Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.

A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.

Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Literary Fiction, Short Story Collection, Contemporary

254 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 2012

About the author

Dan Chaon is the author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. His new novel, Await Your Reply, will be published in late August 2009.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chaon is not a writer of weird fiction, yet many of his stories haunt you in the way good weird fiction does. When a talented writer--and Chaon is one--takes as his subject characters of limited awareness tried by extremity, and when he views those characters with both irony and empathy, something surprising and disturbing happens. The universe of the story appears to expand and distort, as if to accommodate the immensity of the pain, and--because we find ourselves absorbed in the story and these characters--our universe expands and distorts too.

Flannery O'Connor's "hard Sophoclean light" can release an intensity of pity and terror that cries out for redemption, and that cry in turn makes redemption possible, not only for her characters but for us. Denis Johnson's hallucinatory imagery helps the reader identify strongly with the drug-addled consciousness of his characters, and as a result their universe--ours too of course--becomes porous and elastic, suggesting wondrous, wounding mysteries beyond the sordidness of daily life. Something similar happens in the short stories of Dan Chaon.

In his best work, Chaon makes us doubt the mundane reality he describes, suggesting something sinister at its base, a shudder rather than an epiphany. What happens to his characters is often so horrible that neither they nor the we can comprehend it, but as the characters must focus on the details, putting one foot in front of the other, we have the leisure to look beyond, and through the darkness we glimpse not mercy but an abyss. The finest stories in this collection--"The Bees, "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted," "Stay Awake," "I Wake Up," "To the Psychic Underworld" and "Take This Brother, May it Serve You Well"--have this haunting quality. The worst stories often sound like watered-down O'Connor, Johnson or Carver, but even they have their moments, and, when he is at his best, Chaon delivers an authentic--and distinctive--metaphysical thrill.

[J.I.]

People must be warned: If you hate depressing stories, you should never, ever read Dan Chaon. I have heard him described as an author of Midwest Gothic, and I can think of no better term. This is a depressing collection, with stories that rear up out of their tragedy so that they may drag you deeper. The endings will leave you without satisfaction, either. They do not give you resolution, though they do point the way down the road where that resolution may lay (hint: you don't want to go there, though you must), they do not hold your hand and they do not want you to be happy.

If you have persisted, however, you will find a truly wonderfully collection of stories that digs into the flesh that hides behind social graces, that torments the people that smile and say "fine, thanks, and you?", that sits within our hearts at low moments. But what is there, though it is dark (and the world, I would venture, is not nearly as dark as Chaon's stories would imply, thank goodness), is true to life, true to experience, and it is so well rendered, so expertly crafted, that it sinks into you and it grabs you.

Don't read this on the beach, but on that dark and cloudy day, where the rain drizzles and there is no hope of joy, read this, be horrified, and then emerge, seeing just how beautiful a rainy day can seem in comparison.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps it was the times and places in which I read these short, strange and nightmarish stories that led me to enjoy them so much. They are suited to bleak days and sleepless nights. They will remind you that sometimes there is no hope.

These people are displaced, disoriented, bogged down in loneliness so deep you wonder if they are dreaming instead of living. They tie together unexpectedly and eerily in the final story and haunted me long after the planes had landed and the dawns had broken.

[Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a dream I was awake and I woke up to find myself asleep.
-Stan Laurel

This amazing collection of stories provides readers with words and ideas to promote life reflection. I absolutely love Dan Chaon's magical ability :-)

One of my favorite books ever! I have read Stay Awake nineteen times since it's February 2012 publication. I am excited for any new work by Dan Chaon. I highly recommend Dan Chaon's books, especially Stay Awake and Await Your Reply - if you like stories that keep you thinking and don't give you all the answers, then you will appreciate Dan Chaon's writing :-)

Stay Awake provides 12 short stories, rich with meaning & mystery. Particular ideas & objects re-occurring in multiple stories include: Suicide, Open Mouths, Severed Fingers, Brain Damage, Astro Projection, Halo Rings, "etcetera", "very lucky", Conjoined Twins, Babies, Having Children, Babies with two heads, Beef Eaters, Rain, Falling Asleep, Waking Up, Death, Chicago, Cleveland, Characters with "J" Names, Characters with "C" Names, Jan, Joni, Karen, Christopher aka "Critter", Painters, Carpentry, Random Messages, Lullabies, Nurses, Children, Coffins, Zombies, Insects, Animals, Dogs, Monkeys, Deer, Lillies, Post-it Note Messages, Foster Care, Hospitals, Comas, Grocery Stores, Car Accidents, Fall Accidents, Fire Accidents, Prison Stays, Institutionalization, Group Homes, Deafness, Eyes Opening, Eyes Closing, Alternate Realities, Characters not realizing they are dead or in a coma, Time/Sequence Distortion, Figurines, Fuzzie Field Mouse, Hard Truths, Breakups/Divorce/Death of Spouse/Parents, "We", Stories told out of sequence.

While the collection can be enjoyed as stand-alone episodes, there is a grander scope of shared trauma, mental illness and secret messages among the stories. Characters cross over from one story to another such as in the case of Joni and Critter.

The final story, The Farm, The Gold, The Lily-White Hands, serves as a culminating summarization, interconnecting to previous characters & story elements.
The audiobook is narrated by Kirby Heyborne (same narrator as Await Your Reply).

