The Nature of Balance

I felt like I was reading a horror movie, and as a result it was taking too long.

Lebbon creates the disorientation of a world where most of the population has died -- horribly -- in their sleep. And that sleep is the enemy is perfectly captured in a scene where a woman comforts a sobbing child who has lost his family. She strokes his head, he dozes off, his head collapses in on itself.

There is a predictably mismatched band of survivors, who while contending with flesh eating farm animals find time to complain that emergency services are not doing their job. At least there are no zombies. What you get instead is a plot that over reaches itself to incorporate dying earth spirits gone berserk and an ending that comes several dozen pages too late.

But I did like the flesh eating farm animals.