for us, while they raked in the coins. This, perhaps, is the actual horror.