Related Works: You Remind Me of Me, Await Your Reply, A Brief History of Time, On the Road

WARNING: TEASERS (including full paragraphs from stories) CONTAINED BEYOND THIS POINT

Here are my favorite passages from various stories:

The Bees
Here is a high, empty wail that severs Gene from his unconsciousness like sharp teeth. It is the worst sound that Gene can imagine, the sound of a young child dying violently - falling from a building, or caught in some machinery that is tearing an arm off, or being mauled by a predatory animal.
____

It isn't a headache, he says. "It's like bees!" he says. "Buzzing bees!" He rubs his hand against his brow. "Inside my head." He considers for a moment. "You know how the bees bump against the window when they get in the house and want to get out?"
____

He'd escaped his old self . . . now he had a chance to do things over, to do it better.
____

"What are you scared of?" Gene asks Frankie, after a moment, "Anything?"
"You know what the scariest thing is?" Frankie says, and widens his eyes, miming a frightened look. "There's a lady with no head, and she went walking through the woods, looking for it. 'Give . . . me . . . back . . . my . . . head . . . .'"
"Where on earth did you hear a story like that!" Karen says.
"Daddy told me," Frankie says. "When we were camping"
Gene blushes, even before Karen gives him a sharp look. "Oh, great," she says. "Wonderful."
He doesn't meet her eyes. "We were just telling ghost stories," he says, softly. "I thought he would think the story was funny."
"My God, Gene," she says. "With him having nightmares like this? What were you thinking?"
____

All the things that he doesn't quite remember are circling and alighting, vibrating their cellophane wings insistently.
____

There is an image of Mandy, sitting on the couch as he stormed out, with DJ cradled in her arms, one of DJ's eyes swollen shut and puffy. There is an image of him in the kitchen, throwing glasses and beer bottles onto the floor, listening to them shatter.
And whether they are dead or not, he knows that they don't wish him well. They would not want him to be happy - in love with his wife and child. His normal, undeserved life.
______

"We need to talk about last night," she says. "I need to know what's going on."
"Nothing," he says, but the stern way she examines him activates his anxieties all over again. "I couldn't sleep, so I went out to the living room to watch TV. That's all."
She stares at him. "Gene," she says after a moment. "People don't usually wake up naked on their living room floor, and not know how they got there. That's just weird, don't you think?" Oh, please, he thinks. He lifts his hands, shrugging - a posture of innocence and exasperation, though his insides are trembling. "I know," he says. "It was weird to me, too. I was having nightmares. I really don't know what happened."


Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted

I could relate to this story because both the character & I worked in a small grocery store.

What could he say? He had known a lot of dead people recently.
____

And then there were areas that he had started to clean or pack up but then had broken off for one reason or another.
For example, in the basement "rec room" area, on the upper shelf of a closet, he'd come across a bunch of games that the family used to play when Brandon and Jodee were kids: Monopoly. Yahtzee. Battleship. Which he'd planned to get rid of.
But then he opened the mildewy cardboard box of an ancient Scrabble game and an enormous number of cockroaches came scuttling out of it. Oh, my God! He chucked the game across the room and it broke open and all the little wooden tiles with letters printed on them scattered across the shag carpet.
_______

It had occurred to him that maybe something was going wrong with the world. Like global warming or an economic collapse or a coming plague. He could imagine that his parents had somehow intuited or found out about such an event, something so terrible that they couldn't bear to live through it. But what? He couldn't quite conceptualize such a catastrophe, though often he was aware of its presence, its force, something large and omnipotent hovering over not just himself and his house but also the neighborhood, the state, the country. Possibly the planet?
He noticed, for example, that many of the stores were closing and remaining empty - the old Beatrice Academy of Beauty across from the high school had shut down, and through the cracked windows you could see the hair dryers all piled together in a jumble, like dead spacemen.
_______

There were electrical outages in the city and then he couldn't sleep at all. He would sit there alone in the dark, clutching his flashlight. He was certain he could hear sounds in the house. In the ruined bathroom, his parents' bedroom, in the basement, where he imagined the scuttle of cockroaches or Scrabble tiles -
And he'd once actually fled out the back door in his underwear with his flashlight and sleeping bag in his arms and tried to sleep on the lawn under the old apple tree. But even that - the beloved apple tree of their childhood, "Jonathan the Apple Tree," their mother had called it - even that behaved strangely. Its leaves would get a white powdery substance on them and then they curled up and fell off, and the apples themselves were tiny and wrinkled and deformed in a way that made them look like little ugly heads, and as he sat in the backyard on the sleeping bag he heard one drop.
. . . tunk?
A sinister little questioning sound.
And then, after a long silence, another one - "tunk?" - and he imagined he saw the whispery movement as the shrunken apple rolled through the unmowed grass.
______

....the world had begun to seem as if it wanted to communicate a dreadful, dire message, uncomfortable words and letters began to emerge - for example, the long vine from his mom's pathos plant in the kitchen was curling down in a way that appeared to be unreadable cursive writing, possibly Arabic, and the shingles on the neighbor's roof seemed to be arranged so that they formed H's and I's in a pattern: H I H I H I H I H I which freaked him quite badly.
____

