Goodnight, My Sweet
Vince Churchill
Dark Recesses Press
2014
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
Vince Churchill’s Goodnight, My Sweet, reads a bit like a great-grandchild of Stephen King’s early ‘Richard Bachman’ novel, The Long Walk (1979). In both, main characters must remain awake…or die. In both, characters are forced by circumstances to undertake what might be a useless journey leading only to inevitable death or madness. In both, the authors concentrate less on overt action than on revelation inner lives, hopes, and dreams, often through what seem more hallucinations caused by sleep-deprivation than conscious thought. And both conclude…ambiguously.
For Dylan Myles, the last day was like many others: spending time at the Santa Monica beach with a friend, who happened to be athletic and stunningly beautiful; then an all-night-long telephone conversation with his estranged wife, Alex, halfway across the country.
The call saved Dylan and Alex because, during that single night, everyone who fell asleep died.
Churchill spends little time on the cause of the cataclysm; in fact, neither he nor his characters offer any explanation. They are too busy wrestling with the consequences. Nearly everyone is dead. At one point, Dylan speculates that perhaps a million people—night-shift workers, insomniacs, a scattered few others—are alive…and it is clear that the moment any of them fall asleep, they too will die. Living has become an automatic death sentence, to be endured for moments, hours, at the best, a handful of days.
Then sleep…and death.
Dylan sets out to drive to Alex, telephoning her every four hours to encourage her and, truth be told, to reassure himself that she is still alive. Along the way, he encounters individual and small groups struggling to keep awake, to understand what has happened, to prepare for the inevitable. Unlike many post-apocalyptic novels, Goodnight, My Sweet is light on biker-hordes ravaging and pillaging the countryside—for the most part they, too, are dead, although there is the occasional shotgun-wielding madman and a few other direct threats. Instead the story emphasizes the sense of coming to grips with the inevitable: with discovering a survivor who needs to travel to Texas to join her grandmother, and who becomes Dylan’s confidante; with enjoying a home-cooked meal at a roadside café where the owner is miraculously alive; with taking time to decide what their last meal will be at a meticulously clean McDonald’s, where recurrent themes of human racism and prejudice are finally put to rest; with Dylan’s jubilation at seeing his wife sitting on their porch, waiting for him; and with Dylan’s final hours before sleep takes him.
Even without constant melodrama and histrionics, however, Goodnight, My Sweet develops an intensity of its own, propelling readers along, just as readers thirty-five years ago followed the footsteps of King’s Ray Garraty toward his inevitable destiny…in a long walk that was ultimately as meaningless-seeming as Dylan Myles’ long drive.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not as meaningless as it appears.
Because in Goodnight, My Sweet, there is always one last twist, one last variation of death-within-life…one last sentence.
