Brad Anderson

A machinist who has not slept in a year loses enough weight that his colleagues flinch when they see him, and The Machinist spends its length on whether anything he reports is reliable. Sleeplessness, guilt and an unreliable narrator recur. Session 9 puts an asbestos crew inside an abandoned Massachusetts asylum and gets most of its dread from the building and the daylight. The budgets are small, so the horror is built out of architecture and doubt.

Signature

• Protagonists whose account of events cannot be trusted.
• Decaying institutional buildings used as the source of dread.
• Insomnia, guilt and physical deterioration.
• Restraint forced by budget and turned into method.