Both he and Zachary Leven had gotten paranoid and begun to imagine that their brains were going to turn off. Like suddenly they would become vegetables. And both he and Zachary Leven were crying and his mom said, I am so ashamed of you, I hope you remember this when I'm dead, after all I've done for you this is how you repay me, I hope you think about this moment when I am gone, and his father had looked pained and said, Oh, Cathy, that kind of talk isn't necessary, and the doctor gazed at them and said: "I am going to prescribe some clonazepam -that should do the trick," and his mother said, with enthusiastic disgust: "They are both of them throwing up and they both have diarrhea!"
____

More and more, he thought, his days at the grocery store were like being in a zombie movie except that here the undead appeared to be too depressed to be cannibals. You didn't even realize, most of the time, that they were dead, and he had the worrisome thought that he would look up and there would be his mom or Zachary Leven or there would be Patrick Lane, gray-skinned and surprised-looking, standing at the end of an empty checkout aisle, his hands moving slowly as if he were packing an unseen grocery bag with air.
It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.
____

"Halos around objects," he read. "Colors of objects changing while looking at them. Illusion that objects are moving."
He lifted his head and stared at the discarded white sock on the floor, which wasn't breathing, he was pretty sure.
"Aeropsia," he read. "Floaters."
____

On The Weather Channel it said: "A large swath of dead clouds covered many areas of the Tennessee Valley to the Northeast yesterday."
____

"A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking."
____

He could imagine that there was a way in which all the pieces came together and interlocked, some kind of lines that could be drawn from the funerals of his classmates to the plumbing problems in the house, which also connected the clutter of hair dryers in the abandoned beauty academy with his old grade-school teacher, which was associated with the time he and Zacharay Leven had watched the zombie movie, which was linked to the scattered tiles of the Scrabble game and the graffiti in the grocery-store bathroom and the note that his parents had left him - it was a map, he thought, a net that cast itself outward, ad if he only applied himself he would see how the weather would lift and he would get the house finished and the economy would shift again and he would go back to college and meet some new friends and the wars would come and go and he would move to a new place and maybe get married and he would tease his own children about how they never seemed to grasp cause and effect very well.
He sat there, huddled underneath the hum of electrical equipment that made a halo around the sofa bed, but the house crept gently closer. He could sense the house, the way you sense something leaning over you and watching while you're sleeping. He could hear the rattle of the apple tree in the wind, the shifting of the floorboards upstairs, the red flutter of an emergency vehicle on a distant street. Outside the window, some streetlights winked off and on, hesitating.
Then, with a sigh, the power shut down again. All across the city the light folded into itself, and the darkness spread out its arms

Stay Awake (title story)
Things seemed almost normal . . .
____

Zach had often wondered what was going on inside their brains. Could they dream each other's dreams, think each other's thoughts? Could they see what the other one saw, the two pairs of eyes looking at the world both right side up and upside down?
____

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.
____

. . . while the moon . . . drifts in the skies . . . stay awake . . . don't close . . . your . . . eyes . . .
____

Back when he was spending his nights on the Internet, he had come across a long article about astral projection. According to some philosophies, the self existed outside of the physical body. There were many religions that believed the soul could lift away, a noncorporeal version of your mind could rise up from the tether of muscle and skin and bone and blood and float off on its own.
Its own journey.
____

You want a child because it is a piece of yourself that will live on after you are dead. That is one answer.
____

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.


Long Delayed, Always Expected
"Why am I afraid of dying? Aren't you afraid?"
Jeffrey shrugged. "It's just like going to sleep."
"Yes, but you never wake up. That's the problem."
"How do you know?"
"How do I know what?"
"You don't know that you never wake up," Jeffrey said. "Because you're dead."
____

He was a better lover, as a brain-damaged person....
____

All the things that people longed for seemed a little stupid, she thought.
____

You have brain damage. I have no idea what your thought processes are like.
____

It's so stupid. It's like trying to explain something to a cat.
"Hmm," Jeffrey said. "Cats don't really understand human language."
______

She would not step even a tiny bit more into the future that seemed to be settling over her.

The story ends with this haunting paragraph:

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.

I Wake Up
And I was surprised to see that his hands and fingers had a lot of dark hair growing on them, despite his baldness.
____

. . . I realized that my own brain worked differently from the way theirs did.
____

. . . the pictures my brain would send me often didn't make much sense. I'd conjure up a vivid image of a row of brownstone apartments and a cobblestone street; I'd imagine that I recalled an organ grinder and his monkey on the corner, and people passing by in clothes from a hundred years ago. I'd call forth a farmhouse in the middle of cornfields, and I'd see myself walking on a winding dirt road, looking up as a pterdactyl slowly flapping its wings, passing across the moon. I'd picture a crumpled potato-chip bag, or a snowy tundra, where a woman was pinning white sheets to a clothesline in the wind, or the sound of something scratching on the door in the night. Maybe, I thought, the memory-recording apparatus in my head had been damaged in some way.
___

"That's all very poetic," she said. "But that's just whimsy, Robbie. It's not memory. I mean, you do know the difference between fantasy and reality, don't you?"
____

"I've had nightmares every single night of my life since it happened," she said. "God! All of us have. Poor Cecilia Joy said that she was contemplating suicide for a while, before she met her husband. She thought about killing herself, just to get away from the bad dreams!"
"Oh," I said. Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.
____

