(Almost) every Tuesday, a member of the horror community shares what they are reading with us! This week, it’s Jeffrey Thomas. He writes:

Though not strictly a horror novel, to my mind The Day the Sun Died (2015) by Chinese author Yan Lianke is fantastical and grotesque enough to qualify as such. In this novel, an increasing number of the citizens of a small rural town begin sleepwalking – what they call “dreamwalking – without any apparent cause. During this epidemic of somnambulism, the townspeople begin acting out their secret desires and worst impulses, resulting in a growing number of suicides and eventually murders.

Our narrator and protagonist, the fourteen-year-old son of a couple who create and sell funeral decorations, is often unsure whether the numerous people he encounters during this single nightmarish night are actually sleeping or awake, leading the reader to feel that perhaps there is only a thin crust between our public and secret selves. In this bizarre and imaginative story, even the author himself (or an alternate version thereof) appears as one of the dreamwalking villagers, though our protagonist doesn’t seem to think much of his books!

The Day the Sun Died is ominous, humorous, and weird, and I would recommend it to those looking for something different.

The Day the Sun Died is available in print, on Kindle, and on Audible. Get it here.

Review by Jeffrey Thomas, author of The Spirit of Place and many other books. Find him on Facebook here, and read his latest book here.