3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this free of charge in return for an honest review.

The narrator, whose name we never learn, first had experience of ‘sleep falling’ back in the 1980s, it was a strange sensation that he had when he was sleeping that he was falling away. It went after a while until one day he was walking high on fells near Wansfell when he had the experience once again. It moved from falling to other hallucinations that then started to invade his reality.

The place he lived in was a bit of a dive, but given how little he can afford, beggars could not be choosers. There was a small gang of youths that used to hand around the bottom of the stairs including someone he called the Chicken Lady. The walls of the flat were paper thin so he was often kept awake by the amorous couple above him. He had decided to quit his job and on the last day drank way too much.

For the Christmas break, he heads down south to Brighton to visit his parents. As he reached the South Downs he has an unnerving experience in the mist. He had never been overly close to his parents, his dad in particular, but they had always got along. But the relationship was changing as his father slowly succumbed to dementia. Now out of work, he starts to drift around, watching the horrors of the modern world unravel around him, poaching free wifi from a building nearby and slowly losing the perception to understand dreams from reality.

He decides to start a new life. He passes the few possessions he doesn’t feel he needs anymore and buys a ticket to the lake district. He switched off his phone and hoped that he could just vanish. It was time to begin a new life…

I liked this, even though reading it I made me feel unsettled too. I have lived through the bigger events in the book, and like the narrator, they discombobulated me a bit at the time. The plot is not hugely strong. It has a mix of nature and psychogeography and it floats along like a feather being buffeted by the breeze and that was part of its charm to me. It had echoes of All The Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. It felt slightly surreal at times and occasionally dreamlike as you lived some of the main character’s life. I don’t know the author very well but we have had a little correspondence, but reading this felt a little autobiographical. I don’t know whether or not he had experienced some or all of these things himself but reading it made me think that he had.

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