He would joke that we probably seemed kind of trailer-park-esque to people, two cousins with the same first name -
____

Despite our years of friendship, there was always a certain level of pretending going on between us.
____

"Oh, look. Here's an unsolved murder. Here's a rape over at the community college. I sure hope Robbie isn't involved . . . "
____

When Cassie said things about craziness, mental illness, schizophrenia, that sort of thing, I couldn't help but feel a bit self-conscious. Concerned. I thought about the way the world played tricks on me - squirrels, for example, that transformed into paper bags, phone calls that seemed half whited out when I woke up, memories spotted with imaginary pterodactyls and organ-grinder monkeys and glacial lakes - little things that perhaps added up.
Such things might give a person pause.
____

I was glad that I didn't know, that first night, that I was going to be sleeping in the room of a dead boy.
____

I got into the bed, in between the cool, dry sheets, and put my head against the thick pillow and folded my hands over my chest as if I were in a coffin.



The day I lost my finger was something like that. One minute I was on the ladder, three stories up, painting along the frame of the old round window near the peak of the house; the next minute a swimmy feeling trickled up my spine and into my brain. The window was empty and then the face of a woman floated up like a transparent reflection on the surface of water, moving toward me, pressing up against the glass, a face like someone who had loved me once, leaning over my bed at night to kiss my hair. I don't even remember falling, though I recall the feeling as my ring caught against a nail, the finger separating from my body, not so much pain as a kind of gasp. I hit the ground and the wind knocked out of me. For a second I thought I felt my soul, my spirit, bounce out of me and fly up a few feet before fluttering down and settling back into my body.


What was the name of that family I lived with before I was sent to the Dowtys?
Lamb? Lambert? Something like that. I sat there sending out feelers into my memory, tracing it back past the Lamb/Lamberts and it was like trying to place stepping-stones down from one bank of a creek to the other side.


I ran out of room. More favorite passages can be found in the comments if you're interested :-)

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

She sighs. “I know,” she says. “I realize that I should have told you. But—you know. All this stuff with your mother and so on. You seemed like you were in a very fragile state.”

“Fraj-ile,” I say, pronouncing it the way that she does—as if it might be a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, beautiful Fraj Isle, with its white sandy beaches and shark-filled coves.

- Shepherdess

If I had to choose one passage to symbolise this short story collection by Dan Chaon, I would quote the above. These are stories of people who inhabit this beautiful island, Fraj Isle.

In the interview provided as afterword, the author says that he wanted to create a collection which basically were variations around a single theme; and also that he loves to write about broken people. This, along with his predilection for horror stories, has made Dan Chaon put forth a collection of delightfully dark tales written with a surprising amount of positivity. He speaks of unspeakable things in an unbelievably light way, making them all the more poignant in the process. This is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as directed by Charlie Chaplin.

There are a few common threads running through all the stories. One: a protagonist who is totally alienated. Two: disconnects between parents and children, life partners and siblings. Three: The sense of something dark and dreadful lurking just beneath the veneer of normalcy that we come to expect from the current world.

Chaon's characters stumble around in a universe which seems just about to remove its facade and show us its real face. Thus, the recovering alcoholic in The Bees is haunted by the wife and son he abandoned in his dark days; the world keeps on sending strange, cryptic messages to Critter, the bereaved protagonist of To Psychic Underworld:, memories of impossible things keep flitting through the mind of Rob, the son of a mother committed for the murder of her children, in I Wake Up; and Dave Deagle, arbitration lawyer, recovering from a heart attack and the loss of his wife, suddenly finds himself in the realm of gypsies and fortune-telling in modern-day Portland, Oregon in Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well.

Relationships have all been destroyed and twisted in these tales. In St. Dismas, the protagonist kidnaps his former druggie girlfriend's son, only to abandon him later. In Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow, a story written in the second person, you are forced to imagine yourself as the progeny of an unloving mother and an alcoholic father - at the moment of the death of your premature baby. This sense of alienation is beautifully captured in the following paragraph of Shepherdess:

More and more there will be things I can never explain to anyone. More and more I’ll find myself lost in parking lots at four in the morning, stepping through the rows upon rows, a long sea of vehicles spreading out beneath the canopy of halogen streetlights, and me with no idea whatsoever where my car might be. I’ll find myself pressing the teeny button on my car’s automatic anti-theft alarm system. “Where are you?” I will whisper to myself. “Where are you?” Until at last, in the distance, I will hear the car alarm begin to emit its melancholy, birdlike reply.

Along with alienation, there is also a sense of belonging. In Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted, Brandon is slowly imploding into himself after the death of his mother. Lying in his living room, to which his world has shrunk, he suddenly has this vision of connectedness:

He could imagine that there was a way in which all the pieces came together and interlocked, some kind of lines that could be drawn from the funerals of his classmates to the plumbing problems in the house, which also connected the clutter of hair dryers in the abandoned beauty academy with his old grade-school teacher, which was associated with the time he and Zachary Leven had watched that zombie movie, which was linked to the scattered tiles of the Scrabble game and the graffiti in the grocery-store bathroom and the note that his parents had left him—it was a map, he thought, a net that cast itself outward, and if he only applied himself he would see how the weather would lift and he would get the house finished and the economy would shift again and he would go back to college and meet some new friends and the wars would come and go and he would move to a new place and maybe get married and he would tease his own children about how they never seemed to grasp cause and effect very well.

