Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.
One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?
Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks–and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.

‘Graveyard Shift’ runs for just over three hours and I think it’s best consumed in a single sitting. For me, it filled that ‘Afternoon Play’ slot: an entertainment with just enough going on to keep me interested but with nothing challenging in the content to make it hard to understand or difficult to listen to. The production standard was high and using multiple narrators increased my pleasure in listening to the story.

The story is mostly about insomnia: what it does to people, how they cope with it and what they will do to try and end it. The five main characters in the story are insomniacs. Some are more or less coping, some are fraying under the strain and one has come to terms with the idea that she will always be the angry aggressive, nocturnal person that sleep deprivation has turned her into.

The five are acquaintances rather than friends. They all live or work near the university. None of them can sleep and they’re all addicted to cigarettes. Their paths most often cross in the graveyard of an abandoned church and it’s there that they stumble across a mystery that they spend the night, working sperately, trying to resolve.

This novella is more a mystery than a horror story, despite the graveyard setting and all the dead bodies. The mystery is neat and well-presented. Its main purpose isn’t to provide a puzzle for the reader to solve but to give more insight into insomnia and to share snapshots of the lives of the five insomniacs.

I was suprised to find that I didn’t connect with four of the five insomniacs. It’s not that they’re badly written, just that they’re not my kind of people. The smoking put me off. It’s an addiction I’ve never understood and which I find mildly repulsive. As I got to know them, I realised that the smoking was mostly a manifestation of their anxieties and their unhappiness with themselves. I know this should have engaged my empathy but it didn’t. Empathy isn’t my strong suit. The one character I did engage with was the one who had suffered the most damage and was ready to inflict the most hurt. She was also the one who was central to resolving the mystery.

Perhaps because I didn’t engage with most of the characters, this story didn’t really take me anywhere but it was original, it opened a window onto a world that I’d never normally see and it was delivered in style.