Alive~Asleep (new book in progress)

Laura Robertson reads excerpt from Alive~Asleep: A Horror Memoir from LAURA ROBERTSON on Vimeo.

My new non-fiction novel, in progress. Listen to a 4 minute excerpt, above, or read a slightly longer version, below.

Part memoir, part eulogy, the sleep-deprived texts within Alive~Asleep hover around two central characters, the unreliable narrator and her cancer-stricken father; the former looking to art and culture in order to get a grip on their grief.

We traverse sleeplessness as a territory that holds many fragments of horror – swooping towards empty spaces, holes and portals, nightscapes, dreamscapes, ghosts, the supernatural, the monstrous and the grotesque, illness, stasis, metamorphosis, the uncanny and the eerie; and sculpture, painting and sound from female artists Berlinde De Bruyckere, Dora García and Helene Schjerfbeck – stories that ebb and flow between delirium and lucidity.

Paying close attention to the terrible, visitations and manifestations; creative non-fiction; the ghost(s) in the room; the dread of night; body horror; hallucinations; and a love of, an obsession with, fear.