The title story, Stay Awake, about a two-headed baby can give us a clue to the whole set, I feel. Two heads, joined together at the top: two brains, separate yet inseparable: two consciousnesses, of which one must necessarily die if the other is to live. Yet will one consciousness disappear for ever, or will it be present, as a ghost, as a whisper, as a reaching out from the far side of existence... as most of the stories in this collection do?

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is bleak, really, really bleak. Not for one paragraph will you read something that can possibly produce a feeling of hope in your heart. It could almost be enough to drive you to a life of loveless solitude, because if you believe in the universe Chaon creates here, something bad will inevitably happen to whomever you care about most and destroy your very being.

I bloody loved it.

Chaon brings darkness to the short story form like Carver, or a personal favourite of mine, Ron Rash’s Burning Bright: Stories. Taking depressing snippets from people’s lives and leaving many unanswered questions, you won’t get any satisfying endings here, if you don’t enjoy wallowing in visceral tales you won’t like these stories. They certain aren’t written for everybody, the world would be a depressing place if they were.

I really thought this was going to be a no questions asked 5 star read until about 2/3rds of the way through, the last 3 or 4 stories felt considerably weaker than the previously (which admittedly I would class many amongst the best short stories I’ve ever read). My other problem is that it does get a bit samey, whereas Rash’s’ characters all had similar backgrounds but very distance voices, in many of these It could be the same 40 something male or struggling mother. More than once I stopped during a story to try and figure out if they were actually interlinking, I don’t think they were, but I’m still not 100% positive on that.

But it’s still a solid 4, I want to recommend it to everyone and no one at the same time cause I really think it has the power to drive some people to misery, but for me it’s only left me wanting to consume everything Chaon has written… just in a few weeks, once the gloom from this one has stopped consuming me fully.

And just in case you haven't seen it before, here is a excellent piece / tribute on when his own wife, Sheila Schwartz died.

http://therumpus.net/2009/01/what-hap...

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in the middle of the title story when I realized that Dan Chaon had written a collection of horror tales. In these stories, human beings perpetrate horrors such as abandonment, abuse, neglect upon each other. Relatives are left to clean up the emotional refuse after events such as a house fire, or parental suicide. I came across one review that labeled Chaon an "evil puppet master," and I suppose that is because he puts his characters through the wringer. Some stories in this collection are stronger than others, but I gave the overall collection four stars, because Dan Chaon writes fiction that works on me at a very personal level. There is always a line in his work, or a mood that he evokes that rings very true to me, and my own experiences.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleakest book I've read since Simenon. The stories are close to flawless, I think, just... BLEAK AS FUCK. Couldn't really imagine reading this again. At least not straight through. Maybe a story here and there. In between dancing in the kitchen to T-Rex or visits to Pirates of the Caribbean.

Favorites:

"Stay Awake"
"I Wake Up"
"St. Dismas"
"Thinking of You in your Time of Sorrow"

But really, they are all pretty powerful.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stay Awake is the new collection of short stories from Dan Chaon. Despite the fact that I read an ARC of these short stories, each selection felt unfinished. There was no resolution or closure to any of the stories. In many instances, sentences were left unfinished, as in, there was no period at the end of a paragraph. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not. The stories are connected in that they each focus on dismal situations with characters who are experiencing loneliness, grief, despair, or misguided love. In the opening short story, a recovering alcoholic is still grappling with his choice to walk out on his first wife and small child. Another selection focuses on a young man dealing with the deaths of several of his close friends and the double suicide of his parents. The title story is based on a couple whose child is born with a rare condition in which it is born with 2 heads. All of the stories share a haunting overtone and end so abruptly that it's not entirely clear that the story has even ended and left me unsatisfied. I recommend Await Your Reply for a better and more complete read by this author.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dan Chaon is an excellent writer. I was absolutely mesmerized by two of his novels: You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his new collection of short stories.

Yet somehow, some way, something is missing this time. The stories, all focusing on ordinary men and women who have found themselves in dire or haunting situations, have a “sameness” about them and a certain voice that – at least for me – permeates each one. It is almost as if this time, instead of crafting the stories from the outside, Mr. Chaon is channeling the stories through his psyche, letting them speak through him.

The characters – who exist in a sort of twilight realm – include a father who harbors a secret – the emotional abuse of the first wife and child he deserted – who is becoming unglued by his second son’s night terrors. There is a young widower named Critter who believes he is receiving secret messages from the psychic underworld. There is a young man who kidnaps his ex-girlfriend’s son and starts discovering the darkness within him. Characters work their way through their parents’ suicide, through the death of siblings at their mother’s hands, through brotherly road trips that turn out to gruesome.

In the eponymous title story, one of the finest of this collection, a couple must cope after hearing that their newborn was born with a rare condition called craniopagus parasiticus…which means that their baby had two heads. Throughout this and the other stories, there is a mood of loss and dread of what comes next, that sense on the part of the characters that things are not going to work out the way they had planned.

