This dystopian novel captures a familiar feeling: anxiety

Novels tend to portray dystopia as a messy, noisy business. Climate change brings devastating fires and floods; political extremism breeds abuse and bloodshed; viruses fill graveyards following quick, brutish deaths. Kevin Prufer’s slim dystopian novel, “Sleepaway,” pursues a different kind of action. The terror in this book — a small-press gem released this year that deserves more attention — is that the depth of the crisis isn’t certain. Instead of abject peril, humanity is thrust into a state of anxiety, like being stuck in the middle of a wobbly bridge.

The problem, as the title suggests, is a sleeping sickness called the “Sinaloan condition.” Mists carried on the wind fall on communities and cause residents to nod off temporarily. Old air raid sirens are dusted off to warn of coming “sleeps.” Prufer is vague about how long the crisis has gone on, but the residents of the Missouri town where most of the novel is set are used to the routine, which has the vibe of old atom-bomb drills: “A sleep was coming, another sleep was coming, they were falling asleep in Sedalia, they were falling asleep in Knob Noster, get to a place where you can lie down comfortably, where you will not drive into a tree or a school.”

This predicament would be more inconvenient than apocalyptic except for two things. One, the sleeps are getting longer, stretching from a few minutes to hours. Two, not everybody wakes up from them. Certain residents are left inexplicably in coma-like states and then whisked away to mysterious secured facilities. That fate has befallen people close to the novel’s two main characters. Glass, a tween boy, has lost his father as well as the foster parent who took him in; Cora, whose stalled writing career has left her waiting tables, has seen her ex-boyfriend fall into perma-sleep. The man himself is no great loss to her, but he was her source for Eight Track, a drug that can keep you awake when the sleeps blow through.

Prufer is a poet, and he approaches the nightmarish scenario in “Sleepaway,” his debut novel, with patient lyricism, not the manic energy of a thriller. It’s an effective strategy that stresses anxiety over panic: Even the biggest apocalyptic disruptions affect people on complicated emotional levels. Prufer captures the creeping neurosis that comes with all the uncertainty the sleeps bring.

Eight Track fends off the worst-case-scenario, but it leaves Cora psychically racked: “Her whole body tingled and burned and she would feel her brain turning on its brainstem in the black lily pond inside her skull. She was at the dresser and she was on the sofa, and all around her the populace was asleep, was asleep, was asleep.”

Such repetitions appear throughout the novel to a charming, ironic kind of lulling effect — Prufer strives to evoke the dolor that’s polluted this imagined world without making the reader sleepy. The book’s lyricism is so strong that it’s easy to miss the depths of violence that suffuse it: a shattered windowpane that gave Glass his nickname, a near-drowning, wasps’ nests, kidnapping, gunplay.

So there is drama for readers seeking it. But Prufer weaves it alongside the notion that the true drama is interior: “the currents and tides of a mind struggling against an unsolvable problem, a problem that consumed it, that it examined and considered and felt, ending so beautifully in ambiguity or complexity or loss.”

There’s also an obvious real-world allegory for “Sleepaway”: the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when debate about its origins was intense, Eight Track-like “solutions” were rampant in the absence of a vaccine, and rumors abounded about what life was like, what life would become, how dangerous things really were. “Sleepaway” is set in 1984 — a nod to Orwell — so virality is mainly a function of TV news and neighborhood rumor mills. But the novel still effectively captures the isolation that the late winter of 2020 brought — uncertainty where safety was, the sudden erasure of community pillars, a permeating sense of dread.

And when dread is all-consuming, it can lead to poor choices, as the novel’s violence shows. “People want to return to normal, they want things to be normal,” a woman tells Cora. “So they go crazy for a while, and then eventually they hunker down or go about their day…. They return to a routine if they can.” In this world — and, increasingly, ours — that’s a big if.

Though the novel is seductive and considered, some of Prufer’s imaginings feel unpolished. The true fates of the permanently sleep-struck are left dangling. So too is the fact that white people are most strongly affected by the sleeps — an interesting concept to pursue, but except for a moment of contemplation by Cora, who is white, it’s largely abandoned. One detects the seams of a larger world-building project that was distilled to the novel’s overall fine shine.

In a crisis, as Prufer explores, we crave a story to tell ourselves, something that offers reassurance. Glass clings to a multi-volume science-fiction series, but he can’t seem to find the book that promises resolution. Cora has a stash of Eight Track, but supplies are running low, and what she has might do more harm than good.

Keeping the story the way we want it to be is impossible, “Sleepaway” suggests, and can deliver only frustration and disappointment. For anybody who remembers the pandemic vividly, the novel revives a powerful and uncomfortable feeling.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”