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Parasomnia
At the Aux-Anges institute, nestled in the woods outside of North Bay, they study and treat parasomnias, or sleep disorders. Ashley suffers from night terrors, Terrance sleepwalks, Kiri sleep-eats, and Paul sets fires; they are there for treatment. Adelaide took the job as a counselor to discover why she still has an imaginary friend. When they discover the secret hideout of an old club called the Dreamers, they are shocked to find that the five of them are connected through more than just the Institute.
“Parasomnia has a great plot and a diverse cast of well-rounded characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it!” – Caro Fréchette, author of the Family by Choice series
“Éric Desmarais is a master of characterization. He creates unique, quirky and believable characters who I hope to meet again.” – Sue Taylor-Davidson, author of To Pluck A Crow
“Parasomnia has a great plot and a diverse cast of well-rounded characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it!” – Caro Fréchette, author of the Family by Choice series
“Éric Desmarais is a master of characterization. He creates unique, quirky and believable characters who I hope to meet again.” – Sue Taylor-Davidson, author of To Pluck A Crow
274 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 7, 2017
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Eric Desmarais
15 books11 followersÉric has had an eclectic career which ranges from casino dealer to canal boat captain to radio station DJ. Since 2009, he’s worked as a desktop publisher for the federal government. During his off time, he works as a freelance typesetter for various Canadian-based authors and publishers, roasts gourmet flavoured coffee, runs several pen-and-paper role-playing games, writes, and helps run JenEric-Designs.ca (Home of the TravellingTARDIS.com).
He lives in Ottawa, Ontario with his author wife, daughter, and son. Visit him at www.EricDesmarais.ca.
He lives in Ottawa, Ontario with his author wife, daughter, and son. Visit him at www.EricDesmarais.ca.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 27, 2017
Okay, this book is really cool. I never expected a story about a sleep disorder would morph into a fantasy tale. Extremely original concept. I devoured it whole! And the Terrance and Tara plotline was brilliant.
August 25, 2017
Complex, diverse characters and an intriguing mystery. What more do you want? Witty dialogue, check. Fantasy setting, check. Modern setting, check. (both? yes. you'll see!) Sneaky little nods to other books the author has written, check! Tugging on heartstrings, check.
Definitely a book for all readers!
Definitely a book for all readers!
September 27, 2017
*Full disclosure: I know the author. We're both firm friends and also published by the same publisher. I was also a beta reader for Eric for this book.*
Honestly, this is a great book.
It's changed a bit from when I beta read it. It was good then. It's better now!
It's such a nice, simple read, without skimping on the emotional punches. I teared up quite a bit in the last act.
The language is simple and really easy to follow, with a solid and imaginative story. This book is great for an reader, but I feel the younger readers or those really into young.new adult will love it.
Honestly, this is a great book.
It's changed a bit from when I beta read it. It was good then. It's better now!
It's such a nice, simple read, without skimping on the emotional punches. I teared up quite a bit in the last act.
The language is simple and really easy to follow, with a solid and imaginative story. This book is great for an reader, but I feel the younger readers or those really into young.new adult will love it.
July 20, 2019
I don’t do bad reviews often, largely as a matter of preference. However, in the case of Parasomnia, it’s a book that could so easily have been good with a bit more work, and that’s so much more frustrating than a book that was flawed from the start.
The premise of Parasomnia is this; Aux-Anges is an institute specializing in sleep disorders, and the novel follows several of the patients and one of the psychiatrists as they navigate their internal struggles. The disorders in question are varied, from insomnia and sleepwalking to sleep-related eating disorders and setting fires while asleep. As somebody very interested in stories about mental illness, my interest was already piqued.
Unfortunately, Parasomnia falls into a lot of traps even from the beginning. It starts off slow and meandering, exploring the life of one of the main characters and her high-school boyfriend for a solid chapter, even taking a voyeuristic approach towards her first time having sex before it all goes wrong. From there, it skips to telling the almost-full life of a therapist working at Aux-Anges and her not-so-imaginary friend. In both cases, it’s hard to understand what the stakes are in the book because we’re hearing the backstories before the story itself.
From there, Parasomnia makes a lot of bad decisions with its premise. The nightmares of all the patients with sleep disorders turn out to be supernaturally connected, falling into the well-criticized and overused trope of ‘magic mistaken for mental illness’. Terrence, the most homophobic and needlessly cruel of the patients, turns out to be a closeted trans girl (playing into the idea that we oppress ourselves – not something I’m comfortable with cis people writing), and the other patients start being able to see and hear the therapist’s imaginary friend.