I should add that I am able to handle dark material better than most. I was blown away by Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and Bonnie Campbell’s American Salvage for example. But somehow, I was seeking a visceral emotion and a greater sense of differentiation that I didn’t experience. Having said that, I have no doubt I will be in line to read Mr. Chaon’s next novel, which I hear he is currently working on.

[Renee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

This is a solid collection of short stories from an incredibly talented writer. Reading Chaon's work, you can't help but feel as though he is either consciously or subconsciously revealing parts of himself. His flaws, his fears, thoughts on family, love, and death. He is a man who has loved and lost, and you feel the depth of his experience between the pages of his books. 

This collection has a few brilliant, eerie stories. The first story, The Bees is so, so good, and so, so creepy. This collection started off with a bang! There's some imagery there that I can't get out of my mind. This story felt complete, it gave me everything I needed.

I struggle a little with short stories because I almost always want more, and this collection suffers the same fate. Many of the stories felt incomplete - I wanted Chaon to save them to flesh out full novels! That said, they were all great to read and that is certainly the mark of a great writer - give me more! All of the stories are dark and twisted in one way or another.

Chaon is my kind of writer, and I am excited to continue working through his catalog. If you've read Chaon, tell me what I should pick up next!

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a book of short stories that were very, very dark in tone--all of them. Which I liked because it was kind of different and almost fun to revel in the gruesomeness and in the dark aspects of the human spirit. These were unapologetically negative people and situations--car crashes, deformed babies, abandoned children, coffins, suicides, etc. Don't read this book after you've had a bad day! But in the right mood, it was interesting.

I did not, however, think it was very compelling or any kind of pageturner. If it wasn't such a quick read I probably would have stopped. Also, I hated the affected writing technique in some of the stories, particularly the last one. It was a bunch of e e cumming B.S.--uncapitalized beginnings of sentences, half-finished sentences, large amounts of space between words on a page. Give me a break! Pretentious and added nothing to the telling, I thought.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imaginative with strong repetitive suggestions for the real time perceptions of the schizophrenic. Not weird or creepy in a esoteric way for me. But closer to listening to first person case study. Skill is honed in that particular or personality disordered observation and emotive context. He writes close to the "off" bone. Not at all my cup of tea, but that skill is rare, IMHO and as such I recognize that he owns it.

[Michael Ahrens · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am melancholically refreshed. There’s nothing I love more than a classic American short story, and Chaon, keeping with the tradition of the genre’s greats, delivered with this one. Not every piece affected me, but the handful that did brought all of the loneliness, loss, and despair that I was craving. I most definitely will be checking out Among The Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and, if the descriptions are accurate at all, promises also to be a series of satisfying punches directly to my gut, chest, and throat.

[Sue Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

About people for whom the American dream is barely more than a vague concept available only to others. Memories, identity and the loss of it. Where did I go wrong? What could I have done differently? Ordinary lives that are not ordinary. In the end everything is connected.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is about death, dreams, suicide, loss and losing your way, and trying to find your way back.
It is lifted by small hopeful bursts of humour. “…Their skin had a rosy, post-maternal glow, and they spoke in gently therapeutic voices as they walked around carrying their babies in expensive papooses. She, meanwhile, had the haggard eyes and quick temper of a woman who had just lived for five years with a teenager.”
In ‘Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted’, Brandon notices how his town is decaying. Through the windows of the old Beatrice Academy of Beauty, “you could see the hair dryers all piled together in a jumble, like dead spacemen. Parking meters along the block had been beheaded and were now just bare pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk.” Jeez, no wonder he gets depressed.

Despite the themes, it does not feel heavy and oppressive. It is saved and elevated by the prose.
“Even when a child’s death is imminent, the parent must forever carry the image of the child moving forward, alive, into the future.”
“Conclusion simply the place where you tired of thinking.”

The stories were all different, but all of them shared similarities with others in some way. Parents dying just as the character was becoming an adult, dreams, car crashes, new starts and failures to make new starts. How many ways can we talk about death/loss/suicide/hopelessness/life not going as planned? It was as if he was writing a story to express these ideas, and then tried writing another different one to express the same, and on and on. Circling around the ideas and concepts, picking at some and transferring bits to others. I thought there must be something happening in the writer’s life that is propelling this intense mulling. Digging around on the web a bit found this link:
http://therumpus.net/2009/01/what-hap... which describes the death of his wife in late 2008, from ovarian cancer. It shares the same substrate as his short stories, and in “Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well”, one of my favourites, one of the characters also dies from the disease. The descriptions could be provided only by someone familiar with its path of destruction. Emprise Review has an interesting interview with him here http://emprisereview.com/2012/intervi...

The stories were powerful, the prose over and over was was wonderful. So many instances of readerly “yes, exactly, he has captured that perfectly.”
Surfing the net also taught me that his last name is pronounced Shawn. It is not like chaos.

