‘Nonsomnia’ by Maria Raven – Book Review

From Austin Macauley Publishers comes Nonsomnia, a collection of short stories by Russian author Maria Raven. Now living on Cyprus, Raven moved after a difficult childhood filled with years of both medical and psychological treatment, the result of being a victim of Munchausen Syndrome by proxy. She began writing at the age of 14 to try and deal with her fears and emotional trauma in an effort to battle her inner demons, and she hopes that her stories will help others fighting their own struggles with the night. Nonsomnia is her first book.

Synopsis:

Nonsomnia is a book of short stories of Cypriot writer Maria Raven. Inspired by her own childhood memories and dark imagination, Maria tries to describe people’s nightmares, lucid dreaming, weird illusions and hallucinations. Many questions are still unanswered which she wants to raise in her book.

Is there God, and what is the soul? Why do we exist and what is there after death? What if we all just have been sleeping for a long time and cannot wake up? Is our reality the only one, or are there are many others? There are some, and if you read attentively, then you can find a key in this book of short stories. Don’t be afraid to start. The time has come. Wake up and go for it!

What Works

Maria Raven’s narratives are all original fables that sound like they’re right out of a lost book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In some of the stories, evil characters get what they had coming to them, and good people prosper, while in others, the bad guys wins and escapes with no punishment. Innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time walk into something wholly unreal and supernatural, and must bend their own minds to the will of the extraordinary reality around them. Every story involves death, darkness and magic, and I imagine them being told as black and white gothic encounters, the terrified protagonists wide-eyed with terror as they try to survive.

What Doesn’t Work

While I do realize that Maria Raven is from another country and, therefore, speaks a different language, I feel like her editor or published could have taken more steps to translate the author’s words into a more eloquent English. The sentences in these stories are chopped up and sometimes make little sense. It almost seems as if they just ran her words through Google Translate and then pasted them into the pages of Nonsomnia. I thought a few of the twists in the stories were eye-rollingly obvious, although the stories themselves were still pretty unique and original. Lastly, I felt like some descriptions of things like conversations and food were a bit too wordy, while other things – the juicy meat of the horror itself – was lacking a bit in detail. I do feel like these things will improve as Raven continues to write.

If you’re looking for a book of original short stories and you don’t mind reading in slightly fractured English, then you should give Nonsomnia a try. You can get both the Kindle and Hardcover versions on Amazon.