What’s so frustrating is that many of the ideas here are good. I’m not opposed to any of these ideas, if well executed and by somebody who has either done enough research to know what they’re doing, has consulted sensitivity readers, or has personal experience and understanding. Unfortunately, from what I read of the book, none of these three seem to be true. The therapist and her imaginary friend are a very hollow, stereotyped depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Adding to that, DID already suffers from ongoing stigma that it’s ‘made-up’, only from fantasy, or somehow tied explicitly to the supernatural. The sleep disorders themselves are mostly accurate or at least close enough, but the symptoms that show up in the book are either toned down or linked into the fantasy narrative.
Overall, Parasomnia starts from a creative place, and has a lot of good intentions, but I couldn’t enjoy it or feel comfortable with the choices it made with its plot, premise or characters.
The premise of Parasomnia is this; Aux-Anges is an institute specializing in sleep disorders, and the novel follows several of the patients and one of the psychiatrists as they navigate their internal struggles. The disorders in question are varied, from insomnia and sleepwalking to sleep-related eating disorders and setting fires while asleep. As somebody very interested in stories about mental illness, my interest was already piqued.
Unfortunately, Parasomnia falls into a lot of traps even from the beginning. It starts off slow and meandering, exploring the life of one of the main characters and her high-school boyfriend for a solid chapter, even taking a voyeuristic approach towards her first time having sex before it all goes wrong. From there, it skips to telling the almost-full life of a therapist working at Aux-Anges and her not-so-imaginary friend. In both cases, it’s hard to understand what the stakes are in the book because we’re hearing the backstories before the story itself.
From there, Parasomnia makes a lot of bad decisions with its premise. The nightmares of all the patients with sleep disorders turn out to be supernaturally connected, falling into the well-criticized and overused trope of ‘magic mistaken for mental illness’. Terrence, the most homophobic and needlessly cruel of the patients, turns out to be a closeted trans girl (playing into the idea that we oppress ourselves – not something I’m comfortable with cis people writing), and the other patients start being able to see and hear the therapist’s imaginary friend.
What’s so frustrating is that many of the ideas here are good. I’m not opposed to any of these ideas, if well executed and by somebody who has either done enough research to know what they’re doing, has consulted sensitivity readers, or has personal experience and understanding. Unfortunately, from what I read of the book, none of these three seem to be true. The therapist and her imaginary friend are a very hollow, stereotyped depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Adding to that, DID already suffers from ongoing stigma that it’s ‘made-up’, only from fantasy, or somehow tied explicitly to the supernatural. The sleep disorders themselves are mostly accurate or at least close enough, but the symptoms that show up in the book are either toned down or linked into the fantasy narrative.
Overall, Parasomnia starts from a creative place, and has a lot of good intentions, but I couldn’t enjoy it or feel comfortable with the choices it made with its plot, premise or characters.
August 7, 2020
Loved it!
Very original plot line.
I enjoyed getting various points of views from different characters.
Highly recommend.
Very original plot line.
I enjoyed getting various points of views from different characters.
Highly recommend.
October 20, 2017
A handful of young people at a sleep disorder clinic that functions more like a psychiatric ward struggle to get along. Each has a different disorder, and yet their dreams of a magical fantasy world are strangely similar. Maybe it's the medication, maybe it's being induced as an experimental form of therapy. Or maybe it's something else entirely.
Mr. Desmarais has created wonderful diverse characters: a mental health worker with an invisible friend; a girl who has to be restrained in her bed to prevent violent behavior; a recovering anorexic who eats in her sleep, even when there's no food around; a traumatized security guard who wakes up smelling smoke; and a boy who sleep-walks beyond his locked room. Their issues stem believably from their past, and are fully integrated into the plot. Ingenious.
Mr. Desmarais has created wonderful diverse characters: a mental health worker with an invisible friend; a girl who has to be restrained in her bed to prevent violent behavior; a recovering anorexic who eats in her sleep, even when there's no food around; a traumatized security guard who wakes up smelling smoke; and a boy who sleep-walks beyond his locked room. Their issues stem believably from their past, and are fully integrated into the plot. Ingenious.
August 12, 2017
Loved this book! This author is great at showing a diverse cast of characters and at weaving a good intrigue!
February 27, 2018
Full disclosure: I know the author.