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked Chaon's novels a lot, this was the natural next step, his short stories. And...not so much, which is to say this is still very much Chaon's style and themes, but something about the procession of these short units of despair and sadness that made the book too relentlessly bleak for casual enjoyment. Heavy doesn't even begins to describe it, it's oppressingly so. Once again in pursuit of those invisible ghosts, the characters here (all failures in their own way, crushed under the weight of the world, grief and circumstances) are all haunted as they stumble through their sad desperate despodent lives usually trapped by Midwest, lack of money, lack of options, etc.. Depressing would be an understatement here. Not that Chaon's previous work sets a reader up for something sunny, this just...you have to be in a mood for it. The collection starts off terrifically, with something that comes as close to a proper horror story as Chaon does, its ambiguity being its greatest strength. The collection wraps up cleverly with a story that squares away the multiple plot strands of its predecessors. The journey from one end to the other is...at the very least emotionally exhausting. An eloquent, well written journey, but tough to recommend, this is the sort of book that should be used to balance out the obnoxiously optimistic into reason.

[Mary Lins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling and CREEPY set of short stories!

[Tom Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the past five years, I haven't read a better novel than Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, an utterly engrossing story of identity in a modern, digital age, at once a mystery, thriller, and much more. So I eagerly tore into his story collection Stay Awake, hoping to experience more of what made his novel so memorable for me. Unfortunately, while there is some astonishing writing on display in Chaon's short stories, the experience was ultimately only partially as fulfilling as I'd hoped.

The problem, for me, is that the majority of these stories simply end at a point where little if anything is resolved. Of course, that is in some part a problem presented naturally by the short story form. And as an avowed fan of ambiguity, I realize it's a bit hypocritical to criticize an indefinite resolution - skillfully deployed, an ambiguous approach can make a story live on, taking a reader outside of a self-contained experience and into something that resonates long after being put down. But over time, and over multiple stories, this seemingly stubborn refusal to provide any type of closure grew more and more frustrating for me. As much as I enjoyed what was written, many entries felt either like remainders, or felt like a prelude to something bigger, and Chaon was either unable or (more likely in my mind) unwilling to go further.

The other issue is that the stories here are almost unremittingly bleak, if not (like the denouement of the first story, "The Bees") downright horrifying. Chaon's world is populated by two- and three- (or more) time losers who just want to catch a break but somehow can't, or by couples who can't navigate their own failings and fall into resentment and sorrow. There's very little, if any, redemption possible for any of these characters, and we are seeing them right as their downfalls seem to achieve terminal velocity. It's a lot to take in a single volume, and it would be good to leaven the sorrow with at least a hint of lightness here and there. Unfortunately, Stay Awake doesn't provide that. It's a challenging, unique, and even intermittently gripping collection, but one that ultimately feels incomplete.

[Larry H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was first introduced to Dan Chaon when I started getting interested in short stories in the late 1990s. I remember being blown away by several of his stories, and over the years I eagerly devoured both of his novels, You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply, which was one of my favorite books I read in 2009. Stay Awake is Chaon's return to short stories, and while I didn't feel that any of the stories in this collection packed the power of some of his older stories, they are still tremendously well-written and immensely readable.

All of the characters in these stories are dealing with some sort of trauma, be it physical, psychological, even paranormal. Some of my favorite stories included "To Psychic Underworld:," in which a young widower starts finding cryptic notes on dollar bills, restaurant napkins, tacked to trees, etc.; "Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow," which follows a high school couple whose lives are thrown into turmoil when their baby dies; "Long Delayed, Always Expected," in which a woman has an interesting way of dealing with empty nest syndrome; and "I Wake Up," which follows a young man who receives an out-of-the-blue phone call from his oldest sister, years after their family has been split into separate foster homes following their mother's horrible crime. Some of the stories work better than others; I tended to enjoy those that dealt with more regular situations than those which focused on the odd or paranormal.

Dan Chaon is a terrific writer, and his storytelling ability definitely shines in many of the stories in this collection. I guess it's my own fault for expecting a story or two to really wallop me, based on his previous collections, but this is an enjoyable and compelling collection worthy of a read.

[Cayleigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first time reading Dan Chaon and I was pleasantly surprised…and a little scared later that night. These stories are CREEPY and I enjoyed that, they remind me of The Twilight Zone mixed in with Tales from the Crypt. Most of the stories are not outright hit you in the face scary, but psychologically it creeps up on you scary. If you are the faint of heart, you should probably skip this book.
My favorite part about this book was that all the stories were interconnected. You’d read a line in one story and then when you are reading another story you realize “Hey! This is the guy that was mentioned in that story a few pages back!” I thought that was really cool and in some stories it gave you a little bit more information on the characters.
In my opinion the best story is the title story, Stay Awake. It is about a couple who has a child who has a parasitic twin, which consists of another head attached to the baby’s head, that has a face and facial movement. The story is about how the parents are dealing with all of the implications of the surgery to remove the parasitic twin and the wondering about how alert is that other head? Scary in that quiet way. The other story I liked the best was The Bees. Towards the end the stories lost a little bit of their grip on me, but I will probably read more of Chaon’s writings.

[Joshua Jorgensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second work of Dan Chaon's and it is safe to say that I am officially a fan. These collection of short stories are disorienting, dark, melancholic, and some of them are down right chill-inducing. I like the bizarre nature of his writing--the way that he crafts a story out of the mist--and as you read you get closer and closer to a shape, yet are never close enough to figure out just exactly what it is you are running into.
The standouts in this collection for me are: "The Bees," "Long Delayed, Always Expected," "To Psychic Underworld:," and "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands."
The latter of the works mentioned above is now one of my favorite short stories ever written. What a chilling story. It left me temporarily paralyzed and it was well placed.
Upon concluding the collection, I had the anxious thought: "STAY AWAKE."
The stories weave together, blend together, and sometimes one story bleeds into another story and you're not quite sure if that is intended or not. I think that it is intentional, and it makes the collection more wholesome.
I am reading a few other books at the moment, but another Dan Chaon novel is in the queue. I'll be more than ready to pick it up and get lost in another blurry story that somehow shifts me and settles over me. What a master, is Mr. Dan Chaon.

