In Brief: A well-crafted thriller about a man who wakes up every night, unable to recall what he did during daylight.
Chris Hollis’ second book, Affinities: Lifecycle One, turns on a major revelation partway through the story, one that I don’t intend to spoil. Therefore be warned that I can’t provide a very clear idea what this book is about. I can say that it’s carefully plotted with a creative premise, believable characters, and genuine moments of fear (at least for this reader). It’s a page-turner.
Affinities opens with Andrew Goodwin, a Briton trying to rebuild his life after divorce and injury, quickly trapped in a novel dilemma. Beset by headaches and disturbing dreams, Andrew keeps waking in the middle of the night to spooky noises that disappear as he rises to investigate. Hollis is effective at establishing an unsettling atmosphere. The setting helps; it is always night, Andrew is in an unfamiliar new flat, and he is nearly always alone. Andrew’s outlook becomes significantly more worrying when he discovers he is not waking multiple times during the night, but rather waking anew each night. His days have apparently disappeared. After efforts to force himself awake with multiple alarm clocks fail, Andrew realizes he is not sleeping through the day, but instead rising and leading a life that his nighttime self is unable to recall.
Andrew’s escalating attempts to escape this plight form the framework for the beginning of the story. I found myself trying to imagine what I would do in the same situation – call a friend, call the hospital, go to the police – but Hollis has not left many threads dangling. Eventually, new developments unfurl: Andrew wakes outside his flat, discovers mysterious syringes of adrenaline, and receives strange messages from his presumed captor. By this point, Andrew’s agency has been reduced to that of a video game character. He wakes in a new setting, with only a few actions available to him, and efforts to leave the “level” inevitably result in his falling asleep and resurfacing somewhere else.
By this point, I was hooked. Hollis writes with a clean style that doesn’t get in the way, with short (even one word) sentences frequently dividing up the paragraphs to emphasize significant moments.
Like this.
The prose is occasionally leavened with dry understatement, but for the most part this is a story of characters trying to overcome significant (and creative) obstacles. There are tense moments, particularly a scene on a lake where psychological danger meets physical. There are also scenes of violence, with details of gut-wrenching injury and fear.
In general, however, the thrill of the story emanates from the skill with which the reader is placed into the heads of characters forced into strange and sinister situations. The characters are confused, as are we, and the approaches they take to understand just what is going on are believable. While the demands of the plot tends to dominate, Hollis has not neglected character development, and by the end of the story we have a good idea of what the main protagonists are like, as well as most of the small supporting cast.
My primary concern after selecting the book based on two hours of reading was that it would (as my wife calls it) “pull a JJ Abrams”: great set-up, disappointing follow-through. I was pleasantly surprised that this was not the case. As the story unfurls, the book’s plot is revealed to be a carefully designed apparatus with interlocking parts. Toward the end of the book I found myself returning to earlier sections to see how Andrew’s nighttime awakenings were tied into concurrent developments revealed later. I left the book satisfied, but with a lingering sense of unease.
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