I love the idea of this book. Sleep disorders as windows into some other, parallel or greater reality? Sign me up. It has a lot of potential and could be incredibly exciting. I also like the potential in the characters. Especially the first one we're introduced to: Ashley.
The setup for this tale is just chock full of goodness. I don't feel the execution lived up to it.
A large part of my disconnect with the book is the style it was written in. Eric Desmarais has a very 'telly' style of writing. We don't get shown characters, we get told characters. I saw this in his first book, 'A Study in Aether', and it's rampant in this one as well. This is exacerbated by a paucity of description. We are told actions, but there's very little life to them. Occasionally we'll get some descriptive text, but it often feels bland and dry even then. Fantastic events are glossed over in a sentence, when they should have paragraphs devoted to them.
This means that the atmosphere of the book is thin and hollow. We get told everything so there's no mystery and no ambiguity. The structure of the book does not help, and in fact hinders quite a bit. The narrative jumps between the main characters quite a bit, which is fine within itself, however it repeats certain events from every character's point of view, so every time we jump to a new character we get a rehash of what's already happened with very little (or nothing) added. Sometimes this rehash is reaching quite a ways back in the story, when the plot has long since moved on from it. This backtracking is frustrating, and ultimately pointless as we never learn any new information.
As a general piece of writing advice: when writing a story with many point-of-view characters, it is often best to pick the character who sees most in a scene, or will have the most dramatic impact, and tell it from their perspective. If you DO backtrack to the same events from another point of view, the idea is to use the new perspective to show something important that would have been missed the first time, to change the whole meaning of the events or otherwise reveal something plot-relevant. Not doing this creates obvious and annoying filler. There are better ways to pad the word count.
Now for the characters. In a sad word: flat. The potential is there, but so much of it is just wasted because there is nothing to them. They are collections of traits with no life, and they don't act like human beings most of the time, so much as automatons playing out a script.
Now, it's not all bad. There are moments of genuine good character there. Eric is quite capable of writing compelling, nuanced portrayals of actual people. The problem I see here is that he didn't give himself enough time to explore the characters. He had a plot, and he had to keep that plot running. So giving characters the proper time and focus to deal with their issues was jettisoned in favor of having them do their appointed actions at the appointed times with often only a passing nod to the fact that they are dealing with serious, soul-crushing shit.
So much is wasted. Most of the main characters have a parasomnia, a sleep disorder. Some of them are really interesting or weird. One character sleepwalks and gets into places they shouldn't be able to, another becomes violent and super-strong in her sleep. They even refer to their disorders as 'superpowers' in the beginning of the book. I kept expecting that these disorders would have some major impact on the plot, but nope! Do we have our sleepwalker use his strange power to get into a locked room so they can get the files they need to figure out what's really going on in this hospital? Nope. He just sleepwalks sometimes (and only once in the story itself, a total of three feet in the same room to go hug someone). Do they have to contend with one of their friends falling asleep and going Mr. Hyde on them? Nope. One of them sets fires in his sleep, does that mean we get a climax where the Institute has been set aflame? Nope. None of their disorders matters. For the most part, they're not even connected to their alternate-world counterparts.
Nobody reacts like human beings. This is a problem with the 'tell don't show' style, mainly. Major life-changing events happen, and the reaction more often than not amounts to 'huh. ok'. Find out you have an alternate-world counterpart, and then merge memories with them? 'Meh'. Watch a man die in front of you? 'Meh'. Get hunted down by a body-possessing shadow monster? 'Hey, I think I know that dude!'. One character finds out she murdered her boyfriend. She spends some time screaming about it (appropriately), and then in an in-universe matter of hours gets over it and is running around making pop-culture references.
The low-grade characterization doesn't help. I meant it when I said the characters were more a collection of traits than actual people. Everybody talks the same. The only difference is when there's a trait that must be highlighted, like with pop-culture-reference girl, who has a trait that says she sometimes makes pop-culture references. Or sleepwalking guy, who is exactly like everyone else in intelligence and opinions, except he has a trait that says he randomly has to say 'gays are gross'. It doesn't affect his character at other times, only when the plot says its time to remind people that he's a tad homophobic (and OF COURSE he turns out to be transgender, because he couldn't just be straight-up homophobic and thus provide some conflict and interaction with the other characters, no he's gotta be a confused trans-person who just needed to realize they were really a girl all along. Urgh.)
The alternate-universe versions of people are even worse in many ways. They've got magic and such, but that doesn't seem to matter. They are essentially all the same character with a few minor traits to distinguish themselves from the bland-blob of the rest of them. This one cooks! This one has a sword! This one has fire magic but doesn't do anything of note until the end of the book! This one shapeshifts but it has no effect on the plot or her character whatsoever!
