SLEEPAWAY

A woman and young man forge an unlikely friendship amid a global contagion.

This slim, artful novel by Prufer, a poet, imagines a world consumed by a peculiar viral phenomenon—communities are struck by the “Sinaloan condition,” mysterious but brief attacks that force people to collectively nod off for a minute or more. Tornado sirens have been repurposed to sound the alarm when the “sleeps” are coming, but they still induce calamities on the roads and skies. Worse, though most people wake up, some are left in extended comas; Glass, a 12-year-old boy in Missouri, has lost his father to the illness that way and is living with a family friend. Nearby, a young woman named Cora has similarly lost her boyfriend to the condition; fearing the same fate for herself, she hoards a stash of Eight Track, a black-market drug that keeps users awake when the sleeps blow through. That alertness allowed her to save one of Glass’ friends from drowning when a sleep hit, prompting Glass to bond with her. But Prufer resists a simple narrative of friendship and found families; the book is hard not to read as a Covid-19 allegory, concerned with the ways people take divergent and contradictory paths through a crisis. Pointedly, Glass’ father studied ancient dead civilizations, and the plot turns on how Glass and Cora struggle to survive as the sleeps get longer, suspicions grow about what happens to those who don’t wake up, and the side effects of Eight Track (especially severe disassociation) take a toll. “The world ending for you ain’t the same thing as the world ending,” one character says, which is as close as this story gets to optimism; though Prufer doesn’t attempt to deliver a clear message about society in a crisis, the book is suffused with anxiety over our collective inability to respond cohesively to collective ills.

A taut and piercing dystopian tale.