The Dreamers explores what happens when a contagious sleeping sickness strikes a small Southern California college town. The inhabitants are at first carefree and oblivious to the possible danger participating in daily activities and even celebrating Halloween trick-or-treating with abandon as the disease spreads from person to person. Who gets it and who doesn't, doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern.
Since we are all amateur virologists these days, there were some technical aspects of the disease I expected the book to address which it did not. This is not a "Contagion" style book. This is a book that looks more at the societal collapse under a viral threat combined with a thoughtful contemplation of what it means to dream and what it would mean to dream for weeks at a time without the touchstone of reality to fall back upon.
The beginning of the book begins with a quote from the book Blindness, by Jose Saragamo (you can read my review of that here), which I read several years ago and still stays with me at times. This book doesn't dip into the levels of depravity found in that book, but the cycle of the disease and the exploration of the citizenry is evocative of that novel.
I was pleased to find that the writing and the narrative in The Dreamers was finer and tighter than The Age of Miracles, which I read a couple years ago but didn't enjoy as much as this one. (You can read my review of that book here).
3.5/5
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