Really early in the story, Sleepwalker and his alternate-world female counterpart merge memories. Wow! That's a big deal. How will this affect him and his counterpart, knowing that there are two worlds that seem to be colliding and influencing each other? Did you guess 'it won't'? Then you win! All it does is remove the 'gays are gross' trait and add the 'transgender' trait. It didn't even do that much for the alternate-world version. She just goes about business as normal. All supposed character growth is already pre-programmed in, especially with anorexia-girl, who is the most developed out of all the characters. She has an actual arc, but even then we come into the story at the tail end of that growth, when all the heavy lifting's been done offscreen.
The plot is just confused. There are two major bad guys, one the obligatory secretly-evil head doctor of the institute, and the other his Lost smoke-monster son. Neither is a surprise. We learn early on that the head-doctor is up to some shady shit. The smoke monster doesn't make its move until later, but by that point we already know who it is and what its been up to (and it makes a point of announcing its weakness just so the audience knows how it's gonna die). Then there's a paranormal wing of the canadian military that shows up in the 11th hour out of nowhere and adds exactly nothing to the plot except to put some guns in the right place to kill a few people who could have easily died more dramatically. The bouncing between dream-world and real-world is placed logically, but paced poorly. The story would have benefited from keeping the connections between worlds more occluded until the characters were becoming more aware of each other's realities. It also would have benefited greatly from making the two stories more parallel, rather than just kind of mushed together as they are.
There are a lot of things you can do with a structure like this one, where characters can experience two separate realities. At no time is this taken advantage of. You could have information discovered in one world being used to solve a problem in another. Or characters taking actions in one world that bleed over into the other (unlocking doors, passing items, etc). Instead we just get a vague 'oh they can use magic in the real world now'.
I had a hard time finishing this book. The good was there, but it was buried under so much telly, unimaginative blandness that I had real trouble keeping my interest up.
Still, I'm glad I read this book, and I'm looking forward to see how Eric improves in the next one.
I love the idea of this book. Sleep disorders as windows into some other, parallel or greater reality? Sign me up. It has a lot of potential and could be incredibly exciting. I also like the potential in the characters. Especially the first one we're introduced to: Ashley.
The setup for this tale is just chock full of goodness. I don't feel the execution lived up to it.
A large part of my disconnect with the book is the style it was written in. Eric Desmarais has a very 'telly' style of writing. We don't get shown characters, we get told characters. I saw this in his first book, 'A Study in Aether', and it's rampant in this one as well. This is exacerbated by a paucity of description. We are told actions, but there's very little life to them. Occasionally we'll get some descriptive text, but it often feels bland and dry even then. Fantastic events are glossed over in a sentence, when they should have paragraphs devoted to them.
This means that the atmosphere of the book is thin and hollow. We get told everything so there's no mystery and no ambiguity. The structure of the book does not help, and in fact hinders quite a bit. The narrative jumps between the main characters quite a bit, which is fine within itself, however it repeats certain events from every character's point of view, so every time we jump to a new character we get a rehash of what's already happened with very little (or nothing) added. Sometimes this rehash is reaching quite a ways back in the story, when the plot has long since moved on from it. This backtracking is frustrating, and ultimately pointless as we never learn any new information.
As a general piece of writing advice: when writing a story with many point-of-view characters, it is often best to pick the character who sees most in a scene, or will have the most dramatic impact, and tell it from their perspective. If you DO backtrack to the same events from another point of view, the idea is to use the new perspective to show something important that would have been missed the first time, to change the whole meaning of the events or otherwise reveal something plot-relevant. Not doing this creates obvious and annoying filler. There are better ways to pad the word count.
Now for the characters. In a sad word: flat. The potential is there, but so much of it is just wasted because there is nothing to them. They are collections of traits with no life, and they don't act like human beings most of the time, so much as automatons playing out a script.
Now, it's not all bad. There are moments of genuine good character there. Eric is quite capable of writing compelling, nuanced portrayals of actual people. The problem I see here is that he didn't give himself enough time to explore the characters. He had a plot, and he had to keep that plot running. So giving characters the proper time and focus to deal with their issues was jettisoned in favor of having them do their appointed actions at the appointed times with often only a passing nod to the fact that they are dealing with serious, soul-crushing shit.
So much is wasted. Most of the main characters have a parasomnia, a sleep disorder. Some of them are really interesting or weird. One character sleepwalks and gets into places they shouldn't be able to, another becomes violent and super-strong in her sleep. They even refer to their disorders as 'superpowers' in the beginning of the book. I kept expecting that these disorders would have some major impact on the plot, but nope! Do we have our sleepwalker use his strange power to get into a locked room so they can get the files they need to figure out what's really going on in this hospital? Nope. He just sleepwalks sometimes (and only once in the story itself, a total of three feet in the same room to go hug someone). Do they have to contend with one of their friends falling asleep and going Mr. Hyde on them? Nope. One of them sets fires in his sleep, does that mean we get a climax where the Institute has been set aflame? Nope. None of their disorders matters. For the most part, they're not even connected to their alternate-world counterparts.
Nobody reacts like human beings. This is a problem with the 'tell don't show' style, mainly. Major life-changing events happen, and the reaction more often than not amounts to 'huh. ok'. Find out you have an alternate-world counterpart, and then merge memories with them? 'Meh'. Watch a man die in front of you? 'Meh'. Get hunted down by a body-possessing shadow monster? 'Hey, I think I know that dude!'. One character finds out she murdered her boyfriend. She spends some time screaming about it (appropriately), and then in an in-universe matter of hours gets over it and is running around making pop-culture references.
The low-grade characterization doesn't help. I meant it when I said the characters were more a collection of traits than actual people. Everybody talks the same. The only difference is when there's a trait that must be highlighted, like with pop-culture-reference girl, who has a trait that says she sometimes makes pop-culture references. Or sleepwalking guy, who is exactly like everyone else in intelligence and opinions, except he has a trait that says he randomly has to say 'gays are gross'. It doesn't affect his character at other times, only when the plot says its time to remind people that he's a tad homophobic (and OF COURSE he turns out to be transgender, because he couldn't just be straight-up homophobic and thus provide some conflict and interaction with the other characters, no he's gotta be a confused trans-person who just needed to realize they were really a girl all along. Urgh.)
The alternate-universe versions of people are even worse in many ways. They've got magic and such, but that doesn't seem to matter. They are essentially all the same character with a few minor traits to distinguish themselves from the bland-blob of the rest of them. This one cooks! This one has a sword! This one has fire magic but doesn't do anything of note until the end of the book! This one shapeshifts but it has no effect on the plot or her character whatsoever!
Really early in the story, Sleepwalker and his alternate-world female counterpart merge memories. Wow! That's a big deal. How will this affect him and his counterpart, knowing that there are two worlds that seem to be colliding and influencing each other? Did you guess 'it won't'? Then you win! All it does is remove the 'gays are gross' trait and add the 'transgender' trait. It didn't even do that much for the alternate-world version. She just goes about business as normal. All supposed character growth is already pre-programmed in, especially with anorexia-girl, who is the most developed out of all the characters. She has an actual arc, but even then we come into the story at the tail end of that growth, when all the heavy lifting's been done offscreen.
The plot is just confused. There are two major bad guys, one the obligatory secretly-evil head doctor of the institute, and the other his Lost smoke-monster son. Neither is a surprise. We learn early on that the head-doctor is up to some shady shit. The smoke monster doesn't make its move until later, but by that point we already know who it is and what its been up to (and it makes a point of announcing its weakness just so the audience knows how it's gonna die). Then there's a paranormal wing of the canadian military that shows up in the 11th hour out of nowhere and adds exactly nothing to the plot except to put some guns in the right place to kill a few people who could have easily died more dramatically. The bouncing between dream-world and real-world is placed logically, but paced poorly. The story would have benefited from keeping the connections between worlds more occluded until the characters were becoming more aware of each other's realities. It also would have benefited greatly from making the two stories more parallel, rather than just kind of mushed together as they are.
There are a lot of things you can do with a structure like this one, where characters can experience two separate realities. At no time is this taken advantage of. You could have information discovered in one world being used to solve a problem in another. Or characters taking actions in one world that bleed over into the other (unlocking doors, passing items, etc). Instead we just get a vague 'oh they can use magic in the real world now'.
I had a hard time finishing this book. The good was there, but it was buried under so much telly, unimaginative blandness that I had real trouble keeping my interest up.
Still, I'm glad I read this book, and I'm looking forward to see how Eric improves in the next one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 7, 2023
I enjoyed reading Parasomnia. As someone who experiences troubles with sleepwalking, I found many of the stories relatable. I enjoyed seeing snapshots into different lives.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews