The Sleepwalkers

The Sleepwalkers by J. Gabriel Gates

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

Wow. This guy has serious talent! - That was one of my first thoughts when I started reading The Sleepwalkers. The opening scene scared the living daylights out of me. It sent chills down my spine, just as the author intended. The prose stunned me with its beauty, too. I must have marked at least ten different sentences in the first chapter alone. Understandably, it all raised my expectations, which, sadly, weren’t met later on.



I'll start with the good parts, and then get to the thing that really bothered me:

I couldn’t predict where the story was going at all, and since I’m usually able to see everything coming from a mile away, that was a huge plus in my book. Even though Caleb wasn’t instantly likeable, I warmed up to him soon enough. As his estrangement from his father started coming to light, it gave me a better understanding of him, making me willing to forgive him for some of his actions, especially the ones I particularly disliked. Bean, on the other hand, I loved right away. He’s the character that brings humor into the story, so that part isn’t surprising at all. I could have done without his whining later on, but overall, I felt that he was a well-built, complete character.


I admit that I normally tend to shy away from horror stories and that I’m rarely in the right mood for one, but I WAS in such a mood when I picked this book up, and still, The Sleepwalkers failed to impress me. It wasn’t because of the prose, which was strong and evocative, although uneven at times. It wasn’t because of the characters, the plot, or even the occasionally clumsy dialogues.

So what went wrong? Just one very important thing: pacing, pacing, pacing!

As much as I appreciated the well-developed characters, in many ways, reading Sleepwalkers was a slow (and I do mean slow) torture. The pacing remained unchanged throughout the first half, it rarely sped up or slowed down. If you want your scary parts to really BE scary, you have to give your readers some downtime, insert a few lighter moments that will make them relax, and then surprise them with something intense. In the first 40% of the book, the pacing was completely monotone, and quite frankly, it bored me to tears. Things did get a little better later on, but it took me a while to readjust and I’m afraid my overall enjoyment was diminished.

Perhaps I should have waited a while to pick this up after reading The Repossession. Both books are about missing kids no one is really bothering to look for, but to me, The Repossession was infinitely better and far more convincing. Nevertheless, I will go back to my first sentence: J. Gabriel Gates is a man of enormous talent. Even though this didn’t work for me, I feel that he showed tremendous potential and I can’t wait to see what he does next.