Review: Psychological terror in the isolation of space
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 12, 2012
In "Sleep" we meet Jane, the captain of a space freighter and recent murderer of a man she hired as crew for her voyage. With a dead body now on her hands (the only company left aboard the ship) she wrestles with the intricacies of getting rid of it and creating a plausible alibi.The story that unfolds owes a great deal to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Besides just the tap-tap-tapping that Jane hears aboard her desolate ship after her crime, there is a tonal similarity that lends a good bit of ominous atmosphere to the piece. The majority of the chills stem from Jane's psyche. She seems more than just a little cracked, perhaps made so by the desolation of solitary space travel. The time we spend in her rationalizing mind is quite disturbing. She is clearly intelligent and can see many possible angles for how her deed can be discovered and smart enough to plot around it. Yet, her motives for the act itself seem trite and superficial (or at least left open to interpretation), giving her a real unsettling persona. You cannot trust this character, and because everything happens within her own paranoid and crumbling mind, the tension builds tightly.Overall, the writing is tight and well-edited, the mood is dark, and the story is effective and unnerving.