SOURCE: "In the Wake of Dr. Strother," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 20, 1991, p. 8.

In the following review, Donnelly admires the unreal, dreamlike narrative and atmosphere of Doctor Sleep.

To say that an air of unreality hangs over a book is not usually a compliment. To say it about Doctor Sleep, the new novel by Madison Smartt Bell, is to describe one of its greatest strengths.

Let's start with the title. Adrian Strother is not a doctor—although people persist in addressing him as one—but a hypnotherapist: as for the sleep, he spends most of the long weekend of the book trying to break a bout of insomnia which has for several days been driving him to the edge of sanity. He is a displaced person anyway, a hip young New Yorker who left America to escape a drug addiction, now lives in London's seedy Notting...