[Sarah Vanhassel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a series of short stories by Dan Chaon. These stories are not for the faint of heart/the sensitive. Themes throughout the book include [family] tragedy and death, and can sometimes be difficult to read. The first two stories, "The Bees" is a poor introduction to the rest of the book, as it is, in my opinion, one of the most depressing. Others, such as "To Psychic Underworld" were lighter and thought-provoking. The title story, "Stay Awake" is the most cerebral, literally. About a young girl who was born with her malformed twin attached to her head, the parents struggle with the what- if's and what-now's. As a woman in my late stage of my pregnancy, I found this difficult to read, yet enlightening. Some of the stories' endings leave much to be desired, such as "The Bees", "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted", and "I Wake Up". The endings were abrupt and unsatisfactory. Other stories, such as "Slowly We Open Our Eyes" has a strong, powerful conclusion. Overall, this book was not cohesive, and overall forgettable. I chose to give it a 3/5 stars for the choice stories that I enjoyed. Dan Chaon seems to be a talented writer, but may do well to edit, extend, and/or revisit his stories before full publishing.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I've said earlier, Chaon is one of my favorite contemporary writers. I looked forward to this collection. Overall, it's a satisfying read. Chaon appears to be thought of, first and foremost, as "the bleak guy". I don't mind bleak; the way he writes about that territory, there's often something I feel a kinship towards. (And I know how that must sound, but it really has a lot to do with being preoccupied with what it means to be human.) This collection starts off rather forcefully, esp. with the opening story 'The Bees'. For me, the first 5 stories are rather strong (and I found myself quite drawn to 'Long Delayed, Always Expected'). From there, it seems one story threw me off, the next pulled me back in. At that point, I felt a bit lost through four stories (even if I maintained interest throughout) - and the last story was a welcome return to earlier form. Even though the book is broken into separate worlds, it really isn't; one story speaks to another, and that one to the next. There is a fixed mood. I like that about it.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow”

Death and sadness in the heartland. Mortality is a constant presence in this collection of stories, sometimes crouching in a distant corner or looming over every perfectly framed sentence. This is a gallery of troubled souls, dealing with a parasitic baby, a brain-damaged husband, suicide, infanticide, various car wrecks, capital punishment and the forlorn parade shuffles on.
Spread out, through various towns and cities, from Ohio to Nebraska, these characters struggle with loneliness, a regrettable past and isolation.
Sounds like a bright Spring read, huh? Well, don’t reach for the rope and chair quite yet. There is a dark beauty here. Gorgeous writing and an uncanny understanding of human grief and pain. Each story drew me in, sometimes reluctantly and with every precise, haunting word, made me look to the skies and appreciate the good life that I possess.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was SO HAPPY when I saw this book on my to-be-processed cart at my library. Dan Chaon is an absolute master (and my personal favorite) in the short story genre. His language is like poetry - and in this collection, numerous times it literally does slip into poetry, in the most natural way possible. I find myself re-reading sections: the first and second time because they were so beautiful, and then again because I want to discover how he did that...right there. That perfect bit of writing.

My story favorite is definitely the last: "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands." Haunting. I think it's now on my list of the five best short stories ever written.

[Annie Whitlock · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt like ghost stories kids tell each other, except less outwardly scary and more dreary and morbid. My biggest issue with it, though, was that it didn't really feel like it had any overarching point - it just felt like the stories were weird and atmospheric simply for the sake of being weird and gloomy, which just isn't what I enjoy reading.

I did enjoy the story "Thinking of You In Your Time of Sorrow." I felt like that one had some nice themes of regret, aimlessness, and anger. And the writing throughout the book was pretty.

I think I should stop expecting to find something I enjoy in the more creepy literary genres, because I just really don't like reading it.

[Marilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of 12 stories and a great book. Perfectly titled, I could not fall asleep while reading this book. Each story pulls you in. You are compelled to finish a story, after which you can dwell on the emotions and thoughts that each story evoked, or you can check the time and see if you might be able to finish another story before you have to put the book down. Each story is a gem. I won an uncorrected proof, but would love to add a hardcopy of this book to my collection. This is a book you will not forget and one that you know you will re-read in the future.

[Ann Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

How creepy is this collection of short stories? So creepy that, when I finished the last short story (reading late at night in a cabin in the woods, by myself) I hopped out of bed and carried the book to another room so that I wouldn't accidentally spot the cover of the book if I woke in the night. Consider yourself forewarned.

[Yanique Gillana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was done beautifully. This collection of short, seemingly connected stories was beautiful. The symbolism and the atmospheric writing made these stories striking. There were parts of this that were extremely impactful and emotional. That ending.... so eerie, so intriguing, perfect. I can see myself reading this over and over, and discovering new connections and details every time.