Books › Early Riser
Early Riser
500 pages
A darkly comic, snow-blind plunge into a bureaucratic nightmare where the dreams are contagious and the cold is deadly.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into a freezing, wildly imaginative funhouse mirror of our own world. The atmosphere is perpetually frostbitten and delightfully unhinged, wrapping you in a claustrophobic yet expansive winter wasteland where the greatest threats are viral nightmares and corporate bureaucracy. The narrative moves at a brisk, engaging clip, propelled by a dry, deadpan wit that makes even the most macabre elements feel absurdly charming. It is a dense, world-building-heavy experience that demands your attention, rewarding you with layers of sharp social satire and surreal mystery. This is a perfect match for readers who love their dystopian thrillers served with a generous helping of British eccentricity and dark, quirky humor.
- Mood
- chilly
- surreal
- claustrophobic
- eerie
- quirky
- Tone
- wry
- satirical
- absurd
- darkly comic
- deadpan
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- bureaucratic absurdity · corporate greed · nature of reality · social stratification · survival against the elements
- The writing
- Witty and dense with wildly imaginative, satirical world-building delivered with dry British understatement.
- The arc
- Begins with bewildered amusement at a bizarre world and spirals into paranoid, high-stakes survival as the surreal becomes deadly.
- Who it's for
- Readers who delight in wildly inventive, slightly unhinged alternate realities laced with dark humor and bureaucratic satire.
Content notes
- cannibalism
- body horror
- violence
- psychological distress
About the book
Every Winter, the human population hibernates.
During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, and devoid of human activity.
Your name is Charlie Worthing and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses.
You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artefact borne of the sleeping mind.
When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling.
When you get the dreams too, it's weird.
When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.
But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting, ensure you aren't eaten by Nightwalkers whose thirst for human flesh can only be satisfied by comfort food, and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk.
But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you'll be fine.
Description